Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation offers vital insights for today’s social-ecological transformation research. It suffers, however, from misreadings that disregard Polanyi’s concern for understanding and combatting fascism. By exposing the supremacist foundations of economic liberalism, Polanyi helps to understand current authoritarian politics. As today, climate backlash is only one of several manifestations of a broader cultural and political backlash, it is necessary to foster unconventional alliances beyond the silo of those convinced of the priority of climate action.
Novy et al. (2026) studied this question.