The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpa… - Karl Polanyi
" "The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm. ... The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even in a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament. The movement appeared in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Jugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain, in countries of Aryan race like England, Ireland or Belgium and non-Aryan race like Japan, Hungary, or Palestine, in countries of Catholic traditions like Portugal and in Protestant ones like Holland, in soldierly communities like Prussia and civilian ones like Austria, in old cultures like France and new ones like the United States and the Latin-American countries. In fact, there was no type of background — of religious, cultural, or national tradition — that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.
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About Karl Polanyi
Karl Paul Polanyi (October 25, 1886 – April 23, 1964) was a Hungarian-American economic historian, economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Polányi Károly
Alternative Names:
Károly Pollacsek
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Karoly Pollacsek
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Karl Paul Polanyi
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Polanyi Karoly
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Additional quotes by Karl Polanyi
Only in a symmetrically organized environment will reciprocative attitudes result in economic institutions of any importance; only where centers have been established beforehand can the cooperative attitude of individuals produce a redistributive economy; and only in the presence of markets instituted to that purpose will the bartering attitude of individuals result in prices that integrate the economic activities of the community.
To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one.
Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom. To represent this principle as one of noninterference, as economic liberals were wont to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favor of a definite kind of interference, namely, such as would destroy noncontractual relations between individuals and prevent their spontaneous reformation.
To sum up the central illusion of an age in terms of a logical error is rarely to the point; yet conceptually the economistic fallacy, in the nature of things, cannot be described otherwise. The logical error was of a common and harmless kind: a broad, generic phenomenon was somehow taken to be identical with a species with which we happen to be familiar. In such terms, the error was in equating the human economy in general with its market form (a mistake that may have been facilitated by the basic ambiguity of the term economic, to which we will return later).
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