“The Great Transformation has an extraordinary diversity of style and the ability to draw so many different threads into one narrative. Rather than trying to present one, coherent set of ideas which can be applicable in any time or space, like Hayek did with The Road to Serfdom or indeed Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes did in their own ways, Karl Polanyi instead chose to understand the economic problems of the period by looking back at the history of ideas that constituted them.
He said that to understand pivotal historical events, including the breakup of the Gold Standard and the breakdown of international relations during the first half of the twentieth century, we have to consider the role of economic thought accumulated over centuries which influenced how those events took place and were understood. It’s having that broad sweep of history and that wide intellectual canvas that makes his work really unique.”