The Great Transformation (book)
As a Great Transformation (English, German Large deformation or Great Transformation ) designated the Hungarian- Austrian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi 1944 the profound transformation of the western society in the 19th and 20th centuries mainly on historical example of England, when industrialization and political action to profound political, social and economic changes led. The two essential moments of the secular change were Polanyi the development of market economies and nation states. He took between the two phenomena in a strong interaction and called this the market -society market society complex.
Independence of the economy
Polanyi described this increasing market orientation as a spin-off of the economy. The traditional feudal and feudal system had to therefore adapt to the consequences of industrialization in no time. It Polanyi recognized the shift from an agrarian society with the motive of subsistence and sized collectives towards a market society in which an individual pursuit of profit and utility maximization of self -dominated. Overall social upheavals Polanyi explained mainly by the respective intentional introduction of free markets for the " fictitious commodities " labor, land and money he referred to as, first in the UK.
The starting point of the Great Transformation Polanyi saw in 1834, when the British government abolished the Speenhamland law. After already sat parallel to the introduction of the Act 1794, the free movement of citizens, the open labor market for the emerging industry, the way was paved; Workers could move freely within the country, and the reward was no longer distorted by the quasi- payment of wage subsidies to manufacturers. The ever-present hunger and shortage drove the former small farmers and farm workers in the factories. Polanyi rated this as the introduction of a free labor market.
In addition, Polanyi also observed the emergence of a market for land, which was accompanied by an increasing enclosure of land by large landowners. This deprived rural residents often the means for an independent livelihood, forcing them further into the market society. Polanyi described this process as " disembedding " and explicitly pointed to a parallel with the market - enforcement in colonial peoples.
With the " goods fiction" of labor, land and money, the devastating effect of the Great Transformation, as "... transformation of the natural and human substance of society into commodities " was born.
Such an ever- escalating materialism in a market society runs according to Polanyi, contrary to the nature of society and is thus an existential threat. The destructive power of this development show is not so much in a material deficiency, the miserable working conditions this time, but in a cultural and social neglect.
Emergence of nation-states
Economic interests promoted by Polanyi the emergence of nation-states as a homogeneous internal markets and changes in the political order, as Polanyi lists the example of Great Britain.
He justified this with the needs of economies in a strong, modern state, as only this could implement the necessary reforms in the social structures in order to stop or mitigate the serious social effects of capitalism.
The highlight of the Great Transformation was Polanyi for the period before the First World War, with international peace through the four facilities equilibrium of forces, gold standard, self-regulating market and liberal state. However, when the gold standard was gradually abandoned as a fixed conversion scale of the international currencies in the early 1930s, was the collapse of liberal market society, Polanyi stated, almost only a matter of time.
In contrast, Polanyi argued in the final chapter of "socialism ," the labor, land and money withdrawing the market and democratically controlling.