The future was social

When​ did the ‘modern’ era begin? For the European imagination across more than a millennium, the most significant divide was between antiquity and what followed, such that for some centuries ‘modern history’ was held to have begun with the fall of Rome. Applying a different filter, the category of the ‘Middle Ages’ indicated the post-Renaissance sense of an epoch between the ancient world and the ‘revival’ of learning, with the period from the late 15th century then becoming the first modern era. In both these cases, the criteria by which periods were distinguished were intellectual, political and religious. But from the late 18th century onwards the most alert observers began to sense that there was a new type of society developing – new not just in Europe, but in human history as a whole – and here the criteria were economic and social. Briefly put, it came to seem that societies based on agriculture, crafts and the struggle for subsistence were being replaced by societies based, at least embryonically, on commerce, industry and the possibility of abundance.

Scottish social theorists of the Enlightenment were early in the field, identifying the lineaments of ‘commercial society’, but from the early 19th century it became clearer, to commentators in France and Germany no less than in Britain, that the growth of a new mechanised form of industry, together with the concentrated capital it required, was the force that was transforming the world. Steam power, machinery, factories – those areas in the Midlands and North of England where the landscape was being transfigured (many said destroyed) by these novel forms now began to be seen as the vanguard of this epoch-defining change. In the course of the 19th century, these developments came retrospectively to be characterised as the ‘industrial revolution’, a term that, though frequently criticised for being misleadingly dramatic and reductive, established itself in historiography and lay commentary alike. Some observers went so far as to claim that the changes in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries ushered in a ‘new civilisation’, with its own distinctive forms of human psychology and social relationships. That claim could take various forms, but it was beyond question that, however the changes were to be understood, they happened first in Britain, indeed in England, with the result that, in the later 19th century and the first half of the 20th, English history became the intellectual laboratory within which ideas about the character or distinctiveness of the new type of society were explored.

A common thread in the variously inflected accounts of this transformation was the claim that, alongside the new economic practices and social arrangements, there also emerged a new way to conceptualise patterns of interaction, perhaps even a new way to understand human motivation. Political economy was a study (a ‘science’ in the eyes of its most enthusiastic votaries) that purported to proceed deductively from a few simple, incontestable axioms about human behaviour to arrive at universally valid ‘laws’ describing the relations of supply and demand and similar matters. This intellectual enterprise, according to its numerous critics, not only had damaging political consequences in seeming to validate policies of laissez-faire: it also encouraged a wider disregard for the complexities of human behaviour and the variability of historical and cultural circumstances. For those intent on imagining a future form of society that would not be disfigured by the perceived exploitation and injustice (and, no less important for some critics, ugliness) of the encroaching industrial system, it became imperative to try to dethrone the abstractions of political economy.

In time, a rich tradition of European thinking about the particularity of ‘modern’ societies provided the framework for the most influential forms of social theory and social science, from Marx’s dissection of the role of capital through Tönnies’s speculations about the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft and on to Weber’s analyses of the distinctively Western form of entrepreneurialism. But alongside these there were native British traditions of social criticism that attempted to undermine the claims of the unregulated market and its legitimating science from within, by telling alternative stories about the relevant stages of British history. In the late 19th century, historical economists such as William Cunningham and the first Arnold Toynbee tried to relativise the theorems of political economy by representing them as merely the reflection of one brief period of English economic history, which might soon be coming to an end. Among the various revisionist histories of the industrial revolution perhaps none was as influential with a wider public as that of J.L. and Barbara Hammond, who, in their ‘Labourer’ trilogy (1911-19), painted a dark picture of the way a rapacious ruling class had deployed the supposed findings of political economy to legitimate the various schemes of expropriation and exploitation that brought untold suffering to the poor.

Another historical line of attack was taken by R.H. Tawney, whose Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) depicted early modern England as a society in which economic practices were informed and constrained by moral and religious norms. Tawney argued that the decline in the social power of such beliefs allowed the rise of more purely instrumental, profit-oriented practices in the 18th century which laid the foundations of what he deplored as the economic tyranny of the present. A revival of Christian social theorising in the interwar period coalesced with the influence of philosophical Idealism – which claimed, legitimately or not, descent from the late Victorian thinking of T.H. Green – to nourish lively debate about the deficiencies, and perhaps the transience, of what was variously identified as ‘unbridled commercialism’, ‘market society’, or (less often outside the Marxist tradition) ‘capitalism’. Figures such as Tawney, T.S. Eliot, and the Idealist philosopher and master of Balliol College A.D. Lindsay came together in the late 1930s to endow this discourse with its distinctively high moral, at times Anglican, tone, yet these traditions of indigenous social criticism were to be given their most powerful summation in the work of a surprising figure, an Austro-Hungarian journalist who only arrived in Britain at the beginning of 1934.

Born in 1886, Karl Polanyi described himself as a Westernised ‘Magyar-Jewish mongrel’ who grew up in the ‘Bloomsbury-on-Danube’ world of the liberal bourgeoisie in Budapest which flourished in the decades before 1914 (György Lukács and Karl Mannheim were among his near contemporaries in a milieu nicely captured in Gareth Dale’s excellent Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, which appeared in 2016). The Fabianism of Shaw and Wells stimulated an early political enthusiasm (Shaw was the subject of his first published article), but such inclinations did not easily find a home amid the political instability that followed the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of 1918. Polanyi was guardedly supportive of Mihály Károlyi’s attempts to sustain a liberal-democratic coalition in Hungary, and more sceptical of the short-lived experiment of Béla Kun’s ‘Red Republic’ (in which his friend Lukács served as commissar for education and culture). But with reaction quickly gaining ground in Hungary following the military ousting of Kun’s government, Polanyi left for Vienna, where, after a brief spell working for an émigré Hungarian publication, he was employed for more than ten years as a journalist on the Österreichische Volkswirt, primarily writing about economic topics.

It is not easy to chart Polanyi’s intellectual trajectory across the 1920s. He was sympathetic to the collectivist policies of Vienna’s ruling socialist party, while being drawn to the guild socialism of G.D.H. Cole (his early Anglophilia persisted). Beyond current politics, his energies seem to have been more and more focused on challenging the pretension of free-market economic theories at a conceptual level, especially as those theories were articulated by the Austrian school led by Ludwig von Mises. But by the early 1930s the political tide in Austria was running irresistibly towards fascism. Polanyi’s position as an editor on a liberal economic journal – and as ‘racially’ a Jew in fascist reckoning – became untenable so he emigrated once more, arriving in London in January 1934. He was 47 years old, without a job, money or obvious prospects.

Drawing on previous contacts made in Vienna, he became associated with several of the leading figures on the Christian left in the mid-1930s as well as with notable Labour Party intellectuals. (When later he was unsuccessfully applying for academic posts in Britain his referees were Tawney, Lindsay, Cole and Mannheim, a battery that might seem capable of reducing any appointments committee to rubble.) He was particularly impressed by Lindsay’s Christianity and Economics (1933), which attacked the dominance of economic calculation in contemporary society; he even read a good deal of T.H. Green. No less crucial was his employment from 1936 as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, conducting classes in South-East England. In the early decades of the WEA there was a marked demand for courses in British social and economic history, its adult students eager to understand the origins of what were experienced as the harsh and unjust conditions of modern Britain as an industrial society. (Such classes formed the matrix from which the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)

Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for his classes. His wife later spoke of how his years in Britain in the mid and late 1930s nourished ‘that abysmal hatred of the market system, the passion behind The Great Transformation’, the book he eventually published in 1944. In the acknowledgments Polanyi declared that, even though the book was largely written in the US, ‘it was begun and finished in England’ and ‘its main thesis was developed during the academic year 1939-40’ in connection with his WEA courses. This report is supported by the thorough researches of Gareth Dale (who also contributes a helpful introduction to this new edition): ‘It was as drafts of economic history lectures [for his classes] that the principal theses of the book that was to make his name were first jotted down.’

Tellingly, one of the possible titles for the book that Polanyi favoured (before he was talked out of it by his American publisher) was ‘Freedom from Economics’, an odd phrase that nonetheless captured the essence of what was, arguably, to be his lifelong quest (‘The Liberal Utopia’ was another rejected candidate). In the event, the issue of the title turned out to be vexed in other ways. The exigencies of his imminent return to Britain in 1943, combined with the demands of a parting US lecture tour, meant that Polanyi had to leave friends to piece together the final form of his typescript for submission to the American publisher. The book first appeared in its US edition titled The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. It was to be published in Britain the following year by Gollancz, a delay that enabled Polanyi to make several changes; both he and Gollancz preferred to give the British edition the title Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation. A new edition was published by Beacon Press in 1957, now with its original US title (at least on the cover; the subtitle did not appear on the title page). In 2001 a slightly corrected version was published under the same full title, edited by Fred Block, and this is the version that now appears as a Penguin Modern Classic.

But the title is vexed, or at least vexing, in a more substantive way, too. Many readers and critics have taken the ‘transformation’ in question to be the arrival of industrialism. Indeed, the jacket blurb for the 2001 Beacon Press edition asserts confidently: ‘In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyses the economic and social changes brought about by the “great transformation” of the industrial revolution.’ Others – following, it must be said, some strong clues in Polanyi’s text – insist that the transformation in question is from the market system to the ‘cataclysm’ of the 1930s and 1940s and on to the more collectivist arrangements predicted to follow. Dale summarises this view: ‘Despite common misconceptions, the title alludes to his prognostication, not to any historical sociology.’ I wouldn’t dispute that judgment, but it is worth pointing out that Polanyi’s writing does sometimes give encouragement to the alternative reading. Still, the opening sentences of the book are emphatic: ‘Nineteenth-century civilisation has collapsed. This book is concerned with the political and economic origins of this event, as well as with the great transformation which it ushered in.’ The ‘it’ in the final clause seems pretty clearly to refer to the ‘event’ of the collapse rather than to ‘19th-century civilisation’. Textual and biographical evidence notwithstanding, the wider reputation of the book has been as an analysis of the transformation brought about by the industrial revolution.

This interpretation is made plausible by the fact that much of the book is devoted to charting the rise of what Polanyi most often called ‘market society’ in 19th-century England, the historical distinctiveness of which he emphasised very strongly: ‘19th-century civilisation’ differed from all other societies in that it was based on the motive of ‘gain’. This was a familiar charge in the English tradition of social criticism, though, in this bald form, it could appear an implausible assertion, since it might not seem difficult to detect the ‘motive of gain’ at work in various other times and places. But Polanyi’s case, drawing on the work of Tawney and anthropologists such as Malinowski, was that in all other societies economic activity was ‘embedded’ (one of his key terms) in a restraining network of social norms and customs: only with the triumph of the allegedly unregulated market in 19th-century Britain did the pursuit of profit assert its primacy over all other considerations. Or, rather, not over all other considerations, for, in another phrase that came to be one of the signature marks of his work, there was always a ‘double movement’: each step towards the more complete installation of the unregulated market was accompanied by some fresh attempt at a form of ‘social protection’. (This was, in Polanyi’s view, not the result of socialist intervention, but rather the self-correcting method of economic liberalism itself; his main source for the details, if not the interpretation, was A.V. Dicey’s Law and Public Opinion, first published in 1905.) The analytical underpinning of this historical generalisation lay in Polanyi’s claim that the full flourishing of a market society depended on land, labour and money being regarded as commodities, but in reality they were not susceptible to complete commodification without seriously damaging consequences even for economic activity itself.

The strains involved in the drive towards such a system were most nakedly exposed in the case of labour. Treating as commodities the human beings whose labour power was necessary to the new productive processes meant destroying the fabric of their lives and their communities. This was brutally apparent in the closing decades of the 18th century, when the introduction of more labour-efficient machinery, combined with bad harvests and the war with revolutionary France, brought hunger and suffering to the rural poor in particular. The Poor Law that had been in place since Elizabethan times attempted to provide for those in need at the expense of the parish, but it struggled to cope with the ‘able-bodied’ poor who were now being thrown out of work in such large numbers. The chief response to this crisis was what came to be called the ‘Speenhamland system’.

Meeting in the village of Speenhamland in Berkshire in 1795, a gathering of local justices of the peace attempted to mitigate the extreme distress being experienced by the labouring classes by modifying the operation of the Poor Law. The Speenhamland JPs proposed to give financial aid to the able-bodied under certain circumstances, essentially by setting a minimum income level that was tied to the price of bread and then topping up the worker’s income from the rates when it fell below this level. They recognised that in bad times (and in the years between 1795 and 1834 there were many bad times) a worker would simply not be able to sustain himself and his family by his labour, so some form of communal support had to be given (forcing farmers to take on additional casual labour for short periods on these terms was a complementary feature of the system).

By the late 1820s and early 1830s this arrangement came in for strong criticism, culminating in a parliamentary report on the operation of the Poor Law in 1834. This gave a selective and damning account of the system’s functioning in recent decades, arguing that it managed simultaneously to depress wages and remove the incentive to work. If employers knew that the parish would top up labourers’ wages, it meant they could pay even less without fear of being unable to retain workers. But, equally, if a labourer knew he would get a guaranteed allowance no matter what he did, the incentive to work hard evaporated. Or at least that is how Polanyi, drawing on the 1834 report, described the drawbacks of the system. Modern historians have modified this view in various respects, including showing that the ‘system’ was only patchily adopted outside a number of southern counties, while also disputing that it had a uniformly depressive effect on wages. Be that as it may, the new Poor Law that was enacted in 1834 involved an attempt to apply the laws of the market more strictly to the ‘commodity’ of labour. There was to be no outdoor relief for the able-bodied; they were to be incentivised to find work by the prospect of being incarcerated in the workhouse, where conditions were to be deliberately maintained at a lower level than those endured even by the most poorly paid independent labourer. This was the infamous ‘less eligibility’ test: the conditions in the workhouse were to be so unattractive as to deter any able-bodied labourer from resorting to it.

Polanyi​ devoted a surprisingly large portion of his book to discussion of the Poor Law, Speenhamland in particular. He saw the latter as society’s attempt to slow the arrival of a fully-fledged market economy, applying instead older notions of a ‘moral economy’. He acknowledged that commentators had given little attention to the topic in the 19th century, and he argued, revealingly, that ‘it was not until the Hammonds (1911) conceived the vision of a new civilisation ushered in by the industrial revolution that Speenhamland was rediscovered.’ That may be a rather brisk abridgement of the historiography, but it did indicate that Polanyi’s whole project was founded on the idea that the industrial revolution ushered in a ‘new civilisation’. Speenhamland was represented as the last spasm of the old humane civilisation; modern market society in all its rigour dated from 1834.

A further reason Polanyi concentrated so heavily on this episode was that he believed it prefigured subsequent debates about welfare. He noted, for example, that ‘Dicey, in 1913, summed up his criticism of the Old Age Pensions Act (1908) in the words: “It is in essence nothing but a new form of outdoor relief for the poor.”’ Polanyi explained that his own interest in Speenhamland had originally been aroused by possible parallels with the welfare measures of the socialist municipality of Vienna in the early 1920s, and he argued that the system was still seen as a warning precedent in debates about various ‘dole’ proposals between the wars: ‘Liberal capitalism in its death throes was faced with the still unsolved problems bequeathed to it by its beginnings.’ It is hard to know which assumption here now seems more remarkable: that the problems with welfare benefits between the wars should still seem to be working out the legacy of the early 19th-century Poor Law, or that liberal capitalism was in its death throes (reports of capitalism’s death have, like Mark Twain’s, been greatly exaggerated). Nonetheless, the urge to read a moral into this moment in the history of poor relief has not disappeared. Fred Block and Margaret Somers, two of Polanyi’s greatest modern admirers, conclude their analysis of his chapters on the Speenhamland system by declaring: ‘The contemporary lesson is obvious; it is time to reject the ideological claim that the best way to fight poverty is by imposing increasingly stringent conditions on ever shrinking transfer payments to poor households.’ The policy point is well taken, but it is not obvious why the route to this conclusion has to be via the deliberations of a number of Berkshire squires in the 1790s.

Polanyi’s chief targets in the first part of The Great Transformation are Malthus and Ricardo, the joint founders, in his view, of a theory of political economy grounded in the supposed biological, and hence unalterable, nature of human beings (indeed, Ricardo is mentioned more frequently than any other figure in the book). Their theories were held to underwrite the wider political conclusion that generous-hearted attempts to mitigate the suffering of the poor merely exacerbated their condition. It is noticeable that Polanyi does not thereafter discuss the work of any other economists in the classical or neoclassical traditions: ‘political economy’ remains something of a reified abstraction, trapped in the confines of its early 19th-century version. This brings out a feature of the book that some more recent scholars have pointed to, namely that, although largely focused on the past, it is only episodically historical. Polanyi does not provide a connected narrative: rather, the argument moves through a sequence of generalised types, or at least of episodes treated in terms of their informing conceptual structures, rather than reconstructing the messy detail of what happened.

Each of Polanyi’s sweeping claims tends to make modern historians’ hackles rise; the interpretation of the industrial revolution, in particular, has become the Somme of historical terrains, with an exceptionally high body count. In terms of the debate that festered, rather than raged, between the ‘optimists’ and the ‘pessimists’ over the social impact of the transformation, Polanyi was a pessimist. He acknowledged that some economic historians could show wage rates rising across the first half of the 19th century, but insisted that ‘a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon that can be measured by income figures or population statistics.’ Moreover, this was a uniquely British disaster: the rural populations of European countries did not, he argued, suffer the same ‘moral and cultural catastrophe’.

Although​ idiosyncratic in its concentration on the principles underlying the old and new Poor Laws, Polanyi’s account of the industrial revolution, and especially his understanding of it as creating a ‘new civilisation’, was not unusual in British social thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What was distinctive was the way he tied that historical story to an analysis of what had happened in the interwar years – cataclysmically in Continental Europe; less dramatically, but still unmistakably, in Britain and the US. The motor force of The Great Transformation was Polanyi’s contention that a thoroughgoing unregulated market society was an impossible dream: he repeatedly referred to the idea of such a society as ‘utopian’ (hence one of the rejected titles). The so-called ‘double movement’, in which the excesses of the free market were compensated for, or patched up, was one expression of this truth. More ambitiously, he tried to represent the economic and political crises of the decades after 1914 as the inevitable outcome of the same self-defeating logic. The exact mechanism in this case was less clear: the attempt to maintain free trade based on the gold standard in a world of competing national autarkies signalled, he argued, the death throes of a doomed project, though there seems more than a hint of circular reasoning in this interpretation. In any event, Polanyi’s book was an exceptionally bold effort to make sense of contemporary developments on an international scale by telling a quasi-historical story that linked the spinning jenny, Malthus and the Poor Law to the Wall Street Crash, the rise of fascism and the vogue for planning. The thesis that held the story together could be stated with brutal clarity: ‘The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavour … to set up a self-regulating market system.’ Or as he put it in one of his pithiest apothegms: ‘In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England.’

If the cataclysm marked the end of 19th-century civilisation, it also signalled the arrival of a new form of social organisation. Polanyi claimed that he had seen the future and the future was social. That is to say, the emphasis on unregulated competition was now yielding to a recognition of what he called ‘the reality of society’ and the need for correspondingly collective forms of social responsibility. He was not alone in detecting moves in this direction in Roosevelt’s New Deal and subsequently in Attlee’s welfare state, though, like so many, he came to be disappointed in the achievements of the 1945-51 Labour government. And he argued that this reorientation towards the social was now an unstoppable tendency more widely: ‘Within the nations we are witnessing a development under which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and the primacy of society over that system is secured.’ The final chapter of The Great Transformation makes the case that freedom, far from being incompatible with a planned society and a regulated market, is in fact meaningful only under such conditions. Enthusing about this development, Polanyi in his peroration hit a utopian note of his own: ‘The passing of the market economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom.’ This was a hot topic in 1940s Britain – both Mannheim and Eliot, for example, made it salient in their contrasting social diagnoses – but in this form it now has a dated feel, and of course the larger prediction about the passing of market society has, to put it mildly, not worn well.

In the years after the publication of The Great Transformation, Polanyi, who died in 1964, turned more and more to anthropology and earlier periods of history in an attempt to demonstrate that other societies exhibited no analytically separate or practically autonomous realm of economic activity. These inquiries were intended to buttress his claim that the ‘civilisation’ that lasted only from about 1780 (or from 1834 on the most stringent definition) to about 1930 was historically unique. It is noticeable that in the decades since his death Polanyi’s work seems to have been of greater interest to anthropologists than to historians (mainstream economists appear never to have shown much interest, though more heterodox ‘institutional’ economists in the US took him seriously). The anthropologists’ attention has been drawn in particular by what he has to say about the character of markets and their various forms of embeddedness or subordination to normative communal practices in ‘premodern’ societies. A volume from 2009 entitled Market and Society edited by two anthropologists, Chris Hann and Keith Hart, was subtitled ‘The Great Transformation Today’. Among historians, E.P. Thompson might have seemed the obvious candidate to have continued or responded to Polanyi’s work, especially since The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was focused on the late 18th and early 19th centuries and drew on many of the same authorities, including the Hammonds, the Webbs and company. But there is no mention of Polanyi in Thompson’s masterpiece, and it is noticeable that even Tim Rogan – who in his book The Moral Economists (2017) makes a case for substantial commonalities in the work of Tawney, Polanyi and Thompson – cites no evidence of Thompson acknowledging or drawing on Polanyi.*

More generally, Polanyi’s stock seems to have risen markedly in recent decades, with several volumes and conferences devoted to his work. As one observer has put it: ‘With the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism, Karl Polanyi’s ideas are, ironically, more relevant today than they were in 1944.’ At first sight, it is not easy to say why this should be the case. It can hardly be on account of the cogency of his predictions. At the same time, the details of social and economic change in Britain in the years between the 1780s and the 1830s on which he lavished such attention have long since ceased to be the focus of contemporary political debate. More plausibly – the array of puffs assembled for this new edition encourages this thought – some contemporary readers may hope to find in the book a convincing repudiation of the forms of market fundamentalism that have dominated economic thinking and policy in recent decades. Polanyi is certainly a trenchant critic of such dogmatism in its 19th-century version; how far his thinking can fruitfully be applied to the globalised financial world that has developed since his death has been a matter of debate, though events such as the 2008 financial crisis were seen by some as giving renewed visibility to his analysis of the economic collapses of the 1930s.

As​ a result of his peregrinations, physical and intellectual, Polanyi brought an unusual combination of perspectives to bear on his chosen topic. One could say that few figures in the British tradition of social criticism could match his command of the contemporary international political and economic scene, while few European social theorists possessed his understanding of the distinctive features of Britain’s history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Aside from any reservations about how persuasively he connected these two domains, perhaps the most critical judgment that might be made of this noted critic of market fundamentalism is that he badly underestimated the resilience of capitalism, largely because his focus was on the defining principles of a market economy rather than on the power of capital itself. He saw the collectivist measures of the 1930s and 1940s as a practical recognition of the fact that the old ideal of the free market could no longer be made to work (he was far from alone in so thinking at the time). But policies such as the New Deal and, later, Britain’s welfare state did not dismantle the fundamental structures of capital investment, with the result that what Polanyi predicted would be the new ‘post-market’ order turned out to be the corporate bonanza (especially in the US) of les trente glorieuses, which was succeeded from the 1980s onwards by rampant forms of financial plunder.

It remains as true as ever that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ market: all trade, investment and exchange depends on a complex network of supporting institutions and restraining regulations, which are matters of politics and culture, not simply of unfettered economic activity. To that extent, Polanyi’s emphasis on what he called the ‘embeddedness’ of economic activity might seem in danger of being no more than a truism were it not for the fact that both governments and theorists frequently seem to have tried to ignore this truth. But, valuable though Polanyi’s analytical framework remains, the world of private equity, hedge funds, credit default swaps and all the other instruments and practices of contemporary technology-enabled finance may seem to require a different order of analysis, one that wouldn’t necessarily encourage an optimistic belief in the imminent arrival of a ‘post-market society’ (what the anthropologists may find helpful in thinking about less advanced societies is a different matter).

Another way to bring out the distance between the world analysed in Polanyi’s book and the world today is to note that whereas the relevant debate in Britain in the 1930s was intimately bound up with rival claims about key periods of British history, contemporary critiques of the damaging role of ‘free-market’ ideology are now rarely cast in this historical form. Historians continue to dispute the explanatory significance of such matters as the ‘financial revolution’ of the late 17th century in Britain, the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the 18th century and so on, but the immediate relevance of those stories to contemporary politics has declined markedly. (There is, it’s true, a large and diverse literature on patterns of capital accumulation over time, a topic to which Thomas Piketty’s work, in particular, has given a fresh boost, but this is comparative work on a quite different scale, not directly tied to local memories of dispossession and exploitation.) As Polanyi’s bibliography on the topic suggested, his account was rooted in the historiography of the previous half-century, his sources running from W.J. Ashley to J.H. Clapham via the Hammonds and the Webbs. How directly a work so deeply intertwined with that phase of historical scholarship on the industrial revolution can speak to contemporary political and economic circumstances in the early 21st century must be, at the very least, moot.

At first sight, Polanyi’s may seem to be an example of what Ernest Gellner called ‘Great Ditch’ theories of historical periodisation, in which all acknowledgment of possible continuities or historical variability is swept aside by the emphasis on one major caesura. But on closer inspection, Polanyi’s would have to be regarded as a ‘Double Ditch’ theory, since the great divide signalled by the arrival of a new civilisation at the end of the 18th century was matched by a no less fundamental break when that civilisation collapsed in the middle decades of the 20th century. ‘Un train peut en cacher un autre,’ as it says (or said) at French level-crossings; much the same can be said of summits when one is hill-walking – and of ditches when trying to divide up history.

After proposing that ‘it is Polanyi’s diagnosis of the corrupting consequences of the marketisation of labour power and nature that gives his work a contemporary feel and explains its continued appeal,’ Gareth Dale concludes his biography with impressive realism: ‘Yet the prescriptions he offers appear antiquated, even foreign, to 21st-century ears. He belongs to a lost world.’ Dale identifies that world in terms of the reformist socialism of left-wing parties in Britain and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But that ‘lost world’ might also be characterised as one where contested accounts of Britain’s industrial revolution – the ditch allegedly separating modern from premodern societies – could still figure so prominently in political debate. Generals are said to be forever refighting the last war, whichever that was; perhaps historians and social theorists, in moving away from claims about a single great transformation, are showing that they now have little inclination to die in the last ditch.