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Karl Polanyi

67 quotes

“Both the personnel and the motives of this singular body invested it with a status the roots of which were securely grounded in the private sphere of strictly commercial interest.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise. And yet the gold standard was the only remaining pillar of the traditional world economy; when it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous. To liberal economists the gold standard was a purely economic institution; they refused even to consider it as a part of a social mechanism.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conclusion, though weird, is inevitable; nothing less will serve the purpose: obviously, the dislocation caused by such devices must disjoint man's relationships and threaten his natural habitat with annihilation.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices. Such a system capable of organizing the whole of economic life without outside help or interference would certainly deserve to be called self-regulating. These rough indications should suffice to show the entirely unprecedented nature of such a venture in the history of the race.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Barter, truck, and exchange is a principle of economic behavior dependent for its effectiveness upon the market pattern. A market is a meeting place for the purpose of barter or buying and selling. Unless such a pattern is present, at least in patches, the propensity to barter will find but insufficient scope: it cannot produce prices.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where markets were most highly developed, as under the mercantile system, they throve under the control of a centralized administration which fostered autarchy both in the household of the peasantry and in respect to national life. Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another feature of the reversal of the Speenhamland method was less obvious to most nineteenth-century writers, namely, that the wage system had to be made universal in the interest also of the wage-earners themselves, even though this meant depriving them of their legal claim to subsistence. The "right to live" had proved a death trap to them.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) first seen 1795 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 7 : Speenhamland, 1795
“The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. Reactionary paternalism had in vain tried to resist this necessity. Out of the horrors of Speenhamland men rushed blindly for the shelter of a utopian market economy.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pauperism had become a portent. But its meaning was still anybody's guess.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The change of atmosphere from Adam Smith to Townsend was, indeed, striking. The former marked the close of an age which opened with the inventors of the state, Thomas More and Machiavelli, Luther and Calvin; the latter belonged to that nineteenth century in which Ricardo and Hegel discovered from opposite angles the existence of a society that was not subject to the laws of the state, but, on the contrary, subjected the state to its own laws.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Edmund Burke was a man of different stature. Where men like Townsend failed in a small way, he failed in a great way. His genius exalted brutal fact into tragedy, and invested sentimentality with the halo of mysticism.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bentham possessed neither the sleek complacency of a Townsend nor the all too precipitate historicism of a Burke, Rather, to this believer in reason and reform the newly discovered realm of social law appeared as the coveted no man's land of utilitarian experimentation.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith's "simple and natural liberty" compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Purely economic matters such as affect want-satisfaction are incomparably less relevant to class behavior than questions of social recognition. Want-satisfaction may be, of course, the result of such recognition, especially as its outward sign or prize. But the interests of a class most directly refer to standing and rank, to status and security, that is, they are primarily not economic but social.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ultimately, therefore, it is the relation of a class to society as a whole which maps out its part in the drama; and its success is determined by the breadth and variety of the interests, other than its own, which it is able to serve. Indeed, no policy of narrow class interest can safeguard even that interest well-a rule which allows of but few exceptions. Unless the alternative to the social setup is a plunge into utter destruction, no crudely selfish class can maintain itself in the lead.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even capitalist business itself had to be sheltered from the unrestricted working of the market mechanism. This should dispose of the suspicion which the very term “man” and “nature” sometimes awaken in sophisticated minds, who tend to denounce all talk about protecting labor and land as the product of antiquated ideas if not as a mere camouflaging of vested interests.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nineteenth century gave birth to two sets of events of a very different order of magnitude: the machine age, a development of millennial range; and the market system, an initial adjustment to that development.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The notion that individual acts of exchange were at the root of trade, money, and even of market institutions, is hardly tenable. Foreign trade, as a rule, preceded domestic trade, the exchange use of money originated in the foreign trade sphere, and organized markets were developed first in external trade; in all three cases, action was more of the collective than of the individual kind.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of mankind and the place of the economy in it, is not, as the evolutionists would have it, an account of unconscious growth and organic continuity. Such an approach would necessarily obscure some aspects of economic development vital to men in the present phase of transition. For the dogma of organic continuity must, in the last resort, weaken man's power of shaping his own history.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To sum up the central illusion of an age in terms of a logical error is rarely to the point; yet conceptually the economistic fallacy, in the nature of things, cannot be described otherwise. The logical error was of a common and harmless kind: a broad, generic phenomenon was somehow taken to be identical with a species with which we happen to be familiar. In such terms, the error was in equating the human economy in general with its market form (a mistake that may have been facilitated by the basic ambiguity of the term economic, to which we will return later).”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Such economic solipsism, as it might well be called, was indeed an outstanding feature of the market mentality. Economic action, it was deemed, was "natural" to men and was, therefore, self-explanatory.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The economy as an instituted process of interaction serving the satisfaction of material wants forms a vital part of every human community. Without an economy in this sense, no society could exist for any length of time.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only in a symmetrically organized environment will reciprocative attitudes result in economic institutions of any importance; only where centers have been established beforehand can the cooperative attitude of individuals produce a redistributive economy; and only in the presence of markets instituted to that purpose will the bartering attitude of individuals result in prices that integrate the economic activities of the community.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is usually not realized that random acts of barter would not, by themselves, produce prices unless a market pattern were in existence that made the bartering intent of the persons effective. In this sense, barter is very much like reciprocity and redistribution. The principle of behavior, in order to become effective, requires the presence of some institutional structure. The market pattern is never traceable to the mere desire of individuals to "truck, barter, and exchange." Its origins come from other directions, as we shall see.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a general conclusion, it can be stated that the production and distribution of material goods was embedded in social relations of a noneconomic kind. No institutionally separate economic system—no network of economic institutions—could be said to exist.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the basic principles governing the development of early economic institutions, the need for the maintenance of communal solidarity deserves pride of place. Domestic and foreign relations are in stark contrast: solidarity here, enmity there, rule the day. "They" are the objects of hostility, depradation, and enslavement, "we" belong together and our communal life is governed by the principles of reciprocity, redistribution, and the exchange of equivalents.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If it seems that we have unduly stressed "acquisition of goods from a distance" as the crucial factor in trade, it was done, inter alia, in order to work out more clearly the determinative role played by the acquisitive or import interest in the history of trade. It involves, as we saw, no less than the alternatives of peaceful versus forcible methods of satisfying that interest, alternatives that may affect the total structure of the state as well as its modes of acting in history.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A bare outline of the objective nature of Fascism thus tends to support our interpretation of its philosophy. The Fascist system has to carry on persistently the task begun by the Fascist Movement: the destruction of the democratic parties, organisations, and institutions in society. Fascism must then proceed to attempt to change the nature of human consciousness itself. The pragmatic reasons for its clash with Christianity are due to this necessity. For a Corporative State is a condition of things in which there is no conscious will or purpose of the individual concerning the community, nor a corresponding responsibility of the individual for his share in it. But neither such a will not such a responsibility can pass from our world altogether so long as we continue to conceive of society as a relationship of persons.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essence of Fascism", In J. Lewis, K. Polanyi, D. K. Kitchin (eds), Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935)
“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.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Broadly, the proposition holds that all economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organized either on the principle of reciprocity or redistribution, or householding, or some combination of the three. These principles were institutionalized with the help of a social organization which, inter alia, made use of the patterns of symmetry, centricity, and autarchy. In this framework, the orderly production and distribution of goods was secured through a great variety of individual motives disciplined by general principles of behavior. Among these motives gain was not prominent. Custom and law, magic and religion cooperated in inducing the individual to comply with rules of behavior which, eventually, ensured his functioning in the economic system.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The step which makes isolated markets into a market economy, regulated markets into a self-regulating market, is indeed crucial. The nineteenth century-whether hailing the fact as the apex of civilization or deploring it as a cancerous growth-naively imagined that such a development was the natural outcome of the spreading of markets. It was not realized that the gearing of markets into a self-regulating system of tremendous power was not the result of any inherent tendency of markets toward excrescence, but rather the effect of highly artificial stimulants administered to the body social in order to meet a situation which was created by the no less artificial phenomenon of the machine.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and a political sphere. Such a dichotomy is, in effect, merely the restatement, from the point of view of society as a whole, of the existence of a self-regulating market. It might be argued that the separateness of the two spheres obtains in every type of society at all times. Such an inference, however, would be based on a fallacy. True, no society can exist without a system of some kind which ensures order in the production and distribution of goods. But that does not imply the existence of separate economic institutions; normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social order. Neither under tribal nor under feudal nor under mercantile conditions was there, as we saw, a separate economic system in society.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable dimensions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money. While the organization of world commodity markets, world capital markets, and world currency markets under the aegis of the gold standard gave an unparalleled momentum to the mechanism of markets, a deep-seated movement sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy. Society protected itself against the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system-this was the one comprehensive feature in the history of the age.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Speenhamland episode revealed to the people of the leading country of the century the true nature of the social adventure on which they were embarking. Neither the rulers nor the ruled ever forgot the lessons of that fool's paradise; if the Reform Bill of1832 and the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 were commonly regarded as the starting point of modern capitalism, it was because they put an end to the rule of the benevolent landlord and his allowance system. The attempt to create a capitalistic order without a labor market had failed disastrously. The laws governing such an order had asserted themselves and manifested their_radical antagonism to the principle of paternalism. The rigor of these laws had become apparent and their violation had been cruelly visited upon those who had disobeyed them.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) first seen 1795 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 7 : Speenhamland, 1795
“The pitfalls of the market system were not readily apparent. To realize this clearly we must distinguish between the various vicissitudes to which the laboring people were exposed in England since the coming of the machine: first, those of the Speenhamland period, 1795 to 1834; second, the hardships caused by the Poor Law Reform, in the decade following 1834; third, the deleterious effects of a competitive labor market after 1834, until in the 1870s the recognition of the trade unions offered sufficient protection. Chronologically, Speenhamland antedated market economy; the decade of the Poor Law Reform Act was a transition to that economy. The last period-overlapping the former-was that of market economy proper. The three periods differed sharply. Speenhamland was designed to prevent the proletarianization of the common people, or at least to slow it down. The outcome was merely the pauperization of the masses, who almost lost their human shape in the process.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) first seen 1795 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 7 : Speenhamland, 1795
“Pauperism, political economy, and the discovery of society were closely interwoven. Pauperism fixed attention on the incomprehensible fact that poverty seemed to go with plenty. Yet this was only the first of the baffling paradoxes with which industrial society was to confront modern man. He had entered his new abode through the door of economics, and this adventitious circumstance invested the age with its materialist aura. To Ricardo and Malthus nothing seemed more real than material goods. The laws of the market meant for them the limit of human possibilities. Godwin believed in unlimited possibilities and hence had to deny the laws of the market. That human possibilities were limited, not by the laws of the market, but by those of society itself was a recognition reserved to Owen who alone discerned behind the veil of market economy the emergent reality: society. However, his vision was lost again for a century.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) first seen 1795 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 7 : Speenhamland, 1795
“The connection between rural poverty and the impact of world trade was anything but obvious. Contemporaries had no reason to link the number of the village poor with the development of commerce in the Seven Seas. The inexplicable increase in the number of the poor was almost generally put down to the method of Poor Law administration, and not without some good cause. Actually, beneath the surface, the ominous growth of rural pauperism was directly linked with the trend of general economic history. But this connection was still hardly perceptible. Scores of writers probed into the channels by which the poor trickled into the village, and the number as well as the variety of reasons adduced for their appearance was amazing.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Speenhamland precipitated a social catastrophe. We have become accustomed to discount the lurid presentations of early capitalism as "sob-stuff:' For this there is no justification. The picture drawn by Harriet Martineau, the perfervid apostle of Poor Law Reform, coincides with that of the Chartist propagandists who were leading the outcry against the Poor Law Reform. The facts set out in the famous Report of the Commission on the Poor Law (1834), advocating the immediate repeal of the Speenhamland Law, could have served as the material for Dickens's campaign against the Commission's policy. Neither Charles Kingsley nor Friedrich Engels, neither Blake nor Carlyle, was mistaken in believing that the very image of man had been defiled by some terrible catastrophe. And more impressive even than the outbursts of pain and anger that came from poets and philanthropists was the icy silence with which Malthus and Ricardo passed over the scenes out of which their philosophy of secular perdition was born.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true significance of the tormenting problem of poverty now stood revealed: economic society was subject to laws which were not human laws. The rift between Adam Smith and Townsend had broadened into a chasm; a dichotomy appeared which marked the birth of nineteenth-century consciousness. From this time onward naturalism haunted the science of man, and the reintegration of society into the human world became the persistently sought aim of the evolution of social thought. Marxian economics-in this line of argument was an essentially unsuccessful attempt to achieve that aim, a failure due to Marx's too close adherence to Ricardo and the traditions of liberal economics.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself. That system developed in leaps and bounds; it engulfed space and time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914, every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations, physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations, were comprised in it. A new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career, only this time the movement was on a purely material level. Yet simultaneously a countermovement was on foot. This was more than the usual defensive behavior of a society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might suppose that freedom of production would naturally spread from the purely technological field to that of the employment of labor. However, only comparatively late did Manchester raise the demand for free labor. The cotton industry had never been subject to the Statute of Artificers and was consequently not hampered either by yearly wage assessments or by rules of apprenticeship. The Old Poor Law, on the other hand, to which latter-day liberals so fiercely objected, was a help to the manufacturers; it not only supplied them with parish apprentices, but also permitted them to divest themselves of responsibility towards their dismissed employees, thus throwing much of the burden of unemployment on public funds.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The countermove against economic liberalism and laissez-faire possessed all the unmistakable characteristics of a spontaneous reaction. At innumerable disconnected points it set in without any traceable links between the interests directly affected or any ideological conformity between them. Even in the settlement of one of the same problem as in the case of workmen's compensation, solutions switched over from individualistic to "collectivistic:' from liberal to antiliberal, from "laissez-faire" to interventionist forms without any change in the economic interest, the ideological influences or political forces in play, merely as a result of the increasing realization of the nature of the problem in question.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Markets for labor, land, and money are easy to distinguish; but it is not so easy to distinguish those parts of a culture the nucleus of which is formed by human beings, their natural surroundings, and productive organizations, respectively. Man and nature are practically one in the cultural sphere; and the money aspect of productive enterprise enters only into one socially vital interest, namely, the unity and cohesion of the nation. Thus, while the markets for the fictitious commodities labor, land, and money were distinct and separate, the threats to society which they involved were not always strictly separable.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one. Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom. To represent this principle as one of noninterference, as economic liberals were wont to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favor of a definite kind of interference, namely, such as would destroy noncontractual relations between individuals and prevent their spontaneous reformation.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source