ABSTRACT
The reception of Karl Polanyi’s work is characterized by a striking discrepancy. On the one hand, his seminal work, The Great Transformation, has become a classic analysis of the breakdown of liberal capitalist civilization in the 20th century and a guide to understanding the current crises of global capitalism. On the other hand, the research question underlying this work and its central insights has been almost completely forgotten, even though this question is explicitly pursued in its concluding chapter, “Freedom in a Complex Society.” The present chapter simultaneously attempts to sketch out both Polanyi’s answer to the question of how freedom can be maintained in a complex society as well as what a post-liberal socialist order might look like. In the work of Polanyi, the search for the conditions of freedom in modern societies and reflections on socialist alternatives are inseparably linked.
