The Great Transformation at 75

To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Great Transformation, Bennington College convened a global group of scholars and engaged intellectuals to consider how Karl Polanyi’s intellectual legacy could help us to develop 20/20 vision—a more generative and generous analysis of the human predicament on the eve of a new decade.

Read a summary of this conference published on the International Karl Polanyi Society website >>

Watch the recordings of the conference here >>

In 1944, Karl Polanyi penned one the twentieth century’s most incisive works of scholarship: The Great Transformation. As an émigré fleeing Nazism, Polanyi witnessed a world falling apart as global depression, fascist regimes, and resurgent racism metastasized into worldwide terror. Finding intellectual sanctuary at Bennington College, Polanyi worked out a bold diagnosis of what had gone wrong in The Great Transformation, and of how modern society might be rebuilt upon a more equitable foundation.

Watch the full interview here

Dates | Oct 25–27, 2019
Location | Bennington College, CAPA Symposium
Contact | capa@bennington.edu
Hosted by John Hultgren, David Bond, and Susan Sgorbati

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Friday, October 25

12:00–2:00 PM  |  Polanyi and Precarious Life

• Luis Flores, “Polanyi at a Tupperware Party: The Spread of Distributive Industriousness Among American Households”
• Irene Pang, “Rethinking Civil Society and Democracy: Lessons from Construction Workers in Beijing and Delhi”
• Mathieu Charbonneau, "The Concept of Fictitious Commodity and the Case of Insurance Risks"
• Aaron Barcant, "Coexistence: Karl Polanyi and Peter Drucker Navigating Mid-Century Crises"
• Discussant: Michael Burawoy

2:30–4:30 PM  |  Liberal Institutions and the Global Market

• Shaina Potts, “The Politics of the 'Private': Liberal Legal Dichotomies and Global Markets”
• Ayca Zayim, “The Polanyian Countermovement and Central Banks in the Contemporary Global Financial System”
• Jay Varellas, "Constitutional Political Economy in the Age of Financialization"
• Discussant: Gareth Dale

7:30–9:00 PM  |  Opening Reception: Remarks by John Hultgren, David Bond, and Kari Polanyi Levitt (Commons Atrium)

Saturday, October 26

9:00–9:30 AM  |  Welcome/Introduction: Isabel Roche, Interim President of Bennington College, and Fred Block)

9:30–11:30 AM  |  First Plenary: The Predicament and Promise of Democracy Today

• Fred Block, “Origins of the Crisis of Our Time”
• Robert Kuttner, “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?”
• Marguerite Mendell, "Instituted Processes of Democratization: Imagining a Conversation between Karl Polanyi and Roberto Mangabeira Unger"
• Discussant: James Scott

11:30 AM–1:00 PM  |  Lunch (Commons Dining Hall)

1:00–3:00 PM  |  Second Plenary: Global Market Fundamentalism and its Discontents

• Brigitte Aulenbacher, “Care, Capitalism, and the Dynamics of the 'Market Society' and the 'Machine Age'"
• Claus Thomasberger, “The Challenges of a Technological Civilization: Economic Liberalism and Polanyi's Vision of the Great Transformation”
• Margaret Somers, "Diagnosing Fascism, Capitalism, and the Moral Crimes of Market Justice: Polanyi's Socialist Vision of a Predistributive Democracy"

3:30–5:30 PM  |  Third Plenary: Financialization and the Paradoxes of Late Capitalism

• Kari Polanyi-Levitt, “The Return of Karl Polanyi: From the Bennington Lectures to our Present Age of Existential Crises'"
• Eve Chiapello, "Financialization and Fictitious Commodities"
• Michael Burawoy, "Going Public with Polanyi in the Era of Trump"
• Discussant: Greta Krippner

7:30–9:00 PM  |  Public Concert​​ (Deane Carriage Barn)

Sunday, October 27

8:30–10:30 AM  |  Fourth Plenary: The Climate Crisis

• Kate Aronoff, “Market Failure, Market Solution: How Neoliberalism Gets the Climate Crisis Wrong”
• Gareth Dale, “Marx, Polanyi, and the Green New Deal”
• Andreas Novy, "The Spatiality of the Current Transformation: Lessons from The Great Transformation"
• Discussant: Nancy Fraser

​​​​​​11:00 AM–1:00 PM  |  Closing Plenary: Polanyi and Politics Today—Reform or Revolution?

Who is Karl Polanyi?

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was an Austro-Hungarian thinker whose work provided a path-breaking analysis of the origins and evolution of market societies. His approach to understanding the relationship between politics and the economy has proven influential in the development of numerous fields of study, including economic history, economic sociology, economic anthropology, and historical sociology. In addition to The Great Transformation (1944), he co-published the influential edited volume, Trade and Market in Early Empires (1957). Polanyi served as editor of Der Österreichische Volkswirt (“the Austrian Economist”), and taught at the Workers’ Education Association, Bennington College, and Columbia University. 

Today, Polanyi's powerful analytic framework and political project are more relevant than ever. The past decade has seen the rise of fiercely anti-democratic forces, the forced displacement of millions of people, proliferating threats of spectacular and intimate violence, troubled national and global economies marked by growing inequality, explosions of parochial hatred and insurgent racism, and a deepening planetary crisis as the uneven impact of climate change intensifies. The Great Transformation—both in the stunning clarity of its vision and in the sweeping scale of its synthesis—offers an instructive model of the kind of scholarship so urgently needed today: scholarship that can confront the cascading fractures and synergies that enliven human inequity and endanger our world, and also chart ways past them.

Why Bennington College?

In July 1940, the President of Bennington College, Robert Leigh, wrote to the publisher W.W. Norton, asking him to forward the names of refugee scholars who had been forced to leave Europe, and who might benefit from spending a year at Bennington as “honorary fellows of the college.” Later that week, the organizational theorist Peter Drucker, himself a refugee, contacted Leigh with a request to bring a little-known scholar from Vienna to the college. Karl Polanyi arrived at Bennington in early Fall 1940 for a short-term lectureship, which was subsequently extended with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, allowing him to remain until 1943. While in residence, Polanyi gave a series of public lectures that offered a bold new interpretation of what had gone wrong as the world fell into unprecedented turmoil. Soon Polanyi was hard at work transforming these early thoughts into what became his magnum opus, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. As the war and the manuscript both neared completion in 1944, Polanyi left the final revisions in the hands of colleagues at Bennington College as he rushed back to Europe to put his stunning synthesis to work rebuilding the world.

Read more about Polanyi's time at Bennington here.