The Economic Thought Of Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi is most famous for his work in chemistry and the philosophy of science, but in the 1930s and 1940s he made an important contribution to economics. Drawing on rich archival materials on Polanyi and his correspondents, Gábor Biró explores their competing worldviews and their struggles to popularise their visions of the economy, economic expertise and democracy. Special focus is given to Polanyi’s pioneering economics film and postmodern ideas. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of the history of economics, philosophy of science, and science and technology studies.

The democratic industrial societies face a deeply-rooted institutional crisis. The accepted ways and means of living lead to frustration and anxiety rather than creativity and joy. The roots of this crisis are political and economic. These societies contain economies that pervert and obstruct the human life process and polities that are subordinate to economic vested interests. Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian emigrho witnessed first hand the cataclysms to which this political economic crisis can lead. He created a powerful social economic theory to analyze this institutional impasse and lay the foundation for social reconstruction. This book reviews Polanyi's life and work, his contributions to the methodology of economics, his concepts of social integration, his theory of market capitalism, and his view of freedom in complex industrial societies.

This volume is a collection of essays on the non-scientific work of Michael Polanyi which place particular emphasis on his social, political and economic thought.

This edited volume of original contributions deals with the economic and political thought of Michael Polanyi. Requiring little prior knowledge of Polanyi, this volume further develops a somewhat neglected side of Polanyi's work. In particular it examines the 'tacit integration', of subsidiary details into focal objects or actions as central to all knowing and action. It traces ontological counterparts in the structures of comprehensive entities and complex actions, and a multi-level universe in which lower levels have their boundary conditions, the extents to which they apply, determined by those of the next higher level, whilst each possessing its own laws or operative principles. This schema of 'dual control' preserves the reality and relative autonomy of each level, and its interactions with others, against the various reductions. The essays in this volume also employ and develop important additional concepts and distinctions such as: 'corporate' and 'spontaneous' order; 'public' and 'private' liberties; 'general' and 'specific authority'; and 'moral inversion'; which, as the essays show, are necessary for understanding and maintaining a free society and the freedom of institutions within it. Among the topics treated with them are: more of the prerequisites of freedom in public liberties dedicated to principles and transcendent values; totalitarianism and society as spontaneous order; the balance of general and specific authority in society and particular institutions; reductionism, totalitarianism and consumption in consumer societies, as moral inversions; the mutual interactions of economics and politics as distinct and autonomous but interacting levels; the sociological aspects of economics; and Polanyi's own contributions to sociology. Although, as indicated, Polanyi has his special terms, the essays in this volume, like his works, give them meaning with concrete examples and so avoid merely shuffling a mass of abstractions. Together the essays show that his work is a rich seam of ideas and inspiration for yet further extension and application.

Society, Economics and Philosophy represents the full range of Polanyi's interests outside of his scientific work: economics, politics, society, philosophy of science, religion and positivist obstacles to it, and art. Polanyi's principal ideas are contained in three essays: on the scientific revolution, the creative imagination and the mind-body relation. Precisely because of Polanyi's work in the physical sciences, his writings have a unique dimension not found in other advocates of the market and too infrequently found even in philosophers of science.Polanyi was a powerful critic of totalitarianism and of the deficiencies of the usual defenses of freedom which helped to prepare the way for it. Freedom, he argued, can be based only upon truth and dedication to transcendent ideals, not upon skepticism, utilitarianism and the liberty of doing merely as one pleases. At a time when easy slogans about socialism were dominant in intellectual circles, epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and when calls for the central planning of scientific research were made by such as J.D. Bernal, Polanyi exposed their errors and showed that science can flourish only in a free society.More radically than even von Mises and Hayek, Polanyi showed that an industrial economy can operate only polycentrically, that central planning is logically impossible, and that what was called by that name in the Soviet Union was in reality no such thing. Likewise, scientific research can proceed, not by a central plan, but only by the spontaneous self-adjustment of separate initiatives to discover a common reality. Against the positivism dominant within philosophy of science, he argued that the notion of reality must be restored and made central. Yet physical sciences, he also argued, are only one branch of science, and the sciences of life and mind are logically richer and more complex and cannot be reduced to the former, nor mind to body or to computers, nor art to its ph

Humanity and Nature in Economic Thought: Searching for the Organic Origins of the Economy argues that organic elements seen as incompatible with rational homo economicus have been left out of, or downplayed in, mainstream histories of economic thought. The chapters show that organic aspects (that is, aspects related to sensitive, cognitive or social human qualities) were present in the economic ideas of a wide range of important thinkers including Hume, Smith, Malthus, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek and the Polanyi brothers. Moreover, the contributors to this thought-provoking volume reveal in turn that these aspects were crucial to how these key figures thought about the economy. This stimulating collection of essays will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of the history of economic thought, economic philosophy, heterodox economics, moral philosophy and intellectual history.

The essays in this volume deal with the economic and political thought of Michael Polanyi. Requiring little prior knowledge of Polanyi, the essays in this volume further develop a somewhat neglected side of Polanyi's work. In particular it examines the 'tacit integration', of subsidiary details into focal objects or actions as central to all knowing and action. The essays in this volume trace ontological counterparts in the structures of comprehensive entities and complex actions, and a multi-level universe in which lower levels have their boundary conditions, the extents to which they apply, determined by those of the next higher level, whilst each possessing its own laws or operative principles. This schema of 'dual control' preserves the reality and relative autonomy of each level, and its interactions with others, against the various reductions. The essays in this volume also employ and develop important further concepts and distinctions such as: 'corporate' and 'spontaneous' order; 'public' and 'private' liberties; 'general' and 'specific authority'; and 'moral inversion'; which, as the essays show, are necessary for understanding and maintaining a free society and the freedom of institutions within it. Among the topics treated with them are: more of the prerequisites of freedom in public liberties dedicated to principles and transcendent values; totalitarianism and society as spontaneous order; the balance of general and specific authority in society and particular institutions; reductionism, totalitarianism and consumption in consumer societies, as moral inversions; the mutual interactions of economics and politics as distinct and autonomous but interacting levels; the sociological aspects of economics; and Polanyi's own contributions to sociology. Although, as indicated, Polanyi has his special terms, the essays in this volume, like his works, give them meaning with concrete examples and so avoid merely shuffling a mass of abstractions. Together the essays show that his work is a rich seam of ideas and inspiration for yet further extension and application.

In Michael Polanyi and His Generation, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science.