The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith’s “simple and natural liberty” compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair.
― Karl Polanyi
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The economy as an instituted process of interaction serving the satisfaction of material wants forms a vital part of every human community. Without an economy in this sense, no society could exist for any length of time.
― Karl Polanyi
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The nineteenth century gave birth to two sets of events of a very different order of magnitude: the machine age, a development of millennial range; and the market system, an initial adjustment to that development.
― Karl Polanyi
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At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people
― Karl Polanyi
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The Fascist system has to carry on persistently the task begun by the Fascist Movement: the destruction of the democratic parties, organisations, and institutions in society. Fascism must then proceed to attempt to change the nature of human consciousness itself.
― Karl Polanyi
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Anthropologically, money should be defined as a semantic system, broadly similar to language; writing, or weights and measures. These systems differ mainly in the purposes served and the signs employed. Language and writing serve the purpose of the communication of ideas, weights and measures that of quantitative physical relationship. As to signs, language uses oral sounds; writing employs ideograms or visual characters; weights and measures, on the other hand, use physical objects as the basis of symbols.
― Karl Polanyi
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