LÁSZLÓ ANDOR 23rd April 2024
Sixty years on from Polanyi’s death and 80 since his classic text appeared, it is time to reassess the Hungarian social scientist’s legacy.
In April 1944, Karl Polanyi published his magnum opus. He died precisely 20 years later, on April 23rd 1964.
Polanyi might seem an enigmatic figure in the social sciences: he became influential well after his death and his fame is the result of a single book, The Great Transformation, which came to inspire a new generation of intellectuals in the neoliberal era. For a thinker identified with the phrase ‘double movement’, this double anniversary provides an opportunity to reflect on his life and his outstanding contribution to political economy.
A life in three chapters
Polanyi’s life is like a trilogy. The first part is his upbringing, youth and study in Hungary, his developing political consciousness and experience. The second begins with his departure and includes the decades of European emigration, when the rise of fascism is the key issue for politics, economics, society and eventually the fate of the international order. Volume three is his life in the United States, where the ageing Polanyi continues his research in economic history and anthropology while engaging in the intellectual dialogue on the cold war and ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the Soviet Union.
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Polanyi grew up in Budapest, speaking German and Hungarian—and very quickly learnt English, French, Latin and Greek as well. As a student, he was influenced by the great Hungarian intellects of the time: Ervin Szabó and Oszkár Jászi. The librarian Szabó was a father figure for Marxists, anarchists and syndicalists, while Jászi was the beacon for progressive liberalism. Polanyi became the first leader of the Galileo Circle, committed to collective learning and activism.
By the time of the war, Polanyi considered himself a liberal socialist, in the footsteps of German thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein and Franz Oppenheimer. In 1919, he left Hungary to receive medical treatment in Austria. Meanwhile, a shortlived Budapest Commune was overthrown and displaced by a ‘white’ counter-revolution, making return impossible. In ‘red’ Vienna, Polanyi and Ilona Duczynska married (in 1923) and he started working as an editor of the prestigious economics journal Der Österreichische Volkswirt (Austrian Economist). He became a critic of the market-fundamentalist ‘Austrian school’ of economics, represented among others by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
