Henry Farrell: belief

Transcript context

…Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation — what was it, if anything, that he got wrong in there? It’s a brilliant book. It’s had massive influence on Dani Rodrik, I think yourself, many other people. Does it have a flaw? It has many flaws. I think it’s a really interesting, good book that everybody ought to read. I also think that people ought to read Schumpeter, the book on the Right that people need to read is Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. But I would say that Polanyi is a very, very . . . There are two things that are fuzzy in it. First of all is his ideal alternative, which is based on a kind of specifically Christian notion of socialism that I think he derives from people like Tawney, which is very, very hard to create in the modern era. So there’s a lot of pretty overt nostalgia for a previous, almost quasi-medieval sense of organic connection between society and economy, which I think simply cannot be reestablished under liberal conditions. And the other thing that, of course, is very, very vague and wafty in Polanyi is how it is that “society” reacts against the market, reacts against these depredations of the marketplace’s double movement that he talks about. Personally, I tend not to believe in big abstractions such as society as explanations or as social causes. I think that he captures something real. And if you want, alternatively, to say what Polanyi gets right, I think that there is something that can be said very plausibly about the ways in which many of the aspects of Trump are, alternatively, what we see happening with people like Orban and Kaczynski in Central and Eastern Europe, that these can be explained as being reactions against overly harsh market forces of one sort or another. But the specific micromechanics, which it happens are really, really important, and we still haven’t really figured out what those micromechanics are. And trying to figure out how to create a better society is really going to force us to look at this much more specifically than a Polanyian framework would allow us to do. Who or what will replace labor unions as the offsetting or special-interest group to oppose capitalism or capitalists? Can we really count on the urban professionals? Aren’t they a bunch of spoiled brats?…

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