Karl Paul Polanyi (; ; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964)[ Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554] was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic sociologist, and politician,
In his writings, Polanyi advances the concept of the Double Movement, which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. He argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.
Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement.
Polanyi was active in politics, and helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party in 1914, serving as its secretary. He fled Hungary for Vienna in 1919 when the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy seized power. He fled Vienna for London in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and fascism was ascendant in Austria. After years of unsuccessfully seeking employment at universities in the United Kingdom, he moved to the United States in 1940 where he joined the faculty at Bennington College and later taught at Columbia University.
Early life
Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna and raised in Budapest by a German‑speaking Jewish family assimilating into the secular middle class.
His younger brother was
Michael Polanyi, a
philosopher, and his niece was
Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned
ceramist. He was born in
Vienna, at the time the capital of the
Austria-Hungary. His father, Mihály Pollacsek, was a railway entrepreneur. Mihály never changed the name
Pollacsek, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. Mihály died in January 1905, which was an emotional shock to Karl, and he commemorated the anniversary of Mihály's death throughout his life. Karl and Michael Polanyi's mother was Cecília Wohl. The name change to Polanyi was made by Karl and his siblings.
Polanyi was well educated despite the ups and downs of his father's fortune, and he immersed himself in Budapest's active intellectual and artistic scene. Polanyi studied at the Minta Gymnasium.
Early career
Polanyi founded the radical and influential
Galileo Circle while at the University of Budapest, a club which would have far reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual thought. During this time, he was actively engaged with other notable thinkers, such as György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, and
Karl Mannheim. Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in
Law. In 1914, he helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party of Hungary and served as its
party secretary.
Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest. Polanyi supported the republican government of Mihály Károlyi and its Social Democratic regime. The republic was short-lived, with socialist Béla Kun toppling the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Polanyi left Hungary for Vienna in order to undergo medical treatment. During this time, the Kun government was replaced by the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy.
In Vienna
From 1924 to 1933, he was employed as a senior editor of the prestigious
Der Österreichische Volkswirt (
The Austrian Economist) magazine. It was at this time that he first began criticizing the Austrian school of economics, which he felt created abstract models that lost sight of the organic, interrelated reality of economic processes. Polanyi himself was attracted to
Fabianism and the works of G. D. H. Cole. It was also during this period that Polanyi first developed an interest in Christian socialism.
Polanyi married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, who was of Polish-Hungarian background. Their daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt carried on the family tradition of academic economic research.
In London
Polanyi was asked to resign from
Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria. He left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what later became
The Great Transformation. However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to
Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College. Polanyi had for many years sought employment at British universities but was unsuccessful.
The book was published in 1944, to great acclaim.
In it, Polanyi described the
enclosure process in
England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century.
United States and Canada
Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation".
The lectures "The Passing of the 19th Century",
"The Trend Towards an Integrated Society",
"The Breakdown of the International System",
"Is America an Exception?",
and "Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution"
took place during the early stages of World War II. Polanyi participated in Bennington's Humanism Lecture Series (1941)
and Bennington College's Lecture Series (1943) where his topic was "Jean Jacques Rousseau: Or Is a Free Society Possible?"
After the war, Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University (1947–1953). However, his wife, Ilona Duczyńska (1897–1978), had a background as a former communism, which made gaining an entrance visa in the United States impossible. As a result, they moved to Canada, and Polanyi commuted to New York City. In the early 1950s, Polanyi received a large grant from the Ford Foundation to study the economic systems of ancient empires.
Having described the emergence of the modern economic system, Polanyi now sought to understand how "the economy" emerged as a distinct sphere in the distant past. His seminar at Columbia drew several famous scholars and influenced a generation of teachers, resulting in the 1957 volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his later years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he lived in Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.
Selected works
-
Dalton, George, ed. Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968); collected essays and selections from his work.
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Pearson, Harry W., ed. The Livelihood of Man (Academic Press, 1977)
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Polanyi, Karl. '.' (Boston: Beacon Press. 1944) ISBN 0-8070-5679-0
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Polanyi, Karl, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Person, eds. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957)
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Polanyi, Karl. Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, (1966).
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Polanyi, Karl. For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 (Polity Press, 2014),
Articles by Karl Polanyi
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"Socialist Accounting" (1922)
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"The Essence of Fascism" (1933–1934); article
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"Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?", The London Quarterly of World Affairs, vol. 10 (3) (1945)
See also
Notes
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Dale, Gareth (2016), Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0745335186
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Humphries, S. C., Vol. 8, No. 2, 1969, 165-212.
Further reading
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Adaman, Fikret, Pat Devine, eds. Economy and Society: Money, Capitalism and Transition. Black Rose Books, 2002. Additional subtitle: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange: embedding the economy in society. Essays based on the legacy of Karl Polanyi.
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Aulenbacher, Brigitte, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi, the life and works of an epochal thinker. Falter Verlag, 2020.
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Block, Fred and Somers, Margaret, The Power of Market Fundamentalism : Karl Polanyi's Critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.
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Brie, Michael (ed.), Karl Polanyi in dialogue : a socialist thinker for our times, Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2017.
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Brie, Michael and Thomasberger, Claus, Karl Polanyi's vision of a socialist transformation. Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2018.
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Dale, Gareth, Karl Polanyi : a life on the left, New York : Columbia University Press, 2016.
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Dale, Gareth, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi's political and economic thought : a critical guide. Newcastle upon Tyne : Agenda Publishing, 2019.
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Dale, Gareth, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi : excavation and critique, London, England : Pluto Press, 2016.
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Desai, Radhika and Polanyi Levitt, Kari, Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2021.
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Hann, Chris, Repatriating Karl Polanyi Market Society in the Visegrád States. Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2019.
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Robert Kuttner, "The Man from Red Vienna" (review of Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Columbia University Press, 381 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 55–57. "In sum, Polanyi got some details wrong, but he got the big picture right. Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism." (Robert Kuttner, p. 57.)
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