In 1944, the groundbreaking political economist Karl Polanyi published his radical magnum opus, The Great Transformation. In it, he accused influential liberal economists, including David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, of commodifying human beings and the environment in the name of the free market. In 1940, he was offered a fellowship at Bennington College in Vermont in the US and so emigrated there, where he wrote The Great Transformation and then took up a post at Columbia.
Polanyi had observed that, in the 1930s, wealthy Germans who saw the Nazi party as a “battering ram” against trade unions and socialists were persuaded to overlook Hitler’s antisemitism because it allowed the market system to flourish. “In the same way that a lot of Americans who find Trump distasteful today will still vote for him, a lot of German elites said to themselves: we’re quite happy funding Hitler because his street fighters will help crush the trade unions, so that we can make more profits.”
Polanyi lost friends and relatives in the war, including his younger sister in the Holocaust. “The whole book is, in a sense, about fascism, something that Polanyi himself suffered from enormously. This is why it has renewed, real relevance today.”
The above from; The Guardian. The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (Penguin Books Ltd, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.