Karl Polanyi

A Life on the Left

Gareth Dale

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231541480
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Education Biographies
• Index: History

Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America.

The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. KPA-54–3, Julius Holló to Polanyi (date unclear).

INTRODUCTION

1. Ferenc Körmendi, The Happy Generation (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945), 18.

2. Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), 303.

3. Karl Mannheim and Ernest Gellner, discussed in Stephen Quilley and Steven Loyal, “Wittgenstein, Gellner, and Elias: From the Philosophy of Language Games to a Figurational Sociology of Knowledge,” Human Figurations 2, no. 2 (2013): 2–9.

4. Mary Gluck, Georg Lukacs and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 73.

5. At one point, when preparing his British tax return, Polanyi concluded that the Inland Revenue had miscalculated in his favor, upon which he insisted on returning the “small extra sum that he thought he should pay.” (Kari Polanyi-Levitt, interview, December 2008.) This was perhaps true to Polanyi’s nature, although he was not consistent. For example, in 1954 the U.S. Social Security Administration claimed that it had overpaid Polanyi by around one thousand dollars. He tenaciously fought his corner, firing off dozens of letters and statements, over almost a year, and brought in a law firm too. His case was that his salary at Columbia, being funded by the Ford Foundation, did not strictly speaking count as salary and was not therefore taxable income. He lost. (KPA-49–5, Polanyi’s correspondence from 1956; also KPA-30–12, D. J. Plitz, 1963, to Karl Polanyi [n.d.].) The incident was not without irony, given that Henry Ford had created the Foundation to avoid inheritance tax.

6. Otto Bauer, Werkausgabe, vol. 2 (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1976), 329.

7. For example, Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 128.

8. Georg Lukacs, “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1967 [1919–1923]), 63–95. See also Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 80.

9. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London: Routledge, 1940), 157.

10. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

11. Jefferson Pooley, “An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research” (D.Phil., Columbia University, 2006), 130.

12. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 86.

13. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 102.

14. KPA-17–24, Karl Polanyi, “Rise and Decline of the Profit Motive,” London Cooperative Society Weekend School.

15. Blaise Bachofen, “Why Rousseau Mistrusts Revolutions: Rousseau’s Paradoxical Conservatism,” in Rousseau and Revolution, ed. Holger Ross Lauritsen and Mikkel Thorup (London: Continuum, 2011), 35–61.

16. This insight has more recently been developed by the political philosopher Ruth Grant, in Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).

17. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). For a critique of “Great Ditch” theories, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

18. KPA-51–2, Karl Polanyi to George, August 6, 1960.

19. MPP-17–12, Karl Polanyi to Misi, January 21, 1957.

20. Typewritten memoir by Don Grant, shared with the author, September 2013.

21. William Scott and Martin Moleski, Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9.

22. Peter Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New York: John Wiley, 1994 [1978]), 134.

23. Collini, cited in Denys Leighton, The Greenian Moment: T. H. Green, Religion and Political Argument in Victorian Britain (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 28. See also Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 128.

24. Godesberg Programme of the SPD, November 1959, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=3341.

25. KPA-30–2, Karl Polanyi to Bé de Waard, January 6, 1958.

1. IN THE EAST-WEST SALON

1. SPSL-536–1, Karl Polanyi to Walter Adams, March 31, 1934.

2. See for example the letterheads in PFP-212–28: “The Pollacsek family were wealthy country folk who rented crown property for their business in the 18th century.” Jean Richards, e-mail to the author, May 28, 2013.

3. Kari Polanyi-Levitt, telephone interview, November 2008.

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Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: In the East-West Salon
• Two: Bearing the Cross of War
• Three: Triumph and Tragedy of Red Vienna
• Four: Challenges and Responses
• Five: The Cataclysm and Its Origins
• Six: “Injustices and Inhumanities”
• Seven: The Precariousness of Existence
• Epilogue: A Lost World of Socialism
• Notes
• Index