Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Karl Polanyi

67 quotes

“Actually, the labor market was allowed to retain its main function only on condition that wages and conditions of work, standards and regulations should be such as would safeguard the human character of the alleged commodity, labor. To argue that social legislation, factory laws, unemployment insurance, and, above all, trade unions have not interfered with the mobility of labor and the flexibility of wages, as is sometimes done, is to imply that those institutions have entirely failed in their purpose, which was exactly that of interfering with the laws of supply and demand in respect to human labor, and removing it from the orbit of the market.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dangers to man and nature cannot be neatly separated. The reactions of the working class and the peasantry to market economy both led to protectionism, the former mainly in the form of social legislation and factory laws, the latter in agrarian tariffs and land laws. Yet there was this important difference: in an emergency, the farmers and peasants of Europe defended the market system, which working-class policies endangered. While the crisis of the inherently unstable system was brought on by both wings of the protectionist movement, the social strata connected with the land were inclined to compromise with the market system, while the broad class of labor did not shrink from breaking its rules and challenging it outright.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How far the state was induced to interfere depended on the constitution of the political sphere and on the degree of economic distress. As long as the vote was restricted and only the few exerted political influence, interventionism was a much less urgent problem than it became after universal suffrage made the state the organ of the ruling million—the identical million who, in the economic realm, had often to carry in bitterness the burden of the ruled. And as long as employment was plentiful, incomes were secure, production was continuous, living standards were dependable, and prices were stable, interventionist pressure was naturally less than it became when protracted slumps made industry a wreckage of unused tools and frustrated effort.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mankind was in the grip, not of new motives, but of new mechanisms. Briefly, the strain sprang from the zone of the market; from there it spread to the political sphere, thus comprising the whole of society. But within the single nations the tension remained latent as long as world economy continued to function. Only when the last of its surviving institutions, the gold standard, dissolved was the stress within the nations finally released. Different as their responses to the new situation were, essentially they represented adjustments to the disappearance of the traditional world economy; when it disintegrated, market civilization itself was engulfed. This explains the almost unbelievable fact that a civilization was being disrupted by the blind action of soulless institutions the only purpose of which was the automatic increase of material welfare.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. It is the solution natural to the industrial workers who see no reason why production should not be regulated directly and why markets should be more than a useful but subordinate trait in a free society. From the point of view of the community as a whole, socialism is merely the continuation of that endeavor to make society a distinctively human relationship of persons which in Western Europe was always associated with Christian traditions.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under conditions such as these the routine conflict of interest between employers and employees took on an ominous character. While a divergence of economic interests would normally end in compromise, the separation of the economic and the political spheres in society tended to invest such clashes with grave consequences to the community. The employers were the owners of the factories and mines and thus directly responsible for carrying on production in society (quite apart from their personal interest in profits). In principle, they would have the backing of all in their endeavor to keep industry going. On the other hand the employees represented a large section of society; their interests also were to an important degree coincident with those of the community as a whole. They were the only available class for the protection of the interests of the consumers, of the citizens, of human beings as such, and, under universal suffrage, their numbers would give them a preponderance in the political sphere. However, the legislature, like industry, had its formal functions to perform in society. Its members were entrusted with the forming of the communal will, the direction of public policy, the enactment of long-term programs at home and abroad. No complex society could do without functioning legislative and executive bodies of a political kind. A clash of group interests that resulted in paralysing the organs of industry or state—either of them, or both—formed an immediate peril to society.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function. Hence, it was worldwide, catholic in scope, universal in application; the issues transcended the economic sphere and begot a general transformation of a distinctively social kind. It radiated into almost every field of human activity whether political or economic, cultural, philosophic, artistic, or religious. And up to a point it coalesced with local and topical tendencies. No understanding of the history of the period is possible unless we distinguish between the underlying fascist move and the ephemeral tendencies with which that move fused in different countries.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By accident only, as we see, was European fascism in the 1920s connected with national and counterrevolutionary tendencies. It was a case of symbiosis between movements of independent origin, which reinforced one another and created the impression of essential similarity, while being actually unrelated. In reality, the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system. During the period 1917–23 governments occasionally sought fascist help to restore law and order: no more was needed to set the market system going. Fascism remained undeveloped. In the period 1924–29, when the restoration of the market system seemed ensured, fascism faded out as a political force altogether. After 1930 market economy was in a general crisis. Within a few years fascism was a world power.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We invoked what we believed to be the three constitutive facts in the consciousness of Western man: knowledge of death, knowledge of freedom, knowledge of society. The first, according to Jewish legend, was revealed in the Old Testament story. The second was revealed through the discovery of the uniqueness of the person in the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. The third revelation came to us through living in an industrial society. No one great name attaches to it; perhaps Robert Owen came nearest to becoming its vehicle. It is the constitutive element in modern man’s consciousness.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The discovery of society is thus either the end or the rebirth of freedom. While the fascist resigns himself to relinquishing freedom and glorifies power which is the reality of society, the socialist resigns himself to that reality and upholds the claim to freedom, in spite of it. Man becomes mature and able to exist as a human being in a complex society. To quote once more Robert Owen’s inspired words: “Should any causes of evil be irremovable by the new powers which men are about to acquire, they will know that they are necessary and unavoidable evils; and childish, unavailing complaints will cease to be made.” Resignation was ever the fount of man’s strength and new hope. Man accepted the reality of death and built the meaning of his bodily life upon it. He resigned himself to the truth that he had a soul to lose and that there was worse than death, and founded his freedom upon it. He resigns himself, in our time, to the reality of society which means the end of that freedom. But, again, life springs from ultimate resignation. Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One simple recognition, from which all attempts at clarification of the place of the economy in society must start, is the fact that the term economic, as commonly used to describe a type of human activity, is a compound of two meanings. These have separate roots, independent of one another. It is not difficult to identify them, even though a number of broadly synonymous words are available for each. The first meaning, the formal, springs from the logical character of the means-ends relationship, as in economizing or economical; from this meaning springs the scarcity definition of economic. The second, the substantive meaning, points to the elemental fact that human beings, like all other living thins, cannot exist for any length of time without a physical environment that sustains them; this is the origin of the substantive definition of economic. The two meanings, the formal and the substantive, have nothing in common. The current concept of economic is, then, a compound of two meanings. While hardly anyone would seriously deny this fact, its implications for the social sciences (always excepting economics) are rarely touched upon. Whenever sociology, anthropology, or history deals with matters pertaining to human livelihood, the term economic is taken for granted. It is employed loosely, relying for a frame of reference now on its scarcity connotation, now on its substantive connotation, thus oscillating between two unrelated poles of meaning.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was characteristic of the economic system of the nineteenth century that it was institutionally distinct from the rest of society. In a market economy, the production and distribution of material goods is carried on through a self-regulating system of markets, governed by laws of its own, the so-called laws of supply and demand, motivated in the last resort by two simple incentives, fear of hunger and hope of gain. This institutional arrangement is thus separate from the noneconomic institutions of society: its kinship organization and its political and religious systems. Neither the blood tie, nor legal compulsion, nor religious obligation, nor fealty, nor magic created the sociologically defined situations that insured the participation of individuals in the system. They were, rather, the creation of institutions like private property in the means of production and the wage system operating on purely economic incentives.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Equivalencies between the units of different goods were meant to express proportions that both resulted from the conditions existing in that society and contributed to the maintenance of those conditions. The "justice" expressed in the equivalency is a reflection of the "justness" of the society it mirrors. How could this be otherwise, once the status rewards and standards of life that obtain in the society were necessarily reflected in the equivalencies? Consequently, what we are wont to call gain, profit, wages, rent, or other revenue, must be comprised in the equivalency, if those revenues are required to maintain existing social relations and values. This was the rationale of the "just price" as postulated by the schoolmen. Far from being the expression of a pious hope or of an uplifted thought irrelevant to "economic realities," as the orthodox economic classics tended to believe, the just price was an equivalency, the actual amount of which was determined either by municipal authority or by the actions of the guildsmen in the market, but in either case according to determinants relevant to the concrete social situation. The guildsmen who refused to sell below a price that would endanger the standard of his colleagues, and equally refused to accept a price that would secure for him a revenue higher than that approved by his colleagues, cooperated to create the "just price" as effectively as the municipal authority that could be called upon to fix the price directly in order to uphold these very principles.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In effect, by far the greater part of trade flowed in such dispositional channels, while a much smaller part continued to proceed on transactional lines. Numerous devices ensured that no merging of the two should ensue. Both equivalencies, which made gainless transactions possible, and rules of law, which organized riskless dispositions into a trading system, were a result of the dominance of redistributive forms of integration. But these did not operate in the ways of tyrannical administrative bureaucracy, as assumed by historians in the past. The absence, or at least the very subordinate role, of markets did not imply ponderous administrative methods tightly held in the hands of a central bureaucracy. On the contrary, gainless transactions and regulated dispositions, as legitimized by law, opened up, as we have seen, a sphere of personal freedom formerly unknown in the economic life of man.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anthropologically, money should be defined as a semantic system, broadly similar to language; writing, or weights and measures. These systems differ mainly in the purposes served and the signs employed. Language and writing serve the purpose of the communication of ideas, weights and measures that of quantitative physical relationship. As to signs, language uses oral sounds; writing employs ideograms or visual characters; weights and measures, on the other hand, use physical objects as the basis of symbols. Money resembles, but also differs from, each of these. It serves several ends, which are traditionally described as means of payment; standard of value or money of account; store of wealth; and medium of exchange.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The standard use of money is vital to the staple finance that accompanies large-scale storage economies. No assessment and collection of taxes, no budgeting and balancing of manorial households, no rational accountancy comprising a variety of goods is possible without a standard. Since it is not the number of things but their values that are here subjected to arithmetic, this operation requires the setting of rates relating the various staples to one another. Such figures, representing rates, are in effect available in most archaic societies. Whether by virtue of custom, statute, or proclamation, fixed equivalents designate the rate at which the necessities of life can be mutually substituted, one for another. It is only when prices develop in markets (i.e., relatively late) that money as a standard can be taken for granted, as it is today.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The market institution has its origin in two different sets of developments: the one external to the community, the other internal. The external is intimately linked with the acquisition of goods from outside, the internal with the local distribution of food. This latter took two very different forms: the first was general in the irrigational empires and centered on storing and distributing staples; the second is to be found from the earliest times in peasant and bush communities, and focused on the local sale of fresh victuals and prepared food. These varied sources of origin contributed different constituent elements to the institution of the market.”
Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source