The Livelihood of Man

Translation from English by Alla Belykh, scientifically edited by Andrei Belykh. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2026. – 144 p.

ISBN 978-5-93255-720-4

Karl Polanyi is one of the major figures of twentieth century social science research, whose ideas remain as relevant as ever. The Livelihood of Man is his final and, in a sense, culminating work, published posthumously: in it, he brings together decades of research in economic history and anthropology.

At the heart of the book lies a fundamental thesis: the economy is not an autonomous sphere subject to universal market laws, but is always rooted in social, political, and cultural relations. Tracing the history of economic institutions from ancient Mesopotamia and archaic Greece to nineteenth-century capitalism, Polanyi demonstrates that the self-regulating market is not an eternal given, but a historically conditioned and inherently unstable experiment. For most of human history, the allocation of resources took place through other means – through reciprocity and redistribution, rather than through the price mechanism.

The book challenges the basic assumptions of neoclassical economics and offers a fundamentally different language for describing economic life – a language whose relevance is only growing in the face of the crises of the modern global market.