Rational versus natural
One might ask Polanyi, "If you're right about these problems, why has no one noticed until now?" His answer is offered in the book through the motif about rationality and natural life. He says that there was a season of philosophy that undergirded political changes that began with a dangerous assumption: that through rationality, humans could build a better life for themselves. The reality, argues, Polanyi, is that one class became incredibly powerful by exploiting a political-economic system they invented.
The titular transformation
The book's title mentions a Transformation which ends up being the development of the modern nation-state in the West. This transformation can be seen as a symbolic cornerstone to Polanyi's whole argument. He sees time with a big hinge in it, a corner at which things stopped being one way and started being a different way. The difference between Polanyi's treatment and other economic theorists is that Polanyi thinks that transformation will bring an eventual collapse when things snap back to the way they used to be.
Speenhamland laws
These laws were designed to settle disputes about land renting. One can see Polanyi's arguments about the Speenhamland laws to be a symbolic discussion about the development of rental living. Instead of owning land, the working class became more likely to rent property, because the cost of owning land became more than a working class person could afford. This is where it all started to go wrong, says Polanyi.
The ancient world
Through motif, the reader learns about ancient world's and their various assumptions about the economy. The string that ties these discussions together is that in Babylon, Egypt, Africa, and Greece, the international trade was still rooted in trade of commodities, not in currency. It would be unusual for a merchant to accept proprietary currency for goods. They would sometimes accept rare metals like gold and silver, but those were treated as goods, not as currency, he argues.
Laissez-faire as a construct
The writer reminds his reader that before the invention of a free market, the idea of a government supporting a capitalistic economy by seeking to keep its hands free—that idea was not invented yet. He treats modern history as the first trial run for the philosophical and political assumptions that created our modern economies, and he urges his reader to remember that the economy is not a self-explaining natural phenomenon. These ways of life were invented, he says.
