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This biography shows how Karl Polanyi transformed from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist. Polanyi's experience was a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times that informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and postwar America. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that he sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.
A biography that connects the theorist’s maverick intellect and political commitments to the turbulent times in which he lived.
Nikil Saval:Gareth Dale's new biography offers us a bracing reminder of a far richer world of socialist activity that once existed in much of the West.
Fred Block, author of The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique:The long wait for an intellectual biography of Karl Polanyi is finally over. The task is intimidating because Polanyi's concepts are difficult to untangle and his life was divided into successive sojourns in five different countries with three different languages. But Gareth Dale has succeeded in writing an engaging and meticulously researched book that illuminates Polanyi's ideas and situates them in their proper historical context.
Sally Randles, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester Institute of Innovation Research:This much needed and accessibly crafted biography by a recognized authority on Karl Polanyi is well researched and supported by a range of sources, including archival material, interviews, and other contemporaneous scholars. The rich historical sourcing provides stimulating material for both scholarly audiences and general readers interested in the lives, contributions, and intellectual thought of fascinating individuals and scholars who lived through this particularly era.
Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster:This is a well-written, often sparkling, always informative, comprehensive narrative about the life and work of Karl Polanyi. The analysis is rich with cultural and historical contextualization, full of interesting allusions and reflections, and wonderfully evocative of the unfolding events on a European and transatlantic stage—it will be the standard reference point for all future work on Polanyi.
G. M. Tamás, author of Innocent Power: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts:Writing the intellectual biography of one of the truly great thinkers of the twentieth century, an heir to Rousseau—comparable in importance to Max Weber or to John Maynard Keynes—is a daunting enterprise. Particularly so, since Polanyi's life is bound to the history of a European radicalism now defunct or dormant. Gareth Dale is equal to this task, the complexity of which is incredible. I have no doubt that this is a durable work that will be read by generations. Also, it will show that this half-submerged chapter in the chronicle of revolutionary and—to say the same with another word—theoretical upheavals is indispensable for everybody who still insists on being able to think critically.
John A. Hall, author of Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography:One of the best biographies ever written of any intellectual emerging from the horrors of mid-twentieth-century Europe. It meticulously covers the whole ground—from the Jewish roots in Budapest through the First War, brilliantly reconstructs the milieu and debates of interwar Vienna, and adds enormously to our understanding of The Great Transformation. A compelling portrait, it is successful not just as an intellectual biography but as a personal one as well.
Steven Lukes, author of Power: A Radical View:Here is the book the many admirers of Karl Polanyi have been waiting for: a vivid, thoroughly researched, and lucidly written intellectual biography that is worthy of its subject. It traces Polanyi's life and developing ideas first in central Europe, then in Britain and North America, showing both their rootedness in the 'lost world' of twentieth-century socialism and their ever-greater relevance to making sense of the market societies of our own time.
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