‘The greatest thinker you’ve never heard of’: expert who explained Hitler’s rise is finally in the spotlight

After fleeing Hitler, brilliant Jewish economist Karl Polanyi was never welcomed by the British. Now, for the first time in 80 years, his masterwork The Great Transformation has been published in the UK

In 1944, the groundbreaking political economist Karl Polanyi published his radical magnum opus, The Great Transformation. In it, he accused influential liberal economists, including David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, of commodifying human beings and the environment in the name of the free market.

Their Industrial Age ideas, he argued, ushered in the barbarism and poverty that came with 19th-century globalisation and unfettered capitalism, and this led, in the 20th century, to far-right and far-left backlashes against the movements of socialism, individualism and liberalism that followed.