A Foreword to Kari Polanyi Levitt

Dani Rodrik:

A Foreword to Kari Polanyi Levitt: I was recently asked to write a foreword to the Mexican edition of Kari Polanyi Levitt’s From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization. Kari is Karl Polanyi's daughter, and the essays in her book -- part memoir, part intellectual history, part analysis of the global economy -- provide a wonderful Polanyi-esque perspective on our day. I happily accepted, and my Foreword is below.

****

I first encountered Karl Polanyi as an undergraduate, in a course on comparative politics. “The Great Transformation” was on the course syllabus, sitting somewhat awkwardly amidst more standard political science fare. The assigned reading, on the Speenhamland system and the reform of the Poor Laws in Britain made little impression on me at first. But over the years, I found myself coming back to the central arguments of the book: the embeddedness of a market economy in a broader set of social arrangements, the rejection of an autonomous economic sphere, the folly of treating markets as self-stabilizing. ...