Summary of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century was the laws governing market economy. The idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia, and it was impossible for such an institution to exist for any length of time without destroying the human and natural substance of society.

#2 The book explores the cause of the cataclysm, which was the collapse of the international system. The balance-of-power system could not ensure peace once the world economy had failed. The origins of this system lie in the social and technological upheaval from which the idea of a self-regulating market system sprang in Western Europe.

#3 The triumph of pragmatic pacifism was not the result of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Throughout the first part of the century, civil wars, revolutionary and antirevolutionary interventions, were the order of the day.

#4 The balance of power, which was traditionally used to maintain independence among states, was instead used to maintain peace between them. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Münster and Westphalia in 1648.

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