ABSTRACT
Polanyi’s articles and manuscripts of the interwar period reveal a renewed interest in Marx’s thought, which played an important role in shaping his theoretical approach and in confirming his political attitude. A parallel between Marx and Polanyi can be fruitfully traced at the general-abstract theoretical level, where capitalism is comparatively determined as a specific “form of society”, and the “critique of political economy” is thereby defined. Marx not only solves problems left open by classical economic theories but criticizes their interpreting specific social institutions in terms of general-natural economic laws. Polanyi, through his societal-objective approach, questions the formalism and subjectivism of neoclassical economics. Both Marx and Polanyi explain economistic ideologies as an expression of a self-referential economic system; moreover, they suggest political intervention to avoid ruinous consequences on the human and natural environment of this kind of economic organization. Both base their theory on historical evidence and outline a possible (but far from certain) better social order for the future of modern freedom.
