The Great Transformation might be a book out of time; relevant to today, but was deemed less so when it was published in 1944.
“It was enough to bag him a chair at the University of Columbia,” explains Ben. “But it wasn’t actually received that well at the time. I suspect that’s because it took the historical approach to understanding the present and so, for some, it could have been written off as a work of economic history and for others it was seen as an outcrop of Polanyi’s anthropological thoughts. But we can regard him as forward thinking as many of the economic facts which characterise our age – the marketisation of public services, globalisation in its various guises, the coming back of capital mobility in a big way – they’re really the kind of things Karl Polanyi was talking about.”