Karl Polanyi Quotes

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment....would result in the demolition of society.

There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. Just as cotton manufactures were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire was enforced by the state.

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

Enclosures have been appropriately called a revolution of the rich against the poor.