Continuing previous work on the power of ideas, this chapter frames developments since the publication of The Great Transformation in terms of the successive intellectual influence of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, and explores the historical possibility that a, if not the, critical intellectual influence in our time will be Karl Polanyi’s. Surveying Polanyi’s Central European experience, reflections and writings from Budapest, Vienna and England, as well as brief visits to the United States, it focuses on the recently discovered Bennington Lectures on ‘The Present Age of Transformation’ delivered late in 1940. While the first three lectures anticipate The Great Transformation, the last two outline original approaches to America and Russia. The chapter concludes with hypothetical reflections of Karl Polanyi on the future of humankind. We roll back the canvas of history to the advent of the machine age 200 years ago and contemplate what Polanyi would have to say on the current state of world affairs. We tell him of the successes of his intellectual adversary Mises and ask him how he might conceive of a socialist response to the challenges facing humanity in our own age of transformation.

The concluding chapter explores new directions for research and possibilities of using the theory of anchoring. This part of the monograph opens a discussion about policy and practical implications of anchoring. It underlines the particular importance of the first period of migration, with first encounters and exchanges providing significant framing experiences. The book also highlights the importance of cognitive anchors (both adaptive and adverse) which may be changed when reflected upon by individuals willing to learn, especially when adequately supported. Possible further applications are proposed, based on the principles of cognitive and behavioural therapy to assist migrants in adaptation and settling in the sense of establishing themselves in the receiving society and better satisfying their needs of safety and security. The chapter claims that the theoretical and practical significance of the concept of anchoring seems to go beyond migration studies. This approach might be useful for theorising the recovery of individuals’ safety and stability after major changes and crises, as well as analysing the wider problem of settling and adaptation to life in the complex and changeable world, particularly in the case of those who have experienced traumatic life changes and/or remain not grounded or socially connected, such as homeless people.

This chapter discusses the theoretical and historical relationship between Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, and Giovanni Arrighi’s 1994 work, The Long Twentieth Century. Arrighi was already acquainted with Polanyi’s works in the 1970s in his critical inspection of the concept of imperialism. But then, he rediscovered Polanyi in the discussion of globalisation around the turn of the twentieth century, after becoming conscious of the vital importance of Fernand Braudel’s perspective and of economic sociology for understanding historical capitalism. He put Polanyi’s discussion of the rise and decline of British hegemony in the longer historical perspective and in a more complex structure of the world-systems theory, and investigated it in connection to the American hegemony. In this way, Arrighi has accomplished a very unique theoretical contribution to the globalised world of our age.

Polanyi spoke of the commodification of money, and this chapter focuses on how interest-bearing debt became the major dynamic, also contributing to the commodification of land and labor. By the late third millennium BC the main way to obtain manual labor was to lend money and make debtors work off their debts as an antichretic interest charge. Personal debt became the lever for creditors to pry land out of the clan-based tenure system, mainly for sale under economic duress. Debtors who pledged their crop or land rights usually ended up forfeiting them. This alienation catalyzed the ‘commodification’ of land. By tracing these debt dynamics, the new economic archaeology is compatible with Polanyi’s intuitions and recognition that market relations are embedded in social relations, and extends his analysis in tracing how administered pricing and monetary valuations created the preconditions for market exchange. The earliest markets, credit and land tenure systems were regulated. Administered pricing was a precondition for creating weights, measures and price equivalencies to enable market exchange to evolve more flexibly.

Chapter 6 aims to synthesise crucial points about anchoring which emerge from the SAST research with Ukrainian migrants in Poland and Polish migrants in the UK, to develop a framework allowing a better understanding of the processes of adaptation and settling. In order to outline key elements useful for building a general model of migrants’ anchoring, it concentrates on commonalities observed across both groups, in contrast to the previous chapters focusing on Polish migrants in the UK and Ukrainian migrants in Poland as separate case studies to highlight their specifics and contextual insights. This chapter showed the centrality of the need for security and stability. The proposed model of anchoring outlines layers of anchoring, from external footholds related to the legal and institutional frameworks and work opportunities, through more complex anchors embedded in social relations, to deeper internal anchors, such as constructed familiarity and closeness. Chapter 6 highlights the significance of practices and spaces for anchoring as well as the importance of cognitive, emotional and spiritual anchoring. This part of the monograph shows the dynamics of anchoring and the uneven and relational character of settling. It sheds light on the flexibility and reversibility of anchoring, including the processes of re-anchoring or un-anchoring (e.g. through selling houses in the country of origin, relocating loved ones, changing names). It argues that although the migrants were active agents endeavouring to establish themselves and reach a relative state of safety and stability, they were also constrained by their existing anchors, their limited resources and societal structures.q

Having invoked ‘the people’ as the inalienable source of legitimacy in democracy, this chapter offers a snapshot of the politics of the British workers’ movements in the nineteenth century. This is the context, arguably, in which the modern democratic conception of ‘the people’ is constructed. E. P. Thompson’s (1968) The Making of the English Working Class is pivotal to this chapter. It is here that a theory of class as concrete collective experience rather than statistical generalization is set out. Rehabilitating class is a crucial, though no doubt contestable, aspect of the analysis of populism offered in this book. In broad terms, the conceptualization of class offered here is ‘cultural’ rather than ‘economic’ in origins and nature. I place the two terms in scare quotes to indicate scepticism about this divide. As Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin remark of this division with regard to current understandings of populism, ‘this binary debate is extremely unhelpful: real life never really works like this’. On the idea of working-class identity, I eschew both essentialist and statistical definitions and align my thinking with Thompson’s celebrated concept of class not ‘as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something that in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships’. This perspective allows me to reconstruct the struggles for universal enfranchisement in nineteenth-century Britain as historically constituting the linkages between democracy, working-class identity and populism.

This chapter outlines key arguments around the nature of capitalism and its relationship with patriarchy and other forms of structural inequality. It begins by outlining the changing nature of capitalism and the liberal and economic theories that support it, before showing how they are challenged by women-centred feminist perspectives: these expose the idea of human independence as a myth and reveal the economic importance of the unpaid work that has traditionally been done by women. The chapter develops this discussion to highlight the limitations of some initiatives that claim to ‘empower’ girls and women in the global south while also benefiting the global capitalist economy; these initiatives include micro-credit projects and Nike’s Girl Effect. The chapter concludes that the needs of the majority of women will not be met in a global economy that is primarily based on the pursuit of profit, and that is therefore unable to solve the climate emergency it has created.

In the conclusion, we return to Raymond Williams’s conception of democracy as a political culture born of collective working-class struggle and experience. Just as Williams looked at Britain in the 1950s as a place where a new wave of popular democratization was both possible and necessary, so under current conditions it is possible to see populism as a potential catalyst rather than a danger to democratic culture in a radical sense. In his later writings from the 1980s, Williams bore witness to the early phase of neoliberalization in the UK under Margaret Thatcher. He noted how the consumerist paradigm marked a withdrawal from collective concerns into the limited sphere of the individual or family home. Returning to the present moment in UK politics, the historic defeat of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election is ascribed to the party’s increasing distance from its traditional working-class constituency. The populist appeal to ‘get Brexit done’ allowed Boris Johnson to amass a Conservative majority in the UK parliament undreamed of two and a half years earlier when Theresa May called a mid-term election. The way for Labour to return from the political wilderness, it is proposed, it to see populism for what it truly is, namely a demand by the working class that the political establishment make good on the historical promise of modern democracy. This must involve, first and foremost, democratization of the workplace, education, healthcare and all other vital social sectors and organizations.