The Great Transformation The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz

This book, occasional hyperbole notwithstanding, presents a form of economics more nuanced and embedded in material life and social reality than that which is practiced in most of academia today. This form of economic thought, known as substantivism, suggests how economic activity can be understood as emerging from social practices based around material provisioning, and pre-exists the increasing domination of monetarised, market modes of exchanges from the mid-Nineteenth century onwards. If, as Polanyi suggested, mainstream economics had taken into account the relevance of anthropological and historical accounts of how households and communities (and not simply individuals) have engaged effectively in economic, 'provisioning' activities for millennia before the widespread adoption of monetarised market practices from the mid-Nineteenth century onwards. The substantivism of The Great Transformation suggests that conventional economic theory has 'inverted' reality, with social and human essences seen as subservient 'commodities' to be traded and exchanged within a market economy, and has lost sight of the insight that economic practices should serve social interests.