Karl Polanyi : a life on the left / Gareth Dale.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America.

The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Karl Polanyi is a great polymath who strides across the academic boundaries of social sciences. His most famous achievement, The Great Transformation, is a masterpiece, a brilliant critique of a world ruled by markets in which market values seem to trump important virtues. This idea remains at the center of Polanyi's work: markets operate more or less independently of society at large with little concern about the impact on people and their societies. Yes, regulations exist, but they are a minimal determinant of markets. Polanyi observes the disheartening transition from early capitalism to fascism. With excellent access to people with information about Polanyi, Dale paints a detailed picture of the highly developed intellectual level of central Europe as well as the struggle of Jews to build lives in a society in which anti-Semitism was rampant. This terrific book can be read on different levels, learning about Jewish evolution as well as the gross of modernist thinking. Perhaps, above all, Polanyi's personal life with family, friends, and other intellectuals is engrossing. Dale deserves great credit for his masterpiece. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Michael Perelman, California State University, Chico