ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi credits Aristotle's critique of political economy with many concepts that contributed to his own theories, including those regarding the nature of human communities, the development of modern capitalism and the substantive theory of political economy. For Polanyi, the point of Roosevelt's "New Deal" was to return some such "social security" to the labourer. The point is that to the degree that a household in the ancient world was self-sufficient, in case of a breakdown of society its members could survive for some time, but today that degree of self-sufficiency has been eliminated. Polanyi says that Aristotle "reached the conclusion, that the broader concept of the good life is the key to the solution" of the problem of political economy. Polanyi argues that the "substantive" meaning of economic is the proper grounding for a conceptual framework with which to evaluate market economy.
