Polanyi's intellectual and political outlook can best be summarized through paradoxical formulations such as 'romantic modernist', 'liberal socialist', and 'cosmopolitan patriot.' In exploring these paradoxes, Dale excavates and reconstructs Polanyi's views on a range of topics that have been neglected in the critical literature, including Keynesian economic policy, the evolution and dynamics of Stalin's Russia, regional integration, and McCarthyism. He reinterprets Polanyi's philosophy of history, his theory of democracy, and his economic historiography of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, and guides readers through Polyani's critical dialogue with Marxism.
While the central threads and motifs of this study are intellectual-historiographical in nature, Dale also critically analyzes the views of Polanyi and his followers on issues of pressing present-day relevance, notably the clash between democracy and capitalism, and the nature and trajectory of European unification.