AN UPDATE ON JOURNALS WORTH READING

Almost ten years ago. I posted about intellectual journals worth reading. As a Xmas bonus I thought it useful to repost it (with a few titles deleted since they no longer operate). I started with a question about which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked. This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 

It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular”. From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a leftist E-mag which I have grown to appreciate – one of the few to which I subscribe

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian. It makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts. Not one I now follow
Los Angeles Review of Books; relatively new journal whose writing occasionally grates 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE great UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960. Also one to which I subscribe 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists

The Marginalian; an interesting cultural journal which I no longer follow – being a bit too predictable  

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Yorker; impressive US writing which I’ve been tempted to subscribe to
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics  and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere.

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope. But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Why Most Academics Write So Badly

I had wanted to say something positive about the beauty of the English language. Instead, I found myself having to wade through the inpenetrable prose of academics who seem to have the greatest difficulty in expressing themselves – the worst examples being -

Language and Power, Norman Fairclough (2019) being far too theoretical
Naming and Framing – the power of words across, disciplines, domains and modalities 

Viktor Smith (2021) far too academic and features too many bibliographical references
The Politics of Language David Beaver and Jason Stanley (2023) too long-winded 

– at 500 pp
Public policy writing that matters David Christinger (2017) as too simplistic
Beyond Public Policy – a public action language approach  Peter Spink (2019) is the only 

text containing more acceptable language

The saving grace is a German trying to make sense of the language of the Nazi regime viz The Language of the Third Reich Victor Klemperer (1946)

I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s book - The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to good writing (2014) which asks -

Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it. I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about. 

The “curse of knowledge” is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail……. 

This is good stuff and what follows echoes exactly what my own draft said all these years ago -

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth: Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you are guaranteed to confuse them. A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them. 

The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself, 

ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. 

If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by that?" or 

"How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who wrote this crap?" The form in 

which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they 

can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to 

write as on how to revise.

Steven Pinker is an eminent psychologist and has a good interview on the book in the current Slate Magazine. My only quibble is with his title – there are a lot of style books out there but I don’t think that’s what he’s actually talking about. He seems rather to be addressing the more crucial issue of how we structure our thinking and present it so clearly that the reader or listener understands and is actually motivated to do something with the insights…..

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language”  Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – bit it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

My own Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power looks at more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform which have this effect and offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions.

And the Plain English website is the other source I would recommend. It contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards. Academics do need to have a read of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly – how to succeed in the social sciences (2013) or have a look at On Writing Well W Zinsser (1976)

Other Relevant Posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/does-being-outsider-improve-quality-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-write-well.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/10/writing-as-power.html

MORE READING ON THE SUBJECT

Another four books this time – starting with some classics 

from the 1980s The Forward March of Labour Halted? ed M Jaques 

and Ed Mulhern (1981)

perhaps the most important contribution of the 1980sPolitics for a Rational Left – political writing 1977-1988 Eric 

Hobsbawm (1989)
The grand old man of historical writing reproduces some of 
his most important thoughts from the period
The Left in History – revolution and reform in 20th century politics 

Willie Thompson (1997)

The confident optimism of the early century was perhaps no longer present (in the era of Mutual Assured Destruction how could it be?) but the vista of indefinite technological and material progress was well reinstated. Cultural pessimists continuing to lament the good old days still existed but were on the defensive. A very popular and renowned text published in 1962 (and still in print), entitled What is History? by the historian of Soviet Russia and maverick pillar of the English academic establishment, E. H. Carr, eloquently conveyed the prevailing sense of advance. The theme of this short book is historiography, but Carr takes space to mock intellectuals who bemoan the alleged deterioration in civilised standards during the twentieth century, remarking that these gripes have more to do with the difficulties Oxbridge academics have in hiring servants than with the actual experiences of ordinary people. In addition he commits himself unreservedly to the idea of progress and longterm historical improvement. In this he reflected the elite and popular perception that the outcome and lessons of the Second World War had definitively overcome the causes of economic and political collapse that racked the world during the internar decades.

Leaving aside the question of the Soviet bloc, the era of the late 1950s, though presided over, paradoxically, by formally right-wing governments in all the major states, may certainly be viewed historically as the hour of the left. Carr, the more so because he was not identified with any specific political party or grouping, can be seen as representative of a general left-wing ethos. His text emphasises the left’s status as a historical current closely associated with modernity, and which would indeed be meaningless in any other circumstances. The left’s distinctive feature in the landscape of modernity however is its identification, rhetorically at least, with social improvement and regulation of economic structures in the interests of the masses.

If the values of the left implicitly dominated the language of politics in the 1950s, the language of the left came to dominate the discourse of politics and culture in the succeeding decade. The 1960s are traditionally regarded as the high tide of left-wing ascendancy in the public domain - era of hope or devil’s decade depending on your point of view. Alongside the established traditions of the left, which continued to flourish and spread up dll that point, emerged also a proliferation of new ones, influencing social levels hitherto scarcely touched by its outlook.

The subsequent collapse was by any historical standard astonishingly rapid. In just a little over two decades an entire modem culture appeared to wither and perish. Mighty institutions fell apart and expired almost without a struggle. Systems of belief were abandoned by millions practically overnight, even where, in governments or parties, institutional continuity and outward symbols were preserved. It is difficult to suggest any parallel in history: the only analogy which comes to mind is the uprooting of European paganism by Christianity - and that was a much more prolonged process, as well as the conquest of the old by the new rather than vice-versa. Barely two hundred years after the term first appeared in political usage it has begun to look as though ‘the left’, both culturally and institutionally, might well prove a transitory historical episode or even, in a breathtakingly ambitious formulation, that its catastrophe has marked ‘the end of history’.

This Is Only The Beginning – the making of a new left from 

anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn Michael Chessum (2022). 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this text is the reading list at the end!

Below are a limited set of recommendations on further reading, split up thematically and chronologically.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to give a full list of classic theoretical texts relating to the themes covered in the book, so I will focus instead on highlighting books which are more or less contemporary and designed for the general, as opposed to the academic, reader. So, from a theoretical perspective, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero, 2009) is short in length but essential reading. Keir Milburn’s Generation Left (Polity, 2019) is a concise and excellent summary of the radicalization of millennials. Hilary Wainwright’s A New Politics from the Left (Polity, 2018) is another concise bringing together of many years of thinking about a new left. Meanwhile, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (Verso, 2022), Jeremy Gilbert’s latest book (written alongside co-author Alex Williams), develops the theme of the ‘long 1990s’ touched on in our interview. Similarly, those interested in exploring debates around technology and the future of capitalism touched on in interviews should read Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (Penguin, 2015) and Clear Bright Future (Allen Lane, 2019); Aaron Bastani also released a book on the subject, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019). In and Against the State is not a contemporary text, but the new edition (Pluto, 2021) contains insightful and timely reflections from John McDonnell and the book’s editor Seth Wheeler.

There remains relatively little general literature on the student movement of 2010. Matt Myers’s oral history Student Revolt: Voices of the Austerity Generation (Pluto, 2017) remains the only authoritative account. Fightback: A Reader on the Winter of Protest (Open Democracy, 2011, edited by Dan Hancox) contains a diverse range of articles and essays from participants in the movement. For anyone interested in primary sources on the movement in a more global perspective, Springtime: The New Student Rebellions (Verso, 2011, edited by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri) is also worth a look. Those interested in the higher education policy landscape at the time would do well to read The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education (Pluto, 2013) by Andrew McGettigan and The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance (Pluto, 2011 – edited by Michael Bailey and Des Freeman).

For wider texts on the global revolts of 2011, there is much more available. In terms of the events themselves, the classic text is Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012). The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013) is David Graeber’s first-hand account of the start of the Occupy movement. The specific history of the UK anti-austerity movement is a much less covered area, however. By and large the sources that go into any kind of detail, or engage with the movement on its own terms, are to be found in academic journal articles, blogs and position statements from the time – though accounts of it can be found in passing in mainstream print (for instance, in Owen Jones’s This Land: The Story of a Movement, Allen Lane 2020; and Andrew Murray’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left, Verso, 2019). One of the reasons why Chapter 3 is the longest chapter of this book is an attempt to fill some of these holes in the literature – though much of that work remains undone.

There are no shortage of accounts of the rise of the new Labour left and the Corbyn Project, though the vast majority of these are focussed on the high politics of the moment rather than the broader picture behind it. Two accounts of the Labour left’s rise, by Owen Jones and Andrew Murray, are already listed above. Alex Nunn’s The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power (OR Books, 2018) remains a good inside story of the campaign. For a less involved journalistic take, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (Vintage, 2020) gives a detailed and entertaining court history. David Kogan’s Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party (Bloomsbury, 2019) also provides an outsider’s perspective, including a great deal of detail and historical background.

There are a wealth of texts on the general history of the Labour Party and the Labour left, but two recent titles in particular are worth mentioning. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys’s Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn (Verso, 2020) is an unmissable account. So too is Simon Hannah’s A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left (Pluto, 2018), which covers a longer chronology and is written from a more critical and politically engaged perspective.

Finally, there are a number of forthcoming books which should be mentioned because they relate to key themes that this book contains and are written by people who feature as protagonists in this book. These include Ash Sarkar’s debut book and take on the culture war, Minority Rule, published by Bloomsbury; Owen Jones’s The Alternative and How We Built It, published by Penguin, which may cover some of the same ground as this book; James Schneider’s Our Bloc: How We Win, a strategic manifesto for the British left published by Verso; and James Meadway’s Pandemic Capitalism, also with Verso.

More Reading about Socialism

Four more to whet your appetite - 

Towards Socialism ed Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (NLR 1965)

An amazing collection of essays from some of the original thinkers of the 1960s – including Anderson, Balogh, Blackburn, Coates, Crossman, Gorz, Nairn, Titmus, Westergaard and Williams

Arguments for Socialism Cockshott and Zackariah (2012)
a series of fairly hard-left essays. Not recommended 

Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie

Mudge (2018) – from the Intro

Insofar as left parties are checks on plutocracy, they are also lynchpins of democracy writ large. Without left parties, in other words, democracy is in trouble. Indeed, standard theories in historical political economy—in particular, those of Karl Polanyi—are quite clear on what we should expect of a world in which there is no longer any democratically imposed limit on the expansion of market society: the rise of an unpredictable populist and extremist politics marked by protection-seeking rebellions against the march toward homo economicus, grounded in a volatile mix of class politics, ethno-racial and nationalist resentments, and basic human responses to disruption, risk, uncertainty, anxiety, and boundless competition. Around the turn of the twentieth century the French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to this state of affairs; by the time of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), the fate of the whole Western political order hung in the balance.

There is now good reason to see the 1990s as the eve of a new Polanyian moment that is very much with us still. To my mind, if we are to grasp these troubling times, the story of the third ways requires a careful, analytical, historical retelling. This retelling needs to be clear-eyed about the self-justifications of third way spokespersons, but, at the same time, it should avoid the “logic of the trial”—in the phrasing of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—in which the more or less explicit question is where, or with whom, blame lies.7 Third wayers need to be situated and historicized, not frozen in time or rendered one-dimensional. If the aim is to shore up left representation not for parties’ sake but for democracy’s sake, then we need to grasp the forces that shape how left parties “see,” informing political debates rather than feeding the divorce of politics and reason.

To this end I adopt a historical, cross-national, and biographical approach focused on parties and their spokespeople. Essential here is the juxtaposition of third way leftism, and the people who gave it form and substance, with the leftisms (and spokespersons) who came before it. Starting from this premise, my analysis centers on left parties’ cultural infrastructure—that is, the organizations, social relations, persons, and devices through which parties organize how people see and understand the world. Instead of asking whether party change is “top-down” or “bottom-up,” I ask how left parties have shaped the very meaning of what it is to be an American “liberal,” or to be “Labour” in Britain, or to be a “social democrat” in Sweden or Germany. I also ask why a strikingly uniform cross-national identifier—“progressive”—has now supplanted all of these terms. To ask these

questions is to acknowledge that, like the umbrella terms “left” and “right,” monikers like “liberal” or “social democratic” do not have the same meaning, or describe the same kinds of people, across times and places. There is also variation in such terms’ territorial reach, and indeed whether they travel across national boundaries at all.

And so, to understand Western leftism’s reinventions, I focus on four parties: the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. I punctuate a long historical view, ranging from the late 1800s to the early 2000s, with emphases on three moments: the 1920s–1930s, the 1950s–1960s, and the 1980s-1990s.

Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist transformation ed M Brie 

and C Thomasberger (2018)

The last two decades have been marked by a renewed interest in the work of Karl Polanyi. Spreading resistance to the neoliberal agenda and the deepening crises of the last 25 years, which culminated in the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, are viewed as a strong support for the main theses of Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece The Great Transformation. Karl Polanyi was quoted by leading intellectuals and in the editorials of the main newspapers around the world as one of the most influential thinkers in the time of crises. But reception of his work remains largely restricted to the so-called “double movement” of commodification vs. social regulation. Polanyi is typically regarded as a social reformer supporting an increased social state, welfare intervention, and a broader national and international regulation of the financial markets. Or he is depicted as a theorist who gives legitimacy to various social associations and organizations which develop in the niches of current society. Both interpretations fail to address the depth of Karl Polanyi’s analysis and alternatives which are linked to his understanding of socialism as a new and different type of civilization.

The socialist intention behind The Great Transformation, and indeed of the totality of his work, is not widely understood. The first reason is that a large part of his oeuvre concerning his understanding of socialism has, until now, not been published in english. Some important texts noted down in the 1920s and 1930s as well as some of his Hungarian writings have been published only recently (Polanyi 2014, 2016b, 2016c, 2017, forthcoming). To bring his unpublished writings to a wider public, we include in this book first-time translations of some of Polanyi’s most significant papers from the 1920s. A second reason is the depth and complexity of Polanyi’s analysis. The Great Transformation strives neither for a sociological theory of social development nor for a blueprint of a new great transformation. It aims primarily at an explanation of the disasters which, starting with the great war, caused the european civilization of the 19th century to collapse. It lays bare the roots of this historic cataclysm. In “The Great Transformation” Polanyi makes the attempt to reveal the meaning of this unique and singular event. He searches for a true understanding of the reasons which caused the horrors of two world wars, the great Depression, the rise of fascism and Auschwitz so as to prevent the repetition of disasters which threatened to extinguish the legacy of the west.