At Home Abroad, Abroad at Home: International Liberalisation and Domestic Stability in the New World Economy

The two most enduring contemporaneous accounts of the inter-war period are E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The perspectives from which the two authors wrote could barely have differed more. Carr is best remembered today for pulverizing the idealist foundations of liberal internationalism, and thereby preparing the ground for the postwar ascendancy of realist discourse in the academic study of international relations. Polanyi;s intellectual pedigree and legacy are more complex. He delivered a searing indictment of the social destructiveness of unregulated market forces and the moral mutilation he attributed to market rationality. For these views, Polanyi was later adopted by the New Left. However, he anchored his critique in an organic conception of society that was, in point of fact, deeply conservative in the traditionalist sense of that term.