Introduction

Polanyi's contribution to the history of economic thought is not so much as a theorist of value but as a conceptual tool-maker and tool-user. “The study of the shifting place occupied by the economy in society,” he noted (Polanyi 1957b: 250), is “no other than the study of the manner in which the economic process is instituted at different times and places. This requires a special tool box.” Polanyi the “tool-user” is the historian, the author of The Great Transformation (1944), his classic study of the “shifting place” occupied by the economy in nineteenth-century England. Polanyi the “tool-maker” is the concept-builder who fills his toolbox with general concepts gathered from single-case studies, refines them with logical distinctions of the sharpest kind, and orders them neatly in the rows and columns of his conceptual tool-box.

We first meet Polanyi the tool-maker in Chapter 4 of The Great Transformation where his four general principles of behavior – reciprocity, redistribution, householding, and money-making – are distinguished by social relationships and institutional pattern. His concept of “reciprocity,” a process embedded in family and kinship, and instituted by symmetrically arranged groupings, was inspired by Thurnwald's (1916) ethnographic study of dual organization among the Banaro of Papua New Guinea; his concept of redistribution was inspired by Malinowski's (1922) study of the Trobriand Islands; and his concept of householding – “the etymon of the word ‘economy’” (Polanyi 2001: 55) – comes from Aristotle.