| |
Karl Paul Polanyi ( October 25, 1886 – April 23, 1964) was an
Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic
sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social
philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and
for his book The Great Transformation, which argued that the emergence
of market-based societies in modern Europe was 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. His daughter, Canadian economist Kari Polanyi
Levitt (born 1923 in Vienna, Austria) was taught by Friedrich Hayek at the
London School of Economics and is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill
University, Montreal.
Background :
Polanyi was born into a Jewish family. 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 Austro-Hungarian Empire. 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 (not von 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
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 Hungarian Radical Party and served as its 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, however, and when
Béla Kun toppled the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet
Republic Polanyi left for Vienna. 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 economists, who he felt created abstract
models which 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 grew interested in Christian
socialism. He married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczynska, of
Polish-Hungarian background.
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. 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 Duczynska (1897–1978), had a
background as a former communist, 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
Markets in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his later years and
established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he resided in
Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.
|
|
