In Search of a Means of Existence

Karl Polanyi is one of the most original economic thinkers of the 20th century, whose ideas remain sharp to this day. "In Search of a Means of Existence" is his last and in some sense final work, published posthumously; in it, he brings together decades of research in economic history and anthropology. At the center of the book is the fundamental thesis: the economy is not an autonomous sphere governed by universal market laws, but is always rooted in social, political, and cultural relations. Tracing the history of economic institutions from ancient Mesopotamia and archaic Greece to 19th-century capitalism, Polanyi shows that the self-regulating market is not an eternal given, but a historically conditioned and internally unstable experiment. For most of human history, the distribution of resources was carried out in other ways — through reciprocity and redistribution, rather than through the price mechanism. The book challenges the basic assumptions of neoclassical economics and offers a fundamentally different language for describing economic life — a language whose relevance only increases in the face of crises in the modern global market.