Saturday, November 8, 2014

Articles from The University of Warrick, UK

I received a note recently from the University of Warrick, UK, asking me to provide a link to one of their journal articles, which introduces an unknown Roman writer named Bryson Arabus. The link to that article follows:

Bryson Arabus - Who was he?

While looking over the newsevents/features section of the University's website,  I found an interesting article marking the seventieth anniversary of the book, The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, the well known economic historian. Polanyi's work sought a middle ground between the political and social philosophy of Hayek and the economic philosophy of Keynes by proposing that society was a fusion between the nation state and market economy, rather than existing in a form dominated by one or the other. Polanyi believed that a "market society" was invented by man and developed organically as a result of human behavior.

Market economies were created the first time two human beings made a trade of equal value, dating back to the time when man became man. The social layer was added during antiquity when the human population density was great enough to foster social classes, a division of labor, and a government designed to enforce property rights. Because man evolved society to meet the needs of a large group, his sense of capitalism and the function of markets evolved in tandem with it. The Athenian agora was no primitive cousin of today's market economy. It was just a smaller version.

A link to the Polanyi article is below;

Karl Polanyi

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