Here are two recommendations: an article and a web service. The article is a transcript of an address by Kari Polanyi Levitt's to the fifth annual conference of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy. It was published in the June 1995 issue of Monthly Review. It is available online through "Cognito" a full text search service that is currently available for free demonstration. To get the article go to: http://www.cognito.com/ and search for "Polanyi" Here are a few excerpts from the article: ..."It is the central argument of The Great Transformation that the liberal 'Utopia' of a generalized 'self-regulating' market is a prescription for disaster. 'Such an institution,' Polanyi wrote, '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. Stripped of social, cultural, and ecological support systems, he wrote, people will perish from hunger, pestilence, violence, and neglect.'" ..."In the Vienna of the 1920s, Polanyi challenged von Mises and Hayek to a debate on the feasibility of democratic socialism. At that time, Polanyi and Hayek were obscure and minor intellectual figures. The Great Transformation and Hayek's Road to Serfdom both appeared in 1944. In the course of the last twenty years, Hayek's neoliberal manifesto has attained global influence. It is said to be the bible of senior policy-makers from Washington to Prague." ..."Fantastic as it may seem--'Utopian' as Polanyi would have said--the policy prescriptions favored by the neo-utilitarian ideologues of our day are modeled on the glory days of nineteenth-century economic liberalism. The fourth quarter of the twentieth century has been described as the 'Age of Hayek,' in contradistinction to the third quarter as the 'Age of Keynes.' A reading of Hayek reveals a radical liberal vision of the economy as a structure 'arising without design from human interaction.' ..."Hayek's nineteenth-century liberal El Dorado... did not arise 'without design from human action.' As Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation, the liberal economic order was designed by the early English political economists and was instituted by the power of the state, which created 'free' labor markets to force workers to accept employment on conditions offered by the capitalists or go hungry--or worse, go to the poorhouse. Nor did the British state acquire the most extensive empire in all human history in a 'fit of absent mindedness.'" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Only in mediocre art does life unfold as fate." -- Michael Ignatieff Tom Walker knoWWare Communications http://mindlink.net/knowware/
