University of Amsterdam | Brian Burgoon presents Karl Polanyi | AISSR Great Thinkers Series

Brian Burgoon, Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), introduces and critiques the contributions of the Austro-Hungarian Karl Polanyi. Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was part sociologist, part social theorist, part historian, and part economist. Polanyi focused on large-scale social and economic development in deep history, spanning ancient societies and his contemporary Europe.
His work is most remembered for its sweeping histories of market industrialisation and global economic liberalism. Polanyi saw these economic transformations not as natural unfolding of individual exchange but as deeply political creations that damaged their societies, and as unleashing political backlashes in these societies. For Polanyi, such backlashes gave us welfare states and social democracy, but also nationalist xenophobia, fascism and world war.