Among distinguished sociologists, Kark Paul Polanyi an influential and internationally renowned was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. Kark Paul Polanyi taught widely throughout Europe and the United States, and has a substantial and continuing influence in sociology because of the way in which his empirical studies undermine many of the assumptions of neoclassical economic theory. Karl Polanyi's was a stringent study of the consequences of the emergence of the 'world market' and the manner in which society can protect itself against its consequences.
Karl Polanyi warned against promoting the economy to the point at which power becomes highly concentrated. This economism could destroy society by undermining social cohesion: it requires that the economy be embedded within relations of social control similar to those found in traditional societies.
Karl Paul Polanyi's best-known publication is The Great Transformation (l944), which has a Foreword by Robert M. Maclver, in which Karl Polanyi seeks to document the causes of the two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, and the basis of the 'new order' of the mid-twentieth century. In the Great Transformation, he argued that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was not inevitable but historically contingent. The lectures, 'The Passing of the 19th Century', 'The Trend Towards an Integrated Society', 'The Breakdown of the International System', 'Is America an Exception' and 'Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution,' took place during the early stages of World War II.
Karl Polanyi's other major publications, notably the co-authored Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957) and the posthumously published The Livelihood of Man (1977) develop Polanyi's so-called substantivist critique of liberalism, challenging the idea that freedom and justice are inextricably tied to the free market economy, and documenting the various ways in which economic processes in any society are necessarily shaped by its cultural, political, and social institutions.