Karl Paul Polanyi was a Hungarian-American economic historian,
economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and
social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic
thought and for his book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi is remembered
today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to
economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and
culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but was 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 Kari Polanyi Levitt is Emerita
Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.
Early life 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. Mihály Pollacsek father of Karl and
Michael Polanyi, was a railway entrepreneur. Mihály never changed the
name Pollacsek and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. Karl and
Michael Polanyi's mother was Cecília Wohl. The name change to Polanyi was
effected 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 Club Galilei 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 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 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 Duczyńska, 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 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 After the war, Polanyi received a
teaching position at Columbia University. However, his wife 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.
See also Embeddedness
Works The Great Transformation
"Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?," The London Quarterly of
World Affairs, vol. 10. Trade and Markets in the Early Empires
Dahomey and the Slave Trade George Dalton, Primitive, Archaic, and
Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi; collected essays and selections
from his work. Harry W. Pearson, The Livelihood of Man.
Karl Polanyi, For a New West: Essays, 1919-1958. ISBN 9780745684444
Notes ^ Encyclopædia Britannica vol 9. p.554
^ For example, Morris Silver, "Redistribution and Markets in the
Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi", Antiguo Oriente 5: 89-112.
^ http:www.government-online.net References
McRobbie, Kenneth, ed., Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi,
Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1-895431-84-0
McRobbie, Kenneth; Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, eds., Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The
Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Black Rose Books Ltd.,
ISBN 1-55164-142-9 Mendell, Marguerite; Salée, Daniel, The
Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth
Century, St. Martins Press, ISBN 0-312-04783-5
Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, ed., The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration,
Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 0-921689-80-2
Stanfield, J. Ron, The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood,
Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-39629-4 Dale, Gareth, Karl Polanyi: The Limits
of the Market, Polity, ISBN 978-0-7456-4072-3
External links The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political
Economy - The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia
University web site. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time Review Essay by Anne Mayhew,
College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee
Profile on Karl Polanyi - On the History of Economic Thought Website
Kari Polanyi Levitt Karl Polanyi from Marginal Revolution
University The free market is an impossible utopia,
The Washington Post. A conversation with Fred Block and Margaret Somers on their
book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique.
The book argues that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to help understand
economic recessions and their aftermath.