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As a personal testimonial, Polanyi's Great Transformation was my 
passport to another world, a crucial vehicle out of the 
theoreticist training at the core of a US PhD program. For me the 
sustaining lesson is less the dominant motif (the `great 
transformation') but the background to the argument - the concept of 
the `social fabric' of economic society.  If anything, Polanyi's 
treatment of market society is impoverished (he makes too many 
concessions to the concept of `self-regulation' of the market), but 
his accessible book has nourished later toilers. 
 
The most pressing issue for economists would appear to be not the 
importance of the `market' in pre-market economies but the importance 
of the market in so-called market economies - the social fabric of the 
market economy, or what economic anthropologists call, in their 
excruciating conceptualisations and prose, `embeddedness'. The 
problem can be simply grasped by confronting that the concept `the 
market' is an inadequate descriptor.  We need to put flesh on it. 
(One of the desirable by-products is a feeling for `comparative 
capitalisms', so that we as economists aren't bound to try to explain 
the Japanese (etc) success in terms of differential levels of 
economic variables (savings ratios, size of government, etc)). 
 
Some examples? John Lie's article in Politics and Society 21,3,1993 
(The Social Origins of Market Society in England) is a useful vehicle 
for confronting the different social structures and balance of forces 
around different market forms. 
The debate, centred on New Left Review, on whether Britain ever 
became truly `capitalist', is another useful vehicle for getting away 
from ideal type abstractions to flesh and blood historically existing 
capitalist economies. 
For Americans, for which there is substantial propaganda apparatus 
trumpeting a purist market model (Australians are subject to such 
propaganda on a daily basis), the role of not merely the military 
industrial complex but the military itself in influencing the 
character, location and timing of industrial development provides a 
nice little antithesis to any notions of purism (vide Ann Markusen et 
al, The Rise of the Gunbelt). 
As for wage labour, labour history and labour law (vide Atleson's 
Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, Forbath's Law and the 
Shaping of the American Labor Movement, etc) are more instructive on 
the complex and continuous shaping of the character of wage labour 
than any grand abstractions as to `commodification'.  etc. etc. 
 
>From this perspective, the whole corpus of neoclassical economics (the 
Walrasian strand in particular) is a diversion from the main game. But 
Marshall is also heavily to blame, and his institutional victory over 
the Historical School (Cunningham in particular) was a victory for 
entombing Polanyi-type perspectives and keeping fresh impressionable 
young minds from being exposed to such dangerous ideas. 
 
The lessons from Polanyi are not that the post-'Transformation' 
economy can thankfully  be analysed purist terms, least of all in 
general equilibrium terms. The lessons are in analysing how the 
market economy is socially/politically/culturally/ embedded; in 
particular, that history is not the gradual but inevitable triumph of 
market rationality over `excrescences'.  What economists from Smith 
downwards want to see as aberrations aren't going to go away (a good 
example being the persistence of divergences from the so-called `free 
trade' ideal) and they need to be analysed as something other than 
the dead hand of the past. 
 
Fortunately, the history of economic thought encompasses more than 
the history of economic theory. This debate on Polanyi is far more 
instructive than multiple years of the core syllabus of 
English-language economics, and the earlier one's students get 
exposed to such stuff the better. 
 
One contribution to the specific debate: I don't know why Anthony 
Brewer is so antagonistic to the  `conscious transformation of 
institutions'.  It's a losing argument. The historical record is 
replete with pervasive and assertive (and substantially successful) 
strategic interventions and counter-interventions, which blend 
organically with the `unconscious' dimension of structural evolution. 
 History does not happen purely by stealth. 
 
Evan Jones 
Economics, Sydney University 
 
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