Karl Polanyi

Karl Paul Polanyi (October 25, 1886, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire — April 23, 1964, Pickering, Ontario) was a Hungarian philosopher, political economist and economic anthropologist known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and 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 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. Polyani'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

See also: Polányi

Polanyi was born into a Jewish family. His younger brother was chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and was born in Vienna, at the time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The son of a prominent member of the bourgeoisie involved in railroads, father Mihály (til 1904 Pollacsek) von Polányi and mother Cecília Wohl, 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 earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1908 and graduated in Law in 1912. 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, but was removed from service due to disabilities after arriving at the Russian Front. After the war, he returned to Budapest where he became politically active once again. 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 was forced to flee to Vienna.

From 1924 to 1933 he worked there as a journalist writing economic and political commentary for (among others) the prestigious Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt ('The Austrian Economist'). 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.

United States and Canada

He fled Austria in 1933 as the short-lived Austrian Republic began to collapse and fascist influence began to grow. He moved to London, where he earned a living working as a journalist and tutor and took up a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association. Polanyi also conducted the bulk of his research for what would later become 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.

After the war Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University (1947-1953). However, his wife's (Ilona Duczynska) background as a former communist 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 resided in Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.

Works

• The Great Transformation (1944)
• Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957, edited and with contributions by others)
• Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966)
• Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (1968, collected essays and selections from his work).
• The Livelihood of Man (Studies in social discontinuity)(Academic Pr; New Ed edition (November 1977)

Bibliography

• McRobbie, Kenneth, ed. (1994), Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1895431840 
• McRobbie, Kenneth; Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, eds. (2000), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN ISBN 1551641429 
• Mendell, Marguerite; Salée, Daniel (1991), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, St. Martins Press, ISBN 0312047835 
• Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, ed. (1990), The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 0921689802 
• Stanfield, J. Ron (1986), The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood, Macmillan, ISBN 0333396294 
• Dale, Gareth (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, Polity, ISBN 9780745640723 

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 (1944) 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

See also: Polányi