The Elusive Karl Polanyi

Since the Great Recession, Polanyi has become a totem for social democracy. Both disciples and critics have portrayed him as the master theorist of the welfare state. The Polanyi revival has now yielded the first full-length intellectual biography of the thinker. Gareth Dale’s Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left offers a brisk but thorough account of Polanyi’s life and times. Despite this light touch, Dale’s invaluable portrait unsettles some of the received images of its subject, above all by tracing his intellectual journey in its full sweep. Polanyi is unusual in being so deeply identified with a single book, and the temptation is to read his magnum opus, The Great Transformation, as the authoritative distillation of his thought. But it was only one step—and not the final one—in a career than was itinerant in both literal and intellectual terms.