Karl Polanyi
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Many early sociologists and other writers portrayed primitive cultures as noble—noble savages—and believed that their lack of technology and less integrated economies made them ideal examples of the correct human lifestyle. Among these thinkers were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is most frequently associated with the idea of the noble savage based on his Discourse on Inequality, and Karl Polanyi, who in The Great Transformation praised the economic organization of primitive societies as less destructive than the market economy. The belief that primitive cultures are ideal is often described as primitivism; branches of this theory include primitive communism and anarcho-primitivism." --Sholem Stein |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Karl Paul Polanyi (October 25, 1886 – April 23, 1964) was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and for his book, The Great Transformation, which argued that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.
Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement. His daughter, Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt (born 1923 in Vienna, Austria), is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.
Selected works
- "Socialist Accounting" (1922)
- The Essence of Fascism (1933–1934); article
- The Great Transformation (1944)
- "Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?", The London Quarterly of World Affairs, vol. 10 (3) (1945)
- Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957, edited and with contributions by others)
- Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966)
- George Dalton (ed), Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968); collected essays and selections from his work.
- Harry W. Pearson (ed.), The Livelihood of Man (Academic Press, 1977)
- Karl Polanyi, For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 (Polity Press, 2014), Template:ISBN
See also
