THE GREAT TRANSFORMATiON the political and economic origins of our time çağımızın siyasal ve ekonomik kökenleri KARL POLANYi

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
the political and economic origins of our time
KARL POLANYI

PART ONE ................................................................................................................................. 2
The International System ............................................................................................................. 2
THE HUNDRED YEARS' PEACE............................................................................................. 2
CONSERVATIVE TWENTIES, REVOLUTIONARY THIRTIES ......................................... 12
PART TWO ............................................................................................................................... 19
Rise and Fall of Market Economy ............................................................................................. 19
I.SATANIC MILL ..................................................................................................................... 19
"HABITATION VERSUS IMPROVEMENT" ......................................................................... 19
SOCIETIES AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS............................................................................. 24
EVOLUTION OF THE MARKET PATTERN......................................................................... 32
THE SELF-REGULATING MARKET AM THE FICTITIOUS COMMODITIES: LABOR,
LAND, AND MONEY .......................................................................................................................... 39
SPEENHAMLAND, 1795......................................................................................................... 44
ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES............................................................................. 49
PAUPERISM AND UTOPIA.................................................................................................... 59
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE DISCOVERY OF SOCIETY........................................ 64
II. SELF-PROTECTION OF SOCIETY.................................................................................... 75
MAN, NATURE, AND PRODUCTIVE ORGANIZATION.................................................... 75
BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL CREED......................................................................................... 78
BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL CREED (Continued): CLASS INTEREST AND SOCIAL
CHANGE.............................................................................................................................................. 87

MARKET AND MAN............................................................................................................... 95
MARKET AND NATURE...................................................................................................... 103
MARKET AND PRODUCTIVE ORGANIZATION ............................................................. 111
SELF-REGULATIOJV IMPAIRED ....................................................................................... 116
DISRUPTIVE STRAINS......................................................................................................... 121
PART THREE.......................................................................................................................... 127
Transformation In Progress...................................................................................................... 127
POPULAR GOVERNMENT AND MARKET ECONOMY.................................................. 127
HISTORY IM THE GEAR OF SOCIAL CHANGE............................................................... 135
FREEDOM IN A COMPLEX SOCIETY ............................................................................... 142
Additional Note........................................................................................................................ 168
SUBJECT INDEX ................................................................................................................... 174
AUTHORS' INDEX................................................................................................................. 192
AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................... 197

PART ONE
The International System
1
THE HUNDRED YEARS' PEACE
NINETEENTH CENTURY Civilization has collapsed. This book is concerned with the political
and economic origins of this event, as well as with the great transformation which it ushered in.
Nineteenth century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power
system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the
Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique
organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market which produced an
unheard-of material welfare. The fourth was the liberal state. Classified in one way, two of these
institutions were economic, two political. Classified in another way, two of them were national, two
international. Between them they determined the characteristic outlines of the history of our
civilization.
Of these institutions the gold standard proved crucial; its fall was the proximate cause of the
catastrophe. By the time it failed most of the other institutions had been sacrificed in a vain effort to
save it.
But the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation
which gave rise to a specific civilization. The gold standard was merely an attempt to extend the
domestic market system to the international field; the balance-of-power system was a superstructure
erected upon and, partly, worked through the gold standard; the liberal state was itself a creation of
the self-regulating market. The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century lay in the
laws governing market economy.
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an
institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural
substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into
a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took
impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society
in yet another
[3]
way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite
groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.
Such an explanation of one of the deepest crises in man’s history just appears all too simple.
Nothing could seem more inept than the attempt to reduce a civilization, its substance and ethos, to a
hard and last number of institutions; to select one of them as fundamental and proceed to argue the
inevitable self-destruction of civilization on account of some technical quality of its economic
organization. Civilizations, like life itself) spring from the interaction of a great number of
independent factors which are not, as a rule, reducible to circumscribed institutions. To trace the
institutional mechanism of the downfall of a civilization may well appear as a hopeless endeavor.
Yet it is this we are undertaking. In doing so we are consciously adjusting our aim to the
extreme singularity of the subject matter. For the civilization of the nineteenth century was unique
precisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism.
No explanation can satisfy which does not account for the suddenness of the cataclysm. As if
the forces of change had been pent up for & century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind.
A social transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an unprecedented type in
which a score of states crashed, and the contours of new empires are emerging out of a sea of blood.
But this fact of demoniac violence is merely superimposed on a swift, silent current of change which

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATiON the political and economic origins of our time çağımızın siyasal ve ekonomik kökenleri KARL POLANYi
"you could never plan the fall but fall into the plan
düşüsü planlayamazsın planın içine düşersin. "