This book is designed to offer something to anyone with an interest in Karl Polanyi’s work, whether a newcomer or a seasoned scholar. Each chapter offers a comprehensive description and discussion of his major theses and ideas in relation to ten themes essential to his work, followed by an afterword which considers the insights offered by the book as a whole. The chapter themes span the range of Polanyi’s political and economic interests, from the importance of economic ideas, the various facets of the international economic system and the role of the state, to his understanding of class, fascism and democracy. By reading the whole volume, the reader can expect to come away with a full overview of Polanyi’s political and economic thought and one which clearly unpacks the relevance of his ideas to subsequent scholarship and contemporary issues.

The reader should not, however, expect to be presented with a single, unified picture of Polanyi’s intellectual contribution, because none exists. This is in part because Polanyi was a writer and a polymath rather than a straightforward academic labourer, confined within the bounds of a particular discipline. Following training as a lawyer in Budapest, he spent formative years as a journalist in Vienna writing for the widely-read periodical Der Österreichische Volkswirt. After that, he moved to Britain, supplementing continuing journalism with often precarious work tutoring for various universities and adult education institutions. These two periods were critical to Polanyi’s intellectual formation and are capped by the publication of his celebrated historical analysis of industrial capitalism, The Great Transformation, in 1944. Only after this point did Polanyi secure permanent academic posts in the United States, first at Bennington College, then Columbia University. From there, Polanyi wrote or contributed to a number of academic articles and books focused largely on issues of ancient economic anthropology.

It is striking how different Polanyi’s writing is during each of these periods, speaking to different audiences with different aims, often using the vocabulary of different disciplines. On this basis, a case could perhaps be made for attempting to divide one’s presentation of his work biographically, into distinct phases of output, emphasizing the situatedness of each period with the associated intellectual terms of debate.