"Two crucial differences between Polanyi’s analysis and that of most other historians of the economy and of the thought of the nineteenth century are so important to understanding his work that they must be made explicit even before their role in the larger argument is recounted. Polanyi differentiated between economic systems in which there were markets and the 'starkly utopian' self-regulating market (SRM) of the nineteenth century. Markets are places or networks in which goods are bought and sold; they are human interactions organized by price, quality, and quantity of traded goods and services. The SRM was a society-wide system of markets in which all inputs into the substantive processes of production and distribution were for sale and in which output was distributed solely in exchange for earnings from sales of inputs. The second crucially distinct feature of Polanyi’s analysis is his argument that the SRM could not survive — not because of the distributional consequences that play the major role in Marx’s explanation of the inevitable collapse of capitalism — but because the starkly utopian nature of the SRM gave rise to a spontaneous counter movement, even among those enjoying increased material prosperity. Society is vital to humans as social animals, and the SRM was inconsistent with a sustainable society. [...] The framework that Polanyi provided for understanding the collapse of nineteenth century civilization and the rise of the troubled twentieth remains powerful. Having said this, however, it must also be said that The Great Transformation contains some major errors of omission and interpretation. [...] Polanyi created a way of thinking about economies and societies that has had substantial impact on economic history, anthropology, and the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The Great Transformation remains important as a highly original contribution to the understanding of the Western past; it has been and is important in methodological debates in the social sciences. Beyond that, as the double movement continues, the book is likely to remain one of the best guides available to what brought us to where we are."

"Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944), published in the same year as Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, is as sacred a text to the opponents of free-market capitalism as Hayek's is to the Chicago School. To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in The Great Transformation. [...] The Great Transformation has attained the status of a classic in branches of sociology, political science, and anthropology. [...] Yet in economics the work is unknown — or, when discussed, derided. [...] The great puzzle of Polanyi's book is thus its enduring allure, given the disconnect between his predictions and modern realities. The fans of Polanyi seem to be responding to his general belief that markets corrupt societies, and his assertion that free market economies are a shocking recent departure from a socially harmonious past. His great criticism is that by breaking the social connections between individuals, by reducing everyone to an isolated atom, markets create inequalities that previously did not exist. But Polanyi was no better a historian than a prognosticator. Indeed, the more we learn of history, the more evident it is that the free market was not an 18th-century innovation, but one of mankind's oldest social institutions. [...] It is probably true, as Polanyi asserts, that hunter-gatherer and shifting cultivation societies were more egalitarian than later market societies. But he hopelessly romanticizes that world [...] Polanyi's popularity thus represents the triumph of yearning and romanticism over science in disciplines like sociology."

"It is hardly surprising that the neo-conservative New York Sun chose to publish a reconsideration of Karl Polanyi's, The Great Transformation, written by Greg Clark, a U.C. Davis economic historian. [...] Following the old maxim that the best defense is a good offense, Clark’s strategy is to change the subject by attacking critics of the free market as wooly headed, naïve, and in energetic denial of 'historical reality.' [...] Clark goes on from there to denounce a straw man version of Polanyi’s argument. [...] Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel prize winning economist [...] insists that 'Economic science and economic history have come to recognize the validity of Polanyi’s key contentions.' [...] Polanyi insists - and Stiglitz and many others agree - that this idea of a 'free market' society is utopian. It is utopian because it assumes that humans can once and for all be released from all forms of social regulation and legal coercion and that the market forces of supply and demand will spontaneously and freely produce optimal outcomes."