ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi invented a scheme of economic analysis still influential in anthropology. And when his research led him to West Africa, he thought he had found, in the eighteenth-century kingdom of Dahomey, an example of central economic planning of amazing complexity. His gifts were recognized early—the Galileo Circle in Budapest made him its first president in 1908. While Michael Polanyi deepened the understanding of civilization in The Logic of Liberty, Karl was preparing a book which might have been called The Logic of Slavery. In 1940 Peter Drucker found a position for him at Bennington College in Vermont. There Karl wrote a sweeping denunciation of the rise of industrial capitalism and all its works. The Great Transformation of 1944 parades the usual villains, from Adam Smith through Malthus and Ricardo down to his old enemy Ludwig von Mises, shows a sound grasp of nineteenth-century historical detail, and is written with color and passion.
