Polanyi

• Learning from Our Grandparents

  Or great-granparents, as the case may be. I want to spend some time with Polanyi in part because he has a fundamentally conservative temperament and POV. I'd argue that he's more of a Burkean conservative than most to the conservative intellectuals who are obsessed with the tyrannic threats posed by big government. I like reading

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• What Is More Natural Than Markets?

  Reflections on The Great Transformation, Chapter Three: "Habitation versus Improvement" Central to Polanyi's argument is that markets are not natural, that contrary to the assumptions of classical economists, to "truck and barter"  is not something that has been a central element in human social activity for thousands of years. He argues that the market economy is

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• The Great Transformation

  Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West. When

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