ABSTRACT
In order to prove his hypothesis, Polanyi’s next task is to show that the real ground (and thus
self-understanding) of economic liberalism is false. Thus he argued that the nineteenth-century
system was an artificial and fairly recent historical construction. This takes him to scrutinise the
emergence of the Economic Man, by using studies from anthropology to economic history.3 By
showing that humanity is a social being, not merely economistic, by nature, he cleared the
ground for a political economy analysis of the effects of economic liberalism and the ethico-pol-
itical responses they evoked. Given the Hundred Years’ Peace of the nineteenth century, dis-
turbed only a few times by limited wars, the Great War and the subsequent turmoil came as a
surprise to most Europeans. The collapse of the nineteenth-century civilisation led to two
World Wars and other catastrophes of the early twentieth century.
