This paper assesses the contribution of Karl Polanyi, a theorist largely ignored in fascism scholarship, toward understanding fascism’s interwar rise and present-day implications. In exploring Polanyi’s work in The Great Transformation and lesser-known and unpublished writings, a sophisticated and largely original conception of fascism emerges, rooted in the idea of ‘anti-individualism’ as its foundational trait. Polanyi accounts for fascism’s philosophical content, ideological plasticity, political function and societal form, intervening in debates over how to define fascism, its ambiguity with the populist (...) far-right, and on its both economically reactionary and socially revolutionary qualities. Polanyi’s analysis suggests an enduring vulnerability on the part of liberal capitalism to fascist currents as (1) a solution to the instability of the market economy (and broader incompatibility between capitalism and democracy) at the systemic level, and (2) to the crisis of the individual subject on a social and moral level. I end by considering how Polanyi’s theory might be applied to locate current neo-fascist movements and elucidate the sociological problems underpinning their existence. (shrink)