The Great Transformation

by Karl Polanyi

  That system developed in leaps and bounds; it engulfed space and time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914, every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations, physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations, were comprised in it. A new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career, only this time the movement was on a purely material level.

  Yet simultaneously a countermovement was on foot. This was more than the usual defensive behavior of a society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.

  Robert Owen’s was a true insight: market economy if left to evolve according to its own laws would create great and permanent evils.

  Production is interaction of man and nature; if this process is to be organized through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then man and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, that is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale.

  Such precisely was the arrangement under a market system. Man under the name of labor, nature under the name of land, were made available for sale; the use of labor power could be universally bought and sold at a price called wages, and the use of land could be negotiated for a price called rent. There was a market in labor as well as in land, and supply and demand in either was regulated by the height of wages and rents, respectively; the fiction that labor and land were produced for sale was consistently upheld. Capital invested in the various combinations of labor and land could thus flow from one branch of production to another, as was required for an automatic levelling of earnings in the various branches.

  But, while production could theoretically be organized in this way, the commodity fiction disregarded the fact that leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them. Accordingly, the countermove consisted in checking the action of the market in respect to the factors of production, labor, and land. This was the main function of interventionism.

  Productive organization also was threatened from the same quarter. The danger was to the single enterprise—industrial, agricultural, or commercial insofar as it was affected by changes in the price level. For under a market system, if prices fell, business was impaired; unless all elements of cost fell proportionately, “going concerns” were forced to liquidate, while the fall in prices might have been due not to a general fall in costs, but merely to the manner in which the monetary system was organized. Actually, as we shall see, such was often the case under a self-regulating market.

  Purchasing power is, in principle, here supplied and regulated by the action of the market itself; this is meant when we say that money is a commodity the amount of which is controlled by the supply and demand of the goods which happen to function as money—the well-known classical theory of money. According to this doctrine, money is only another name for a commodity used in exchange more often than another, and which is therefore acquired mainly in order to facilitate exchange. Whether hides, oxen, shells, or gold are used to this end is immaterial; the value of the objects functioning as money is determined as if they were sought only for their usefulness in regard to nutrition, clothing, ornaments, or other purposes. If gold happens to be used as money, its value, amount, and movements are governed by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. Any other means of exchange would involve the creating of currency outside the market, the act of its creation—whether by banks or government—constituting an interference with the self-regulation of the market. The crucial point is that goods used as money are not different from other commodities; that their supply and demand is regulated by the market like that of other commodities; and that consequently all notions investing money with any other character than that of a commodity being used as a means of indirect exchange are inherently false. It follows also that if gold is used as money, banknotes, if such exist, must represent gold. It was in accordance with this doctrine that the Ricardian school wished to organize the supply of currency by the Bank of England. Indeed, no other method was conceivable which would keep the monetary system from being “interfered” with by the state, and thus safeguard the self-regulation of the market.

  Therefore, in respect to business a very similar situation existed as in respect to the natural and human substance of society. The self-regulating market was a threat to them all, and for essentially similar reasons. And if factory legislation and social laws were required to protect industrial man from the implications of the commodity fiction in regard to labor power, if land laws and agrarian tariffs were called into being by the necessity of protecting natural resources and the culture of the countryside against the implications of the commodity fiction in respect to them, it was equally true that central banking and the management of the monetary system were needed to keep manufactures and other productive enterprises safe from the harm involved in the commodity fiction as applied to money. Paradoxically enough, not human beings and natural resources only but also the organization of capitalistic production itself had to be sheltered from the devastating effects of a self-regulating market.

  Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market—primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes—and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.

  The emphasis on class is important. The services to society performed by the landed, the middle, and the working classes shaped the whole social history of the nineteenth century. Their part was cut out for them by their availability for the discharge of various functions that derived from the total situation of society. The middle classes were the bearers of the nascent market economy; their business interests ran, on the whole, parallel to the general interest in regard to production and employment; if business was flourishing, there was a chance of jobs for all and of rents for the owners; if markets were expanding, investments could be freely and readily made; if the trading community competed successfully with the foreigner, the currency was safe. On the other hand, the trading classes had no organ to sense the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits. The middle classes fulfilled their function by developing an all but sacramental belief in the universal beneficence of profits, although this disqualified them as the keepers of other interests as vital to a good life as the furtherance of production. Here lay the chance of those classes which were not engaged in applying expensive, complicated, or specific machines to production. Roughly, to the landed aristocracy and the peasantry fell the task of safeguarding the martial qualities of the nation which continued to depend largely on men and soil, while the laboring people to a smaller or greater extent, became representatives of the common human interests that had become homeless. But at one time or another, each social class stood, even if unconscio
usly, for interests wider than its own.

  By the turn of the nineteenth century—universal suffrage was now fairly general—the working class was an influential factor in the state; the trading classes, on the other hand, whose sway over the legislature went no longer unchallenged, became conscious of the political power involved in their leadership in industry. This peculiar localization of influence and power caused no trouble as long as the market system continued to function without great stress and strain; but when, for inherent reasons, this was no longer the case, and tensions between the social classes developed, society itself was endangered by the fact that the contending parties were making government and business, state and industry, respectively, their strongholds. Two vital functions of society—the political and the economic—were being used and abused as weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was out of such a perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century the fascist crisis sprang.

  From these two angles, then, we intend to outline the movement which shaped the social history of the nineteenth century. The one was given by the clash of the organizing principles of economic liberalism and social protection which led to deep-seated institutional strain; the other by the conflict of classes which, interacting with the first, turned crisis into catastrophe.

  C H A P T E R T W E L V E

  Birth of the Liberal Creed

  Economic liberalism was the organizing principle of society engaged in creating a market system. Born as a mere penchant for nonbureaucratic methods, it evolved into a veritable faith in man’s secular salvation through a self-regulating market. Such fanaticism was the result of the sudden aggravation of the task it found itself committed to: the magnitude of the sufferings that had to be inflicted on innocent persons as well as the vast scope of the interlocking changes involved in the establishment of the new order. The liberal creed assumed its evangelical fervor only in response to the needs of a fully deployed market economy.

  To antedate the policy of laissez-faire, as is often done, to the time when this catchword was first used in France in the middle of the eighteenth century would be entirely unhistorical; it can be safely said that not until two generations later was economic liberalism more than a spasmodic tendency. Only by the 1820s did it stand for the three classical tenets: that labor should find its price on the market; that the creation of money should be subject to an automatic mechanism; that goods should be free to flow from country to country without hindrance or preference; in short, for a labor market, the gold standard, and free trade.

  To credit François Quesnay with having envisaged such a state of affairs would be little short of fantastic. All that the Physiocrats demanded in a mercantilistic world was the free export of grain in order to ensure a better income to farmers, tenants, and landlords. For the rest their ordre naturel was no more than a directive principle for the regulation of industry and agriculture by a supposedly all-powerful and omniscient government. Quesnay’s Maximes were intended to provide such a government with the viewpoints needed to translate into practical policy the principles of the Tableau on the basis of statistical data which he offered to have furnished periodically. The idea of a self-regulating system of markets had never as much as entered his mind.

  In England, too, laissez-faire was interpreted narrowly; it meant freedom from regulation in production; trade was not comprised. Cotton manufactures, the marvel of the time, had grown from insignificance into the leading export industry of the country—yet the import of printed cottons remained forbidden by positive statute. Notwithstanding the traditional monopoly of the home market an export bounty for calico or muslin was granted. Protectionism was so ingrained that Manchester cotton manufacturers demanded, in 1800, the prohibition of the export of yarn, though they were conscious of the fact that this meant loss of business to them. An act passed in 1791 extended the penalties for the export of tools used in manufacturing cotton goods to the export of models or specifications. The free-trade origins of the cotton industry are a myth. Freedom from regulation in the sphere of production was all the industry wanted; freedom in the sphere of exchange was still deemed a danger.

  One might suppose that freedom of production would naturally spread from the purely technological field to that of the employment of labor. However, only comparatively late did Manchester raise the demand for free labor. The cotton industry had never been subject to the Statute of Artificers and was consequently not hampered either by yearly wage assessments or by rules of apprenticeship. The Old Poor Law, on the other hand, to which latter-day liberals so fiercely objected, was a help to the manufacturers; it not only supplied them with parish apprentices, but also permitted them to divest themselves of responsibility towards their dismissed employees, thus throwing much of the burden of unemployment on public funds. Not even the Speenhamland system was at first unpopular with the cotton manufacturers; as long as the moral effect of allowances did not reduce the productive capacity of the laborer, the industry might have well regarded family endowment as a help in sustaining that reserve army of labour which was urgently required to meet the tremendous fluctuations of trade. At a time when employment in agriculture was still on a year’s term, it was of great importance that such a fund of mobile labor should be available to industry in periods of expansion. Hence the attacks of the manufacturers on the Act of Settlement which hampered the physical mobility of labor. Yet not before 1795 was the reform of that act carried—only to be replaced by more, not less, paternalism in regard to the Poor Law. Pauperism still remained the concern of squire and countryside; and even harsh critics of Speenhamland like Burke, Bentham, and Malthus regarded themselves less as representatives of industrial progress than as propounders of sound principles of rural administration.

  Not until the 1830s did economic liberalism burst forth as a crusading passion and laissez-faire become a militant creed. The manufacturing class was pressing for the amendment of the Poor Law, since it prevented the rise of an industrial working class which depended for its income on achievement. The magnitude of the venture implied in the creation of a free labor market now became apparent, as well as the extent of the misery to be inflicted on the victims of improvement. Accordingly, by the early 1830s a sharp change of mood was manifest. An 1817 reprint of Townsend’s Dissertation contained a preface in praise of the foresight with which the author had borne down on the Poor Laws and demanded their complete abandonment; but the editors warned of his “rash and precipitate” suggestion that outdoor relief to the poor should be abolished within so short a term as ten years. Ricardo’s Principles, which appeared in the same year, insisted on the necessity of abolishing the allowance system, but urged strongly that this should be done only very gradually. Pitt, a disciple of Adam Smith, had rejected such a course on account of the innocent suffering it would entail. And as late as 1829, Peel “doubted whether the allowance system could be safely removed otherwise than gradually.”* Yet after the political victory of the middle class, in 1832, the Poor Law Amendment Bill was carried in its most extreme form and rushed into effect without any period of grace. Laissez-faire had been catalyzed into a drive of uncompromising ferocity.

  A similar keying up of economic liberalism from academic interest to boundless activism occurred in the two other fields of industrial organization: currency and trade. In respect to both, laissez-faire waxed into a fervently held creed when the uselessness of any other but extreme solutions became apparent.

  The currency issued was first brought home to the English community in the form of a general rise in the cost of living. Between 1790 and 1815 prices doubled. Real wages fell and business was hit by a slump in foreign exchanges. Yet not until the 1825 panic did sound currency become a tenet of economic liberalism, i.e., only when Ricardian principles were already so deeply impressed on the minds of politicians and businessmen alike that the “standard” was maintained in spite of the enormous number of financial casualties. This was the beginning of that unshakable belief in the automatic ste
ering mechanism of the gold standard without which the market system could never have got under way.

  International free trade involved no less an act of faith. Its implications were entirely extravagant. It meant that England would depend for her food supply upon overseas sources; would sacrifice her agriculture, if necessary, and enter on a new form of life under which she would be part and parcel of some vaguely conceived world unity of the future: that this planetary community would have to be a peaceful one, or, if not, would have to be made safe for Great Britain by the power of the Navy; and that the English nation would face the prospects of continuous industrial dislocations in the firm belief in its superior inventive and productive ability. However, it was believed that if only the grain of all the world could flow freely to Britain, then her factories would be able to undersell all the world. Again, the measure of the determination needed was set by the magnitude of the proposition and the vastness of the risks involved in complete acceptance. Yet less than complete acceptance spelled certain ruin.

  The utopian springs of the dogma of laissez-faire are but incompletely understood as long as they are viewed separately. The three tenets—competitive labor market, automatic gold standard, and international free trade—formed one whole. The sacrifices involved in achieving any one of them were useless, if not worse, unless the other two were equally secured. It was everything or nothing.

  Anybody could see that the gold standard, for instance, meant danger of deadly deflation and, maybe, of fatal monetary stringency in a panic. The manufacturer could, therefore, hope to hold his own only if he was assured of an increasing scale of production at remunerative prices (in other words, only if wages fell at least in proportion to the general fall in prices, so as to allow the exploitation of an ever-expanding world market). Thus the Anti-Corn Law Bill of 1846 was the corollary of Peel’s Bank Act of 1844, and both assumed a laboring class which, since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, was forced to give its best under the threat of hunger, so that wages were regulated by the price of grain. The three great measures formed a coherent whole.