The Protective Response and the Evolution of the Capitalist State

In his foreword to the new edition of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, from which we excerpted the epigraph above, Stiglitz asserts that: economic science and economic history have come to recognize the validity of Polanyi’s key contentions. But public policy — particularly as reflected in the Washington consensus doctrines concerning how the developing world and the economies in transition should make their great transformations — seems all too often not to have done so. One may share Stiglitz’s scorn for the Washington consensus policy regime without accepting his confidence that economic science has come to accept Polanyi’s arguments in key regards. We share Stiglitz’s enthusiasm with regard to the continuing relevance of Polanyi’s work, indeed its mounting relevance in this era of the neoliberal Great Capitalist Restoration.