by Murray N. Rothbard
[This critique was written as a private memo to the Volker Fund in June 1961. It has never been published. It is posted here September 17, 2004.]
Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is a farrago of confusions, absurdities, fallacies, and distorted attacks on the free market. The temptation is to engage in almost a line-by-line critique. I will abjure this to first set out some of the basic philosophic and economic flaws, before going into some of the detailed criticisms.
One basic philosophic flaw in Polanyi is a common defect of modern intellectuals÷a defect which has been rampant since Rousseau and the Romantic Movement: Worship of the Primitive. At one point, (in dealing with the Kaffirs), Polanyi actually uses the maudlin phrase "noble savage," but this idea permeates the book. (For an excellent discussion of Rousseau, primitivism, and the roman-tic movement, see Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism.) Modern Rousseauism received a major impetus from the cultural anthropologists, such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, and the like (many of whom were Communists, and the remainder highly left-wing), who went eagerly to visit the existing primitive tribes, and reported back about the gay, happy life of Tribe X which had no private property and no inhibitions imposed by monogamous marriage.
There are several things to be said about this worship of the primitive. First, it is absolutely illegitimate to do, as Polanyi does, and infer the history of pre-Western civilization from analysis of existing primitive tribes. Let us never forget that the existing primitive tribes are precisely the ones that didn't progress÷that remained in their primitive state. To infer from observing them that this is the way our ancestors behaved is nonsense÷and apt to be the reverse of the truth, for our ancestors presumably behaved in ways which quickly advanced them beyond the primitive stage thousands of years ago. To scoff, therefore, at the idea that our ancestors among primitive tribes engaged in barter, then in monetary exchange, etc., on the basis of the magic and games indulged in by present-day primitives, is a blunder of the highest order.
[...]
To sum up: I have read few books in my time that have been more vicious or more fallacious.
[rest at <http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1607>]