Andreas Novy

That we are currently living in times of profound turmoil is widely acknowledged. The question no longer is whether profound changes will take place in the twenty-first century, but how this transformation will happen – in a chaotic way, as we are currently experiencing in dealing with the pandemic, or collectively shaped. The latter depends on two prerequisites: re-thinking economics, and strengthening public...

The Great Transformation (TGT), the magnum opus of Karl Polanyi, published in 1944, reconstructs the economic, social, and cultural history of capitalism in the face of the developments he had witnessed between the 1920s and the 1940s: market fundamentalism after World War I, the subsequent crisis and stock market crash in 1929, the Great Depression, fascist and socialist attempts to re-order the economy and society...

After his death in 1964, Karl Polanyi was mainly known in anthropology, being a fierce defender of a more contextualized understanding of the economics as the “organizing of livelihood.” His rediscovery as a social scientist in a broad range of disciplines took place from the 1970s onwards. In economics, it was through the work of Douglass North, who received the Nobel Prize for stressing the importance of institutions in...