The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi
Published 1944 · 412 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is The Great Transformation to read?
The Great Transformation scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Economic, historical, and sociological terminology. Dense academic vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Highly theoretical argument about the nature of markets and society.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Dense with historical evidence and theoretical argument.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Historical narrative punctuated by theoretical chapters.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The double movement as organizing concept. Markets vs. society.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Polanyi treats the 'self-regulating market' as a dangerous utopianism.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Polanyi diagnoses the problem more clearly than he prescribes solutions.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Three parts mixing historical narrative with theoretical argument.
How The Great Transformation is regarded
The Great Transformation holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.