"It provides a detailed summary of Polanyi’s key texts and arguments and situates them within the context of his involvement in intellectual and political movements. Dale outlines the key parameters of scholarly debate over Polanyi’s work, as well as the debates in which Polanyi himself was involved. This is quite possibly the most comprehensive critical overview of Polanyi’s work yet published. [...] arl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is written from a perspective of critical appre-ciation, never descending into hagiography. For Dale, the strength of Polanyi’s work lies in its ‘holist and historicist method’, which allowed him to ‘denaturalise’ capitalism by viewing it as historically specific rather than universal. Dale praises Polanyi’s recognition of both the active role played by states in the construction of capitalism, and of that system’s socially and environmentally destructive tendencies. However, Dale also brings a critical gaze to bear on his subject, and highlights what he views as shortcomings in Polanyi’s work. [...] While Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is comprehensive in its coverage of Polanyi’s thought, it would have been considerably strengthened by a less laborious style of presentation. It is essentially a series of summaries of the arguments of Polanyi and his interlocutors, rather than the development of a coherent thesis."

"Karl Polanyi was a student leader, a radical, a lifelong socialist, a journalist in the interwar Vienna, an autodidact well-versed in the humanities and social sciences of his time, and a scholar who did not fit established intellectual roles. His intellectual trajectory was not conventional; Polanyi’s work defies narrowly-defined disciplinary boundaries. Until quite recently, Polanyi’s ideas were known mostly through a single book, The Great Transformation, which—although it is his magnum opus—does not fully capture the scope and depth of his thought. Despite Polanyi’s remarkable influence in anthropology, heterodox economics, geography, and sociology, there are few works that examine the development of Polanyi’s thought and the intellectual territories he boldly aimed to reshape. [...] Gareth Dale’s Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is a welcome attempt to fill this void. In this book, Dale offers an intellectual biography and a meticulous analysis of Polanyi’s entire body of work. [...] The book is organized to highlight Polanyi’s intellectual development and to draw connections between different parts of his work. [...] Like any original thinker, Polanyi wove an impressive array of ideas and concepts into a pio-neer synthesis: a trenchant criticism of the market society and a ground-breaking way of under-standing the relationship between economy and society. His amalgamation of insight, erudition, painstaking empirical research, and moral vision is powerful. It can also be, at times, confusing and dense. The chief contribution of Dale’s Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market lies in bring-ing clarity and rigor to understanding Polanyi’s sophisticated work. This book neither offers a novel theoretical synthesis on Polanyi, nor does it resolve the many theoretical challenges created by some of Polanyi’s ideas."