ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 portrays what certain of Polanyi’s interlocutors considered to be the cause of economic evil. Connecting mechanicality and evil was quite common in their accounts, but while some saw this machineness in the “evil titanism” of the state, others discerned it in the “satanic mill of the market”. This chapter demonstrates how Michael and Karl Polanyi, Laura Polanyi-Striker, Barbara and Lawrence Hammond, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Oscar Jaszi, T.S. Eliot, Gilbert Murray and others interpreted economic evil and what they meant by machineness in economic realms. It starts with analysing the relation of evil and machineness in The City of Man (1940), Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935), the Hammonds’ Labour trilogy and other sources ranging from laissez-faire liberalism to communism. The chapter continues by showing that Polanyi was not satisfied with these mappings and studied the evil further to eventually find its origin in how economic theories of extreme liberalism and socialist planning handle man. The chapter ends with presenting Polanyi’s alternative to homo oeconomicus.
