INTRODUCTION

Polanyi is not thought of as a theorist of fascism. And yet he was. A defining purpose of The Great Transformation ([1944] 2001), after all, was to explore the aetiology of interwar fascism. It argued that an economic-liberal policy regime – the godmother of today’s neoliberalism – was a crucial determinant of the interwar crisis as a whole, including two world wars, the Great Depression and fascism. War, the depression, and fascism, Polanyi maintained, were not causally discrete phenomena that just happened to coincide in the early twentieth century. They were symptoms of a deeper interconnected social emergency, a crisis of liberal civilization. For what was fascism? It was the last throw of the dice by embattled capitalist elites as they confronted working-class revolt and a succession of crises that culminated in the Great Depression. And what was the Great Depression? It was the outcome of a series of “disruptive strains” – Polanyi’s term for the tensions and imbalances that had arisen as social fall-out from the operation of the gold standard. And what was the gold standard? It was the global institutional embodiment of free market economics. And where did free market economics come from? From the pens of Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. Hence Polanyi’s celebrated dictum: “In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England”.

Polanyi’s attempts to theorize fascism were not located in a political vacuum. In the context of global economic crisis and a widespread questioning of the future of capitalism, Polanyi closely followed debates, on left as well as right, on the morphology and trajectory of fascism. By the time his first significant essay on the topic, “The Essence of Fascism”, appeared in 1936, the question of fascism – its nature and how to combat it – had become a central concern for the left. In both the communist and social-democratic camps, the setbacks suffered by working-class movements across Europe during the 1930s at the hands of fascist and authoritarian rightist regimes forced a reckoning with the inadequate strategies of the past.

In this chapter we provide an exposition of Polanyi’s theory of fascism as it evolved against this backdrop.