“One reason why thinking through Polanyi’s life is a rewarding exercise is that it enables us to think through the experience of reformist socialism, to explore a world that now appears marginal, even lost, and yet which only two or three generations ago was carving deep and distinctive tracks across the political and cultural landscape.”

“With this, Polanyi had arrived at the essence of fascism. It lay not in Spann’s utopia but in what it sought to obscure: the construction of an ultracapitalist regime dedicated to reducing workers to commodity-producing automata, for which their exclusion from the political sphere is a prerequisite.”

Read Gareth Dale’s introduction to KARL POLANYI: A LIFE ON THE LEFT!