Course Materials

The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi and the making of market society

“Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

Lectures

  1. What Is the Great Transformation? The making of your civilization 29 slides · PDF
  2. Aristotle and Aquinas The foundations of medieval economic thought 14 slides · PDF
  3. Economic Life Before the Great Transformation Manors, serfdom, guilds, and medieval cities 16 slides · PDF
  4. The Nature of Money How money arises, and what makes a good money 9 slides · PDF
  5. The Protestant Ethic Max Weber on the spirit of capitalism 35 slides · PDF
  6. Adam Smith The foundation of modern economics 43 slides · PDF
  7. The Industrial Revolution 1760–1900 15 slides · PDF
  8. Karl Marx Dialectical materialism and the critique of capitalism 34 slides · PDF
  9. False Dawn John Gray on the delusions of global capitalism 35 slides · PDF