THE GREAT TRANSFORMATIONby Karl Polanyi Gallimard

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION

by Karl Polanyi, Gallimard.

Such collection, 468 pages,

12.50 euros.

Is it the news of the crisis that has pushed the Gallimard editions to republish the book mythical, published in New York in 1944 Its contents delight, in any case, those who see the harbinger of the end of capitalism in the cracks of the global economy. For Polanyi, Economist of Hungarian origin, Western countries have lived of the industrial revolution to the beginning of the 20th century, in the dogma of the "self-regulating market". This phase is a historical exception, and even a kind of aberration, which the crisis of the 1930s, and then the war put a final end. Liberalism, says the author, is responsible for his own loss: facing the dehumanisation it resulted, the companies have prepared defensive barriers which have distorted the functioning of the markets and caused general economic disruptions, paving the way to the fascismes in Europe, then to the conflict.

This is the thesis. Sixty-five years later, it is too easy to see that capitalism is not dead in 1945 and that the market economy has produced in the country who practiced it, the most formidable rise in the level of life that history has ever recorded. And yet, this book is exciting, not only by counterpoint to suggest the debates in the immediate post-war period and the current responses to the crisis, but especially the ways of thinking that it was open to the economy and the other humanities.

The premise of the classical economy, which has dominated the 19th century, is that the penchant to exchange for individual advantage is a "natural" feature of the human species. This idea is wrong, says Polanyi. Anthropologists have shown that in primitive and ancient societies, economic relations could take three forms major, very different from Merchant Exchange: reciprocity of donations, the redistribution of the livelihood by a central authority or administration of a largely self-sufficient area. In the societies of the past, the engine of the behaviour is not the bait of material gain, but the building or maintenance of "social position" and this is still largely true in modern societies. This critical paradigm of "Homo oeconomicus" (although Polanyi does not use this term) is today one of the themes of choice of economic thinking.

Blind belief in the virtues of the market, says the author, has led to an impasse, because she turned them into goods three refractory elements to this treatment: the human work, nature and the currency. The suffering and the damage caused by a mechanical which was no self-regulatory, barriers are upright to, especially from the last quarter of the 19th century: social legislation and trade union pressure interfered with the labour market, protectionism has slowed trade, and, finally, the standard, achievement of the good currency, which seemed to be the indispensable guarantor of international tradehas been abandoned.

An adaptable body

The description of the causes of the crisis of the 1930s is very illuminating, but we know result of history, anti-liberal argument appears somewhat ambiguous. First because Polanyi does not deny the effectiveness of the market to foster the growth and the production of wealth. It also recognizes the harmfulness of some public interventions. Thus, he tells with force details how in England between 1795 to 1834, a system of aid to the poor (the "Speenhamland Act") prevented the development of a genuine labour market and created a disastrous "trap poverty": it would hear the current discussions on the revenue of active solidarity. But in the long run, he said, the liberalism proves untenable and secretes poisons that kill. The decades that separate us from "the great transformation" showed, on the contrary, that capitalism is an adaptable, able to develop to survive the tests. So far, at least.