"Post-war prosperity also overshadowed the central problems with which Polanyi grappled in the 1930s and 1940s. Polanyi accepted that a market society could indeed produce a great deal of material prosperity, but he was concerned that it could only do so by turning people into puppets and playthings of mindless market forces, and that people did not take well to this new role. The goal, for Polanyi, was to achieve the prosperity that a market economy generates, without suffering the risks of poverty, creative destruction, and community erosion implied by the operation of market forces.Crucially, Polanyi warned that if the modern bourgeois order failed at this task, authoritarian and totalitarian political movements would benefit. During the post-war period, the fair-weather argument that market-driven prosperity justifies any collateral social pain was taken as a given; it also came to define the consensus view among the moneyed class and its ideological backers."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Historians from the United StatesImmigrants to the United StatesAnthropologists from the United StatesSociologists from the United StatesEconomists from Hungary
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
J. Bradford DeLong, "Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?", Project Syndicate (June 28, 2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Karl Polanyi
Karl Paul Polanyi (October 25, 1886 – April 23, 1964) was a Hungarian-American economic historian, economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher.
75 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Karl Polanyi →
Related Quotes
"Bentham possessed neither the sleek complacency of a Townsend nor the all too precipitate historicism of a Burke, Rat…"
"The change of atmosphere from Adam Smith to Townsend was, indeed, striking. The former marked the close of an age whi…"
"A bare outline of the objective nature of Fascism thus tends to support our interpretation of its philosophy. The Fas…"
"Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a ce…"
"Both the personnel and the motives of this singular body invested it with a status the roots of which were securely g…"
"The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyon…"
"At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the…"
"Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsett…"
"The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds …"
"Edmund Burke was a man of different stature. Where men like Townsend failed in a small way, he failed in a great way.…"