Both Hungarian-born economic historian Karl Polanyi and Canadian journalist Naomi Klein have strong ties with Montreal. Polanyi started to live in Canada when he was teaching at Columbia University in New York and the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy is currently hosted by Concordia University in Montreal. Klein was born in Montreal. Both thinkers are critical of the idea of self-regulating market economy and neoliberalism. In my contribution, I am dealing particularly with their books The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944) and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), drawing parallels and contrasts between their works