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“ ”In Polanyi’s view the fascist impulse — to protect society from the market by sacrificing human freedom — was universal, but local contingencies determined where fascist regimes were successful in taking power.
About Karl Polanyi
Karl Paul Polanyi (October 25, 1886 – April 23, 1964) was a Hungarian-American economic historian, economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Karl Polanyi
Yet the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals’ obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.
Freedom’s utter frustration in fascism is, indeed, the inevitable result of the liberal philosophy, which claims that power and compulsion are evil, that freedom demands their absence from a human community. No such thing is possible; in a complex society this becomes apparent. This leaves no alternative but either to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and deny the reality of society, or to accept that reality and reject the idea of freedom. The first is the liberal’s conclusion; the latter the fascist’s.
The congenital weakness of nineteenth century society was not that it was industrial but that it was a market society. Industrial civilization will continue to exist when the Utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory.