Karl Polanyi

Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic sociologist and politician, born in 1886, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets. In his writings he advanced the concept of the double movement, the dialectical process of marketization and the push for social protection against that marketization, and argued that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. He is remembered as the originator of substantivism, a cultural account of economics that emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture, a view counter to mainstream economics but influential in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. He died in 1964.