ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 presents Polanyi’s boundary-work against extreme liberalism and socialist planning. The purpose of this chapter is to outline Polanyi’s ‘third way’, which will be discussed in later chapters. It starts with showing his rhetorical struggles against extreme liberalism, proceeds with demonstrating how he was drawing boundaries against socialist planning, and ends by illustrating what he thought to be common in these strands of economic thought. The commonality of these two “extremes” provided the raison d’être for his novel kind of economics. The chapter heavily relies on archival research and explores several previously unknown pieces from Polanyi, including the three examples of imaginary economies (atmospheric economy, economy of smells and noises, clockwork economy) which he used to argue against the central direction of the economy, and his borrowing of Dickensian characters to illustrate the downside of laissez-faire liberalism.
