Michael and Karl Polanyi: Conflict and Convergence

Michael and Karl Polanyi: brothers bonded together in
family affection, separated by differences in social philosophy.
Such a summarizing statement, while much too facile, offers
a beginning point for reflection much like a drawn caricature
highlights significant features in a subject while ignoring the
telling details that constitute a true physiognomy. The point of the
reflection set forth in this essay is to focus on Michael’s political,
economic, and social thought, rather neglected today, by contrasting
it with Karl’s social philosophy, which is currently enjoying
renewed interest. My aim, however, is not to use the differences
in Karl’s thought simply as a foil for appreciating Michael’s
social philosophy, for each thinker’s ideas are impressive and
worthy of respect on their own. Rather, I wish to acknowledge
from the start that my primary objective is to illuminate Michael’s
social thought through a comparative study.

The Polanyi Family: Karl Takes the Lead
Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna in 1886, but the family soon
moved to Budapest, where Michael was born in 1891. The
Polanyis moved into a spacious apartment on Andrássy út, the
placement of which well symbolized the family’s position in
Hungarian society. Andrássy út is the fashionable avenue linking
a transportation hub with Heroes Square; under it ran the first
subway in continental Europe. The apartment is about midway
between the nearby opera house and the Catholic basilica, with
the leading synagogue several blocks away. So centered, the
brothers grew up in a hotbed of social and cultural thought. Their
mother, Cecil-Mama, organized a weekly literary salon where
leading figures from Budapest’s cultural scene conversed about
the latest political and artistic issues. One of Michael’s last
students, Ruel Tyson, writes that Michael told him how as a boy
“he slipped downstairs and found a hiding place just out of sight
so he could listen in on some of these conversations in his
mother’s salon.””¹ Michael says of his childhood, “”I grew up in this
circle, dreaming of great things.””² Thus from their earliest days
the boys understood that social issues were an important and
exciting part of life.

The boys’ father, Mihály Pollacsek (the children’s family name
was changed to the more Hungarian “”Polanyi”” in 1904), was an
engineer who worked on the design and construction of a number
of railroads. Although he died in 1905, his stalwart moral integrity
made a huge impression on the boys. Wholly in character, when
storms destroyed a railroad line he was building, he insisted on
paying all the workers even though that plunged him and his family
into bankruptcy. In a 1957 letter to Michael, Karl wrote, “”Except
for our father and my wife, I have never loved anyone as dearly as
I loved you . . . .””³ This confession sets the groundwork in several
ways for what follows. It underscores the importance of his father
(and his father’s moral strength) to him even though his father
died before Karl was twenty. It acknowledges his love for his
radical wife, Ilona Ducyznska, so different in temperament from
him. And the letter as a whole expresses his longing to overcome
his estrangement from his younger brother, a longing that does
not seem to have been reciprocated with the same degree of
passion. Indeed, in this relationship Michael appears to be the
person of iron will, committed unswervingly to his beliefs whatever
the cost in terms of relationship. In the biography of Michael
Polanyi, this difference is noted. Of Karl, it is stated that “”in
contrast to Michael, he was not a person for sharp, definitive
opinions—he was described as ‘relativist’ and Michael as ‘absolutist.'””
⁴

As a result of his father’s death, Karl took over the role of the
“”man of the family.”” While completing his education and then in
practice as a lawyer, he enjoyed taking on the role of father to his
younger brother, but it appears that after awhile this role was felt
to be patronizing to Michael, who was struggling to establish his
independent identity. “”Karl’s efforts to act like a father toward
Michael were not welcome after the younger brother reached
maturity; Michael often kept his distance from his elder brother,
much to Karl’s dismay.””⁵

Karl and Michael’s older brother, Adolf, helped establish and
lead the socialist movement at the University of Budapest.

These activities contributed to the awakening of Karl’s political
interest while he was still in high school. The Polanyi brothers
and another cousin, Ervin Szabó, were later inspired to establish
a socialist student group through family connections with the
exiled Russian revolutionary Samuel Klatschko, then living in
Vienna. It was also Klatschko who inspired the young Karl to
found the progressive student organization, the Galilei Circle.⁶

Early on, Karl was an earnest and inspiring, if somewhat
abstract-thinking, leader. Concerning Karl’s leadership, Ilona
Ducyznska quotes one of the young Galileists as follows: “”The
moral impact he had on the young people was the essential thing—
the honesty, veracity and candor. The young ones felt it. He was
the fountainhead of the moral climate of the Galilei Circle. Never
cold or superior—yet his arguments had a cutting edge.””⁷ Karl
had taken on his father’s persona even if not his social beliefs. He
participated in the editorial board meetings of the influential
journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century) prior to starting the
Galilei (or, in English, Galileo) Circle, and so it is not surprising
that he also started participating in the editing of the Circle’s new
journal, Szabadgóndolat (Free Thought), which was dedicated to
improving the world. Karl and many of the leading young Hungarian
thinkers contributed articles to it. The Galileo Circle under
Karl’s leadership organized educational classes for industrial
workers and conducted research on the social problems of
Hungarian villages.

Karl’s theoretical forays took on a decidedly political character
when, in 1914, he joined with the “”conservative liberal””⁸ Oscar
Jaszi and others to give birth to the National Bourgeois Radical
Party and served as its secretary. In rallying support for the new
party, Karl’s rhetorical skills shone forth, as he himself acknowledged.
“”Yesterday I spoke to the law students, on Saturday at
some university meeting—everywhere with deserved success. . . .
Karolyi [the future president of Hungary in 1918 during the
short-lived democratic republic] and Bakonyi came over to me
again and again, to congratulate me. Somebody embraced me: ‘An
orator at last’—and there was something in it.””⁹ Karl greatly
admired Jaszi, and he worked for his journal in Vienna after the
chaotic times in Hungary following World War I, dangerous
especially for public figures with views contrary to the current
administration, led each man to flee to Austria.¹⁰

While active in Hungary, Karl developed a political philosophy
slightly to the left of Jaszi but decidedly not doctrinaire
Marxist in orientation. Perhaps he could best be described as a
free thinking socialist, influenced by Marx’s account of capitalism
as a source of alienation in society, but also appreciative of
England’s tradition of political freedom. He shunned Marxist
theories of economic determinism and revolution, preferring
gradual legislative action, education and persuasion as means of
bringing about social change. The creative social and economic
ideas for which he later became well known were more the
product of his experiences after 1919 in Austria and England than
a result of his earlier experience. His most creative period in
Hungary was cut short by his military service in World War I,
which had a traumatic impact on him in body and soul.

Michael’s Early Thought
And what of Michael during this period? His greatest efforts were
directed toward getting established in a career. He participated in
the Galileo Circle, serving with mathematician George Polya on
its scientific committee.¹¹ But Michael was not entirely comfortable
with some of the more extreme political rhetoric he heard in
the Circle; he was later called “”a white sheep among the black”” by
one of its members.¹² George Polya said of him, “”Michael walks
alone, he will need a strong voice to make himself heard.””¹³ He was
most excited by science, and had his first scientific article published
in 1910. However, he decided it was more prudent for him
to go into medicine than into science, partly because it would
better provide for the support of the family. Michael received his
medical degree in 1913. This he perceived not so much as a great
culmination of his educational experience but as an abdication of
what he truly loved: “”I guard myself severely from yearning for
scientific work. . . . I have to force myself [to be] a completely
different man.””¹⁴ Immediately after the outbreak of World War I
in 1914, he volunteered to serve as a medical officer in the Austro-
Hungarian Army. While recuperating at one point from an illness
during his military service, he engaged in correspondence with
Einstein about how best to explain the adsorption of gases.¹⁵ His
work on adsorption ultimately became the basis for a Ph.D.
granted to him in 1917 by the University of Budapest. His career
as a physical chemist was underway. It should not be thought,
however, that Michael Polanyi’s career, first as a physician and
then a chemist, obliterated the interest he had in social issues
from early on. In 1917 and 1919 he published reflective articles
on the political dramas of that war-saturated time. In the earlier
article, published in Huszadik Szazád, he argues that socialism in
general, but particularly its materialistic variety (doctrinaire
Marxism), had completely failed to understand the sources of
World War I or its possible solution. “”In peace time, Socialist
literature always emphasized that war was nothing other than a
disguised capitalist undertaking. However, when the war broke
out, they unhesitatingly discarded the flag of the Internationale
and promptly sided by the State.””¹⁶ The State has the status of a
religious idea and promotes competition with other countries for
resources and economic control. Even worse, he declared, people
were speaking of revolution as the way to cure social problems and
establish the proper State. In this extended analysis, Polanyi was
already approaching his notion of “”moral inversion”” that comes to
full expression only several decades later, as we will see.
Furthermore, Michael argued that

we must transcend the materialist prejudice, still living obstinately
in us, according to which the actions of the masses are
primarily motivated by insight into their interests. For it is not
interest that voices from the delegates in Stockholm [proclaim]
but the idea of the power of States, the idea, as I explained above,
whose vitality in the masses brought Europe to the plight of
world war, and now makes this plight still uncertain. . . . But the
State goes to war, not as an association of interests, but as an idea,
and what is a bad business for an association of interests is vital
food for the idea. Business requires rational investments, an idea
demands bloody sacrifices. If the State acted in the interests of its
citizens, it would join its neighbours in a permanent and stable
co-operative effort, i.e. it would cease to exist in a sovereign
way!¹⁷

In the foregoing passage, in speaking of an association of
interests Polanyi expressed a second essential notion that would
surface later in his mature social philosophy: the notion of
“”spontaneous order.”” For one can see that he identified with the
“”materialist prejudice”” to this degree: he believed peace would be
secured if the interests of the people were allowed to be expressed
and integrated rather than being directed toward worship of the
State. A spontaneous order among the citizens would arise if the
state did not interfere. Businesses making rational investments
require stability, not war promulgated by a sovereign state to
extend territory and power. In suggesting that a political system
attuned to the actual interests of people would conduce to peace,
Polanyi referred obliquely to the “”invisible hand”” of Adam Smith,
to which he much later referred explicitly and positively. But
Polanyi also made it clear that if an invisible hand is to work as
intended, political structures guaranteeing peace (and justice)
must be in place. “”Peace will come when and only when we, the
peoples of Europe, have become aware of the idea of the internal
co-operation and a close [closed?] system of law and order among
European States, and, accordingly, controversies about power,
have disappeared from our agenda.””¹⁸

In his 1919 article, published in Szabadgondolat, Polanyi
pulled back from any programmatic suggestions his 1917 article
might have posited. “”Politics is not what we have thought it to be
and what the public still thinks it to be, that is, a result of people’s
competing interests. Society is so complicated that even science
cannot calculate the future effects either of any institution or of
any measure . . . .””¹⁹ Polanyi recommended skepticism about the
effectiveness of political programs.

Yet there was still a good deal of continuity with his earlier
article and with his future thoughts. “”On account of the devastations
brought by wars and revolutions we need to awaken to the
fact that popular belief in politics disintegrates our societies and
sweeps everything away. Thus we must enlighten people about
this fact and refute their belief in politics.””²⁰ In terms of the earlier
article, he repeated his view that a politics that promotes the State
or illusory goals is problematic. “”Politics is a blind eruption of fear
and hope. . . . Unlike the teachings of schools that flatter
democracy, political struggles, as blind battles of fear and hope,
do not ensure progress but are aimless devastations caused by
irrational passions.””²¹ Was Polanyi, then, just abdicating responsibility
for social order? One can suppose that he still thought
there need to be in place, and protected by laws, mechanisms for
attending to economic needs—and, after all, political support is
needed to ensure that such structures exist. An explicit objective
Polanyi expressed was this: “”Our job is exploring the truth;
dissecting the confused images of politics and analyzing the belief
in political concepts; finding the originating conditions of political
illusions and what animates the imagination to fix illusions to
certain objects.””²² Once again, in these early comments, he
articulated a twofold point of view that is central to his later
thought: the centrality of truth in all investigations, and the
importance of clear, systemic thought as the proper path to
understanding.

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A still more encompassing theme in Michael’s unfolding
thought is suggested by the two early articles. He advocated
reliance on underlying cultural practices and traditions as the glue
of society, not explicit political programs. Here is, perhaps, an
unexpected congruence with a major theme Karl developed. Karl
is celebrated for his notion that with the coming of the Industrial
Revolution, land, labor, and money became commoditized.²³
Whereas formerly markets and other forms of economic distribution
had been embedded in social practices and traditions, after
the Industrial Revolution social practices were increasingly driven
by economic considerations—by the forces of the capitalist
marketplace. A further basic claim of his was that capitalist
markets are not self-correcting, so that in order to protect a
society from devastation, governments have had to introduce
laws and regulations to counterbalance market-driven catastrophes.
The positive side of Karl’s social thought was his devising of
ways to, once again, make markets one of a variety of ways of
achieving basic social needs—to re-embed economics in society.
Here is where some convergence can be seen. Both Karl and
Michael had become wary of political campaigns in Western and
Central Europe that were tied to national self-interest, or that
suppose market-driven self-interest is a force that can take care
of all social needs. Michael is quite content to see capitalism itself,
corrected by laws and regulations, as a reliable social tradition
that can be indwelt apart from politics. Karl, however, searched
out anthropological and historical antecedents for understanding
patterns of the distribution of society’s benefits and burdens that
offer alternatives to capitalism as well as regulations needed to
support it. Not believing revolution is the proper way to achieve
such social enrichment, he necessarily had to support a political
process of change that was free of violence. He set his hope on
socialism. He believed the Soviet Union, very definitely a political
force, was the best hope for humankind to reinsert broad nonmarket
social arrangements into the process of producing, distributing,
and consuming goods and services, thereby qualifying
the dominant role that the market economy had assumed in the
Western world. So while neither brother invested himself personally
in local political parties that sought to bring about justice and
peace in Central and Western Europe, and both favored the
dominance of socially sensitive rather than purely economic
factors in governance, they differed strongly in their views of the
proper role of capitalism in a healthy society. Michael supported
the liberal tradition, Karl socialism. Out of an initial convergence
came differentiation.

To jump forward a bit, in 1943 Michael Polanyi published a
talk he had given earlier to a Jewish group concerning his attitude
toward Zionism. Polanyi’s maternal grandfather had been a
liberal rabbi, but the Polanyis in Budapest, like many others of
Jewish background who flocked to Budapest, were thoroughly
assimilated into Hungarian culture and, therefore, no longer
identified with Judaism. Michael also opposed Zionism and
supported the assimilation of Jews into Western culture.

Zionists regard Jews as a nation of Hebrews. Their opponents,
pursuing assimilation, insist that Jews must remain a mere
religious denomination; that they are just Englishmen, Scotsmen,
Frenchmen, Americans, Russians, etc.—as it may be—who
happen to be of the Judaic faith. Both views are obviously
forced—expressing somewhat crudely a particular programme,
rather than facing the facts.²⁴

There are many who are called Jews because of their ancestry
who do not speak Hebrew, practice any Jewish rituals, or accept
Jewish faith as normative for themselves. Michael fits into this
category. He observed that “”[d]uring the 500 years of isolation in
the Ghetto, Jewry produced nothing of general human value.
Rabbinic scholarship, maintained with unfailing devotion, was
largely wasted in elaborating fruitless talmudist speculations.””²⁵
Michael could not identify with such Judaism; rather he identified
with liberal Western thought as he experienced it as a young boy
in Hungary. He saw assimilation as a process of recovery from the
500 years of isolation. It was an entry into a kind of cultural
universalism. This amalgam of capitalism, Enlightenment thought,
and appropriate government regulation is the tradition that
became central to his reformed liberal social philosophy. In
contrast, he viewed Zionism as a specific political program
designed to create a particular state, and as he stated in his two
early pieces on political philosophy, such political programs
would give rise to opposition and trouble. His view, in this
instance, has certainly proved to be prescient.

Divergent Paths
During the 1920s Michael was immersed in physical chemistry.
But his subterranean interest in social thought was piqued by his
trip to the Soviet Union in 1928. Many of his fellow Galileists had
become enamored of the Russian experiment, Karl included, and
a somewhat skeptical Michael was glad to have an opportunity to
experience life in the Soviet Union first hand. What he found was
not pretty. “”The economic system functions so badly that one
cannot judge from the result what its fundamental and dubious
principles are. Everything is permeated by brutal and stupid
fanaticism considering all other opinions as devilish nonsense.””²⁶
He felt it important to defend the Western liberal tradition against
the Soviet system he experienced. Based on his personal impressions
from his 1928 trip, the next year Michael sent Karl his
careful criticism of Arthur Feiler’s statistical study of the Soviet
Union. Feiler had uncritically passed on statistics and quantitative
studies provided by the Soviets. Michael was shocked to see
that the plight of the poor was dismissed in cavalier terms; failures
were covered over by rhetoric of heroic progress.²⁷

In his diary of 1929 one finds signs that, just as being a
physician had not been satisfying to Michael’s sense of a meaningful
career, so now the practice of physical chemistry had also lost
its allure. Suffering people needed his help. According to his
biographers, “”Polanyi noted that the things which interested him
he could not do and the things he could do did not interest him.””²⁸
The possibility of developing economic and social thought to
ameliorate current problems now fascinated him, and he worked
on understanding the social realm in his spare time. This study
culminated in 1935 with the publication of a lengthy article on
“”USSR Economics—Fundamental Data, System and Spirit.”” It
was not flattering to the Russians. Finally, Michael’s publication
in 1936 of a review of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, by
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, clearly exposed the totalitarian nature
of a diseased society the Webbs had tried to sanitize through
diversion and deception.²⁹ At this point Michael’s thought had
come to diverge dramatically from Karl’s. In the letter to Michael
of January 21, 1957, cited earlier, Karl dates the differences to
1933 or 1934. Karl goes on to say, “”Some six years later you wrote
to me that what had separated us was our attitudes towards Russia
and my hypochondria.”” The great economic Crash occurred in
1929 followed by the deepening Depression, and these events
reinforced the faith of many of those looking to the Soviet Union
for an economic alternative to what seemed to be a failing
capitalism. Michael, in the face of Nazism, left Germany in 1933,
and in the same year Karl left Austria, both coming to England.
So now on common turf the brothers confronted each other with
different social views.

In his article “”After Brotherhood’s Golden Age: Karl and
Michael Polanyi,”” Endre Nagy divides the relationship of the
brothers into three periods. “”The first, which I call ‘Brotherhood’s
Golden Age,’ lasted until 1934. During this period the brothers
were in basic agreement with respect to the main elements of their
Weltanschauung, until Michael’s book on the Soviet economy
caused Karl to criticize his attitude towards the Russian experiment.””
³⁰ While earlier Karl and Michael did not disagree in print
about social issues, even from the time of Michael’s first two
articles it is clear that his intellectual commitments were staked
out differently than Karl’s. Michael seemed quite content with
liberalism and capitalism, properly monitored, as the basis for
Western civilization, whereas Karl saw capitalism as a basic cause
of World War I, fascism, and later the Depression. Michael
eschewed a political approach to solving world problems, whereas
Karl fastened his hope on a political program of socialism that,
admittedly, remained theoretical rather than acted upon. Where
they were unified is that each was horrified by the violence of the
war and its aftermaths, and each sought reasons for the disaster.
Their explanations were quite different, and so it seems strained
to argue that any Golden Age depended upon a shared
Weltanschauung.³¹ Karl developed his explanation for the collapse
of world peace before Michael did, and it is now to that
explanation that we briefly turn.

When Karl had earlier emigrated to Vienna in 1919, he
became a journalist, first writing under Jaszi’s editorship on
matters of interest to other Hungarians in exile, then writing
primarily on economic matters for Austria’s leading weekly
economics paper.³² He came to see that the joint rise of capitalism
and the Industrial Revolution initiated a dramatic change in
Western society, a change whose impact was still being felt in the
social developments of the 1930s.

We submit that an avalanche of social dislocation, surpassing by
far that of the enclosure period, came down upon England; that
this catastrophe was the accompaniment of a vast movement of
economic improvement; that an entirely new institutional mechanism
was starting to act on Western society; that its dangers,
which cut to the quick when they first appeared, were never
really overcome; and that the history of nineteenth-century
civilization consisted largely in attempts to protect society against
the ravages of such a mechanism. The Industrial Revolution was
merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as
ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was
utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could
be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.
³³

In the course of many years of reflection, he developed his
theory of the double movement of society in response to the
Industrial Revolution as his explanation of current events. Robert
Owens was the first, Karl claimed, to discover “”the reality of
society and its all-powerful formative influence upon character.””
³⁴ Poverty was not a personal failing; it was a social product.
And this product of the Industrial Revolution, the great suffering
of the poor, was not the outcome of some natural law, but the
result of capitalism’s working, a social product that could and
should be changed. The first movement—the disruption of
society caused by capitalistic markets—was followed by a second
self-protective movement by governments. The long peace of the
nineteenth century was the result of all sorts of protective
legislation, including the legalization of labor unions, anti-trust
laws, etc., whereby society protected itself against the ravages of
capitalism. Unfortunately these changes were incompatible with
the thrust of capitalism toward minimizing external costs and
constraints. Consequently tensions increased in society, tensions
that were exacerbated by the adoption of the gold standard.
World War I was the first violent expression of the breaking of the
tension, but the treaties of Versailles and Trianon did not rectify
the underlying problems of competitive market societies that
caused the war. The Great Depression put such pressure on
countries trying to maintain the gold standard, the symbol of
world unity, that finally that commitment could not be maintained.
The collapse of the gold standard ushered in an uncertain
new phase of global relationships.³⁵ Only in the sort of governmental
response to the Great Depression that Franklin Roosevelt
and socialist governments inaugurated was the underlying opposition
between government and private enterprise beginning to be
appropriately addressed. Such, in brief, was Karl’s account of the
causes of the twentieth-century disasters.

Michael followed quite a different course in explaining the
cause of the Great War, the rise of fascism and communism, and
the Great Depression. His was basically an explanation rooted in
intellectual history. He noted how, following the Enlightenment
and the successes of science, an extensive literature had arisen
turning the light of reason on basic human beliefs and structures.
Increasingly skeptical questions arose about the authenticity of
moral values and ideals. Religious beliefs and moral values began
to be interpreted as contrived constructs designed to legitimate the
position of the wealthy and the powerful. Within scientific communities
a reductive mentality frequently took hold, and such movements
as positivism and instrumentalism rejected the truth value
and ultimately the authority of traditional social arrangements.

Those accepting such widespread skepticism sometimes responded
with a romanticism that celebrated emotions and particularism
over against the rational universalism embedded in
skepticism. All too often the Romantic Movement exalted the
unique, lawless individual, one free of society’s restraints. In
rebelling against all restraint, such individualist romanticism
flirts with nihilism. But at the same time, such individuals do not
escape the moral passions with which humans seem invariably
endowed. Frequently a marriage of perfectionism with skepticism
occurs. Michael calls the resulting fusion of moral intensity with
skepticism about the legitimacy of moral values moral inversion.

In public life moral inversion leads to totalitarianism. Marxism-
Leninism is the most important movement of this kind. The
Marxist revolutionary scorns any appeal to generous sentiments
and scorns any appeal to the utopian image of an ideal society. His
skepticism forbids him to acclaim such motives. But, though he
cannot declare these high motives, they are his driving force and
must be satisfied. Marxism resolves this contradiction by inventing
a machine—the Marxist machine of history—which, working
inside society, will bring about the destruction of capitalism and
its replacement by socialism. The machine will achieve this
without the aid of noble sentiments or images of social perfection.
. . . The two contradictory elements of Marxism effectively
protect its teachings against criticism by alternately taking over its
defense. Its moral fervor denies a hearing to any intellectual
objections, while any moral scruples are contemptuously rejected
as unscientific.³⁶

Clearly Karl and Michael were fundamentally at odds with
regard to an assessment of the Soviet Union. Karl’s view might be
called unsettled but hopeful. “”This ambiguous relationship—
sharp criticism of the communists coupled with a magnetic
attraction to the movement (especially during crisis situations)—
stayed with Polanyi all his life.””³⁷ Like Michael, he rejected any
variety of economic determinism or revolutionary violence, yet
unlike Michael he was open to seeing the course of affairs in the
USSR as a great socialist experiment worthy of respect. At any
rate, when Karl read Michael’s account of Soviet economics
published in 1935, he responded sharply in several letters. He
denied Michael’s claim that there was a market in Stalinist Russia
and later said, “”I am still completely baffled by the almost
complete lack of human meaning and significance of your booklet.””
³⁸

Economic Considerations
Michael was convinced of the demonic character of Soviet society
and its economic system, but his rejection of socialism led him to
want to explore market capitalism more thoroughly so he could be
sure his support for liberalism made sense from an economic
standpoint. He acknowledged that socialists stood for many
values he could himself embrace. The following statement from a
1937 speech could be read as conceding the attractiveness of
much of what Karl stood for: “”The demand for social consciousness
in economic life . . . is a historic force more fundamental for
the present century than even the national idea and . . . the struggle
for it will dominate public life until it has found reasonable
satisfaction.””³⁹ In contrast, the acquisitiveness of capitalism
makes it morally unappealing. The social good produced by the
invisible hand is, after all, invisible. The general utilitarian defense
of the market lacks inspiration because

its philosophy makes self-seeking the supreme principle in
economic life and assumes that people are happy if their blind
acquisitiveness is transformed into a maximum efficiency. In fact,
blind acquisitiveness is repugnant to the social instincts of man.
If he cooperates with a community he wants to be conscious of a
common purpose. Accordingly, he revolts against the idea that
the community should refuse responsibility for giving its citizens
opportunity to work and live an educated healthy life.⁴⁰

Michael found the writings of Keynes especially helpful as he
plunged into economic theory. He made a film about the need for
the government to keep the money supply adjusted to something
like the equilibrium point so that (1) inflation would not result
from too much money chasing limited goods or (2) recession
would not result from too much money being withdrawn from
circulation and put into savings. Printing money and adjusting
taxes are two principal means of adjustment he discusses. His
systematic exposition of market economics was finally published
in 1945 as Full Employment and Free Trade. Of this work, Paul
Craig Roberts (former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the
USA) and Norman Van Cott said, “”Polanyi synthesized Keynesian
economics with the monetary school of economics later associated
with Milton Friedman. In this synthesis, Polanyi was at least
two decades, and perhaps three, ahead of the best minds in the
economics profession.””⁴¹

Michael would certainly agree with his brother that the
historical evolution of actual and theoretical capitalism was full of
injustices and crises. “”We are standing to-day at the close of a
hundred years of ceaseless rebellion against the theory and
practice of capitalism. That rebellion has at last borne fruit in the
discovery by Keynes of a fundamental deficiency in the adjustment
of monetary circulation under capitalism.””⁴² Michael wants
the government to treat the economy as a machine: oiling it with
some money here, draining off excess there. But he does not want
to compromise democracy by turning the fine tuning of the
economy over to insular experts. Citizens need to understand how
the economy works so they do not confound immediate benefit
with long term wisdom or mix together political aims with
economic sagacity. The public needs to recognize that in a
developing economy there are necessarily indeterminacies and
risks. Business failures are an inevitable feature of a dynamic
economy.⁴³ Against Karl’s proposed placing of economic issues
under the controlling overview of political aims, Michael advocates
what he calls “”The Principle of Neutrality.”” Government
economic action “”should be, and can be, carried out in a neutral
form, i.e. in a way requiring no materially significant economic or
social action to accompany it. Perhaps the main purpose of this
book is to demonstrate this ‘principle of neutrality’, and to give
warning of the dangers accompanying any deviation from it.””⁴⁴
When infusion of money into circulation depends upon paying for
different sorts of public works, competing constituencies become
involved, and economic considerations may all too easily be
sacrificed to political expediency.

A consistent theme in Michael’s thought is that the world is
not as subject to human order and control as rationalists,
utilitarians, planners of various sorts, and tyrants pretend.⁴⁵
Because there are so many indeterminacies affecting decision
making, it behooves us to find and utilize those processes which
produce order spontaneously. Michael distinguishes between
systems of spontaneous order in physical nature (the growth of
crystals), in life processes (evolutionary development), and in
cultural systems (common law). Different systems have differing
data that must be taken into account and different modes of
adjustment to that data. The following is how he discusses
spontaneous order as it arises in the actions of a judge administering
law.

A judge sitting in court and pondering a case refers consciously
to many precedents—perhaps unconsciously to many more.
Numberless other judges have sat where he is sitting and have
decided according to statute, precedent, equity, and convenience,
just as he now sits and must decide. His mind is in
constant contact with their minds as he analyzes various aspects
of the case. Moreover, beyond the purely legal references he is
making, he senses the entire contemporary trend of opinion, the
social medium as a whole. When he has determined what
bearing his knowledge of all these matters has upon the case and
has responded to them in the light of his professional conscience,
his declared decision will carry his conviction and will
receive respect from his fellow members of the bar.⁴⁶

#page#

Scientists and judges make adjustments in terms of consultation
measured against the standards, respectively, of truth and
justice. Business men, in contrast, engage in mutual adjustment
in a competitive mode as they strive for individual advantage.
Michael shows in some detail how many centers of adjustment
dedicated to the same end will be far more efficient in arriving at
ongoing fitting adjustments in complex situations than top-down
decision making—what he calls “”corporate order.””⁴⁷ Some situations,
like army command, require a hierarchical organization
where “”ideas are cultivated under the supervision of organizations
or public authorities.””⁴⁸ But in the market place, which has
many buyers and sellers, order can most efficiently be derived by
jointly coordinated activity. Polanyi affirms Adam Smith’s model
of a competitive market in which the self-interested actions of
many producers/sellers are guided as if by an invisible hand to the
benefit of all, a quite wonderful spontaneous order.

One would hardly expect to find under these circumstances any
serious suggestion of replacing the functions of a major selfadjusting
system by the directions of a central authority. Yet
contemporary thought is pervaded by the fallacy of central
planning, particularly as regards industrial production. The
belief prevails widely that direct physical controls, consciously
applied from one centre, can in general fully replace adjustments
spreading automatically through a network of market
relations. It underlies the Socialist movement . . . .⁴⁹

Thus, to the distaste Michael felt when he visited Russia and
experienced the dissembling and poverty, there was now added
theoretical assurance that a capitalist economy is a far more
efficient mechanism for deciding what should be produced and
for regulating goods and services than is a socialist economy.
Indeed, Michael’s study of the Soviets showed that a command
economy had been attempted soon after the Revolution with
disastrous results.⁵⁰ Markets with prices were reinstituted in the
early 1920s, but they were compromised by Five-Year plans,
inadequate economic reporting, and other governmental intrusions
on social affairs.

Planning and Freedom
During a visit to Moscow in 1935, Michael experienced a third
major reason for rejecting Soviet socialism when he was confronted
with an intrusion that clashed with his career work. The
clash occurred during a conversation with Bukharin. “”Though he
was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he was
still a leading theoretician of the Communist party. When I asked
him about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that
pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society.””⁵¹ Here
Michael was faced with the claim that science should be planned
in order to contribute to the advancement of society. Now, if one
were to select what experiential field Polanyi was most knowledgeable
in, his experiences of the process of discovery in science
would likely head the list. And he knew that scientific discovery
requires a free and sensitive attunement to coherence among the
items of evidence. Scientific discovery is an experience of the
spontaneous revealing of order that is undermined if unnecessary
constraints are placed upon it. The socially inspired mandates of
planning would be such a distracting constraint. The scientist
must seek to discover what is real under the standard of truth, not
in terms of some social value that is merely distracting. What
Bukharin was advocating was the rejection of pure science as a
form of bourgeois self-indulgence, and the maintaining of applied
science as the sole legitimate expression of science. Michael
points out that pure and applied science operate according to
quite different principles such that one is not reducible to the
other. Pure science progresses through an unfolding of deeper
and wider stages in some principled area of research.

Technology progresses differently. Lighting is constantly made
cheaper and pleasanter. To that extent the development is also
consistent and continuous. But logically each forward step
represents a new departure. There are no principles, unless the
most trivial ones, which are common to the candle, the gasburner
and the incandescent lamp. . . . Each new improved form
of illumination simply displaces its predecessor. Instead of the
development of a single principle, we see a series of logically
disconnected attempts to serve a steady purpose.⁵²

When the movement to plan scientific research developed a
following in England, Michael marshaled his arguments against
social planning and gradually consolidated his case against communism
in general. He was appalled at the treatment of his niece
Eva Striker Zeisel when she was arrested by the Soviets on false
charges and tortured into implicating other innocent persons.⁵³
Also aghast was Arthur Koestler, who had attended an experimental
kindergarten with Eva taught by Michael’s sister. Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon, an important catalyst in turning intellectual
sentiment away from the USSR, was based upon her experience.
After World War II, Michael and Koestler worked together on a
number of anti-Communist committees and projects.

One by-product of Michael’s opposition to centralized governmental
planning was his development of the idea of public
liberty in contrast to private liberty.

Freedom is ambiguous for there are different ways of being free.
One way is to be free from external constraint. The rational limits
to this freedom are set by the condition that it must not interfere
with other people’s right to the same freedom. . . . Another
conception of freedom is in its extreme form almost the opposite
of the first. It regards freedom as liberation from personal ends
by submission to impersonal obligations. . . . In the foundations
of academic freedom we shall find the two rival aspects of liberty
so firmly interwoven that their essential relationship and true
balance become easily apparent.⁵⁴

The freedom from external compulsion has often been termed
“”freedom from”” or negative freedom, whereas in submitting to
external values or obligations one has exercised “”freedom for”” or
positive freedom. But in speaking of private versus public liberty,
Polanyi moves beyond the familiar contrast. Private liberty is
indeed freedom from constraint, but contra the libertarian claim
that this sort of liberty is what governments should above all
protect, Polanyi sees it as an individual matter of desire satisfaction
allowed under all sorts of governmental structures. Thus in
the USSR there was a considerable amount of private freedom
allowed; the state, however, kept the power to control all social
functions. “”Under Stalin the scope of private freedom remains
much wider than it was in Victorian Britain, while that of public
liberties is incomparably less.””⁵⁵

Academic freedom requires both private and public liberty.
As was typical of Michael, he used science as a model.

Science, we can now see, shows strong features corresponding
to both aspects of freedom. The assertion of his personal passion
is the mark of the great pioneer, who is the salt of the earth in
science. Originality is the principal virtue of a scientist and the
revolutionary character of scientific progress is indeed proverbial.
At the same time science has a most closely knit professional
tradition; it rivals the Church of Rome and the legal profession
in continuity of doctrine and strength of corporate spirit. . . .
Science fosters a maximum of originality while imposing also an
exceptional degree of critical rigour.⁵⁶

While Polanyi thought both the principles of spontaneity and
constraint are needed in society, he believed that how the latter
is developed in society determines the health of the society. If
constraint is imposed by governmental edict, this is totalitarianism.
But if private citizens have an ongoing role in shaping public
policy, this is a key step toward the ideal government. Nevertheless,
a democracy of persons seeking individual satisfactions is not
stable because desires are not mutually harmonious. Nor does it
stretch toward those transcendent values that Polanyi thinks
grant a life the most meaning. Political science errs if it merely
sets the individual against the state. “”The true antithesis is
therefore between the State and the invisible things which guide
men’s creative impulses and in which men’s consciences are
naturally rooted.””⁵⁷ When political structures and laws are constructed
in the light of such shared transcendent values as truth,
justice, charity, and toleration, then “”freedom for”” is striving
toward the greatest good.

Polanyi’s notion of public liberty counters several problematic
tendencies characteristic of contemporary democracies.
Politics too often devolves into struggle between various selfinterested
factions. Political parties advertise themselves in the
rhetoric of commerce, promising to help the economy or to
provide security. The voter is treated like a consumer. Michael
lifts people’s vision beyond the mundane to transcendent values
and extols the persons who best exemplify these values in their
actions. Moreover, he urges that we support those institutional
and intellectual spontaneous orders that in practice bypass
sectarian squabbles. Economic public liberty should consist in
putting into place the laws and regulations that protect against
market excesses and support distributive justice.

Karl Polanyi also valued freedom; he saw it as one of the three
great constitutive facts in Western consciousness. Jesus, he
claimed, was its greatest exemplar.⁵⁸ However, Karl developed
his consideration of freedom in terms of how it unfolds in political
movements. To understand his account, it is best to return first
to how his thought developed in Austria.

During his time in Vienna, Karl became impressed with the
society for workers that Robert Owens had created in Scotland.
Polanyi honored Owens because “”having internalized Christianity’s
emphasis on the uniqueness of each person, he had proclaimed
the final revelation: the reality of society and of man as a social
being.””⁵⁹ What exactly did Karl mean by stressing the reality of
society? For one thing, he opposed the notion of Economic Man
as the beginning point of social and economic analysis. His
starting point can also be contrasted with Michael’s point of entry.
Michael’s thought is imprinted by his experience as a creative
scientist. Although Michael strongly emphasized the social and
cultural embeddedness of each scientist, yet finally a discovery is
made by an individual following a gradient of increasing coherence.
Karl’s thought, in contrast, was shaped by his socialist
leanings and, therefore, prioritizes society over the individual.
Like Marx, he saw in the notion of the individual making rational
(i.e., self-interested) choices the essence of the alienated and
partial individual living a life subject to market fluctuations and
other impersonal forces. In speaking of the reality of society, he
incorporated Marx’s notion of species-being into his economic
thinking. But Polanyi’s is also a Christian interpretation of
Marx. “”No attack on Socialism can be permanently effective that
fails to dig down to the religious and moral roots of the
movement. But at these roots lies the Christian inheritance.””⁶⁰
Persons are worthy of respect because they are moral agents,
which by definition means they are part of a community of
persons.

Abraham Rotstein has written an interesting account of Karl’s
notion of the reality of society in which he underscores the
relational, moral quality of society. In his interpretation, society
is more than an aggregation of individuals or a collection of
persons having certain duties, rights, or privileges because of
their membership in the collection. Each person as an economic
actor affects the lives of countless other persons. In a market
economy this effect is blind and impersonal, as commodification
reduces persons to mere individuals who are part of the calculus
of profitability. Yet one fully realizes the force, the power of
society, only when one finds his or her relationships to others
controlled by economic forces and when one recognizes the
impact of one’s choices on others. “”It is this compromised
involvement of the moral individual that Polanyi means by ‘the
reality of society.’ This ‘reality’ is only in the first instance an
institutional reality, but at the deeper level, which Polanyi evokes,
it is a moral reality.””⁶¹

How should persons in the twentieth century respond to the
discovery that society impinges upon the personal freedom that
since the Enlightenment has been held out as the great good
emerging from social change? According to Karl, the two basic
responses that have actually been prominent are liberalism and
fascism.

Freedom’s utter frustration in fascism is, indeed, the inevitable
result of the liberal philosophy, which claims that power and
compulsion are evil, that freedom demands their absence for a
human community. No such thing is possible; in a complex
society this becomes apparent. This leaves no alternative but
either to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and
deny the reality of society, or to accept that reality and reject the
idea of freedom. The first is the liberal’s conclusion; the latter the
fascist’s. No other seems possible.⁶²

But ultimately Karl did not accept this dichotomous way of
perceiving twentieth century social reality. Socialism offers a way
of transcending the impasse. “”Uncomplaining acceptance of the
reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to
remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is
true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need
not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and
destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality.””⁶³

A Final Convergence?
Here, at the end of our journey of comparison, we see the
beginning of a renewed convergence that marks the “”Wise and
Resignative Reconciliation”” that Endre Nagy sees as the third and
final stage of the brothers’ relationship.⁶⁴ Karl wanted to transcend
the impasse he imputed between socialism and liberalism.
How different is his socialist ideal, once he withdrew from his
extreme attachment to the Soviet Union, from the modified sort
of liberalism Michael finally proclaimed? Listen to the position
Michael adopted in his maturity, near the end of Karl’s life:

The shortcomings of the market principle have been increasingly
demonstrated over the past decade or two. The market system is
notably blamed because the market cannot balance collective
demands. It is incapable of deciding whether priority should be
given to the construction of a network of highways or a system of
high schools. It cannot balance social costs, nor can it regulate the
list prices of newly developed industries or public works. Finally,
it cannot control effective demand, at least in the sense that
Keynes—whose theory I subscribe to—understood it. These
operations or functions should therefore be carried out insofar as
it is possible and even if it is done imperfectly, by the public
authorities. By so doing, public authorities serve to regulate,
guide, and supplement market tendencies. This function, which
is now generally known as “”over-all planning,””enables the market
tendencies which do appear to be utilized, but not suppressed.⁶⁵

#page#

Karl acknowledged the importance of markets for economic
efficiency; Michael acknowledged the importance of over-all
governmental planning to better realize the transcendent values
he honored. Yes, Karl comprehended the problems of the twentieth
century by way of the analysis of great social movements,
while Michael relied upon the analysis of the history of ideas
culminating in moral inversion. But aren’t these two approaches
complementary rather than antagonistic? And surely the brothers
agreed on many items: for instance, the counter-productivity of
revolution, the harmfulness of strictly materialistic analysis, the
importance of religion and morality as social glue, a rejection of
class warfare as the key to history, the inadequacy of any utopian
self-correcting economic system, and democracy as an ideal form
of governance. In the last analysis, the convergence in the ideas
of Karl and Michael Polanyi clearly outweighs the conflict.
Therefore, it seems apropos to amend the summary statement
with which this essay began. Michael and Karl Polanyi: bonded
together in family affection, separated by differences in social
philosophy, reconciled through truthful confrontation that reveals
convergence of thought.

Walter Gulick
Montana State University – Billings

NOTES

1. Ruel Tyson, “”From Salon to Institute: Convivial Spaces in
   the Intellectual Life of Michael Polanyi,”” Tradition & Discovery
   32, no. 3 (2005–6): 21.
2. Autobiographical comments by Michael Polanyi in World
   Authors 1950–1970, ed. John Wakeman (New York: H. W.
   Wilson Co., 1975), 1151.
3. Karl Polanyi’s letter to Michael of January 21, 1957 is
   found in box 12, folder 12 of the Michael Polanyi Papers located
   at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.
4. William Taussig Scott and Martin X. Moleski, S.J., Michael
   Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher (New York: Oxford University
   Press, 2005), 10.
5. Scott and Moleski, Michael Polanyi, 15. That Karl adopted
   a paternalistic stance towards Michael is indicated in his letter of
   September 18, 1934 to Michael. “”Our dear father put you in my
   care 29 years ago now. By now, you do not need me any more.””
   Karl in writing to a forty-three-year-old man brings up a relationship
   that presumably expired, at least in a legal sense, twenty-five
   years ago, but he has to remind himself of the obvious fact that his
   fathering no longer applies. The letter is found in box 17, folder
   5 of the Michael Polanyi Papers at the Regenstein Library.
6. Ferenc Múcsi, “”The Start of Karl Polanyi’s Career,”” in The
   Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration, ed. Kari Polanyi-
   Levitt, (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 26.
7. Uncited quotation from Maurice Korach in Ilona Ducyznska,
   “”Karl Polanyi: Notes on His Life”” in Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood
   of Man, ed. Harry W. Pearson (New York: Academic Press, 1977),
   xii–xiii.
8. Thus characterized by Lee Congdon, Exile and Social
   Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–
   1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 216–17.
   Congdon goes on to say of Oscar Jaszi that “”He was very far from
   being the greatest thinker of his generation of Hungarians, but he
   was the greatest man”” (216–217).
9. György Litván, “”Karl Polanyi in Hungarian Politics (1914–
   64),”” in Karl Polanyi, 31–32.
10. For a comprehensive overview of Jaszi’s career with
    information about the continuing connection between Jaszi and
    Karl Polanyi even after each had moved to North America, see
    György Litván, A Twentieth Century Prophet: Oscar Jaszi 1875–
    1957 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006).
11. Lee Congdon, Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile
    and the Challenge of Communism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
    University Press, 2001), 17.
12. Paul Ignotus, “”The Hungary of Michael Polanyi,”” The
    Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi
    on His Seventieth Birthday (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
    1961), 12.
13. Quoted by Polanyi in World Authors 1950–1970, 1151.
14. Undated letter to Karl quoted in Scott and Moleski,
    Michael Polanyi, 29.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. Michael Polanyi, “”To the Peacemakers: Views on the
    Prerequisites of War and Peace in Europe,”” trans. Endre J. Nagy,
    in Michael Polanyi, Society, Economics, and Philosophy: Selected
    Papers, ed. R. T. Allen (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
    1997), 23.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid., 16.
19. Michael Polanyi, “”New Scepticism,”” in Allen, Society,
    Economics, and Philosophy, 30.
20. Ibid., 29–30.
21. Ibid., 30.
22. Ibid., 31. My emphasis.
23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and
    Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001
    [1944]), 72–75.
24. Michael Polanyi, “”Jewish Problems,”” in Allen, Society,
    Economics, and Philosophy, 33–34.
25. Ibid., 35.
26. From Michael’s letter of April 29, 1928 to his sister,
    Mausi, quoted in Michael Polanyi, 109.
27. Scott and Moleski, Michael Polanyi, 120.
28. Ibid.
29. Michael Polanyi, “”The Struggle between Truth and Propaganda,””
    in Allen, Science, Economics, and Philosophy, 47–60.
30. Endre J. Nagy, “”Brotherhood’s Golden Age: Karl and
    Michael Polanyi,”” in Humanity, Society and Commitment: On
    Karl Polanyi, ed. Kenneth McRobbie, Critical Perspectives on
    Historic Issues (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994): 4:83.
31. To be fair to Endre Nagy, after the passage in the article
    just cited he develops material in his helpful article that shows in
    some detail how the thought of Karl and Michael does begin to
    diverge before 1934—see especially 91–94. I would still argue
    that the early articles Michael wrote show that the difference in
    world views is more deeply rooted than Nagy suggests.
32. Michele Cangiani reports that between 1924 and 1938
    Karl Polanyi wrote about 250 pieces for Der Oesterreichische
    Volkswirt. Most of these articles deal either with economics in the
    context of world politics or with workers’ problems and related
    issues in Great Britain. See her “”Prelude to The Great Transformation:
    Karl Polanyi’s Articles for Der Oesterreichische Volkstwirt“”
    in Humanity, Society, and Commitment, 7.
33. Karl Polanyi, Great Transformation, 42
34. Ibid., 133.
35. “”The breakdown of the international gold standard was
    the invisible link between the disintegration of world economy
    which started at the turn of the century and the transformation
    of a whole civilization in the thirties.”” Karl Polanyi, Great Transformation,
    21.
36. Michael Polanyi, “”On the Modern Mind,”” in Scientific
    Thought and Social Reality: Essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. Fred
    Schwartz, Psychological Issues 8:4, Monograph 32 (New York:
    International Universities Press, Inc., 1974), 146.
37. Litván, “”Karl Polanyi in Hungarian Politics (1914–64),””
    in Karl Polanyi, 34.
38. Karl Polanyi’s letter of January 17, 1936, to Michael,
    Michael Polanyi Papers, box 17, folder 6. Cited in Congdon,
    Seeing Red, 36. See also Nagy, “”Brotherhood’s Golden Age,”” 98.
39. Scott and Moleski, Michael Polanyi, 167, quoting “”Historical
    Society Lecture”” in box 25, folder 12 of the Michael
    Polanyi Papers.
40. Michael Polanyi, “”Popular Education in Economics,””
    unpublished article in the Michael Polanyi Papers, box 25, folder
    9, quoted in Harry Prosch, Michael Polanyi: A Critical Exposition
    (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 191. Polanyi
    saw the revolt as coming to clearest expression in communism
    and fascism, but to avoid the errors involved in these movements
    (especially top-down economic dictation and the theory of class
    composition in class conflict), he rejected laissez-faire capitalism
    and described necessary constraints on the free market to secure
    the moral goods communism and fascism desired. See Prosch,
    192–194. Thanks to Phil Mullins for pointing out this material to
    me.
41. Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Van Cott, “”Polanyi’s
    Economics,”” Tradition & Discovery 25, no. 3 (1998–99), 26.
42. Michael Polanyi, Full Employment and Free Trade (Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 1945), 142.
43. See Prosch, Michael Polanyi, 187–188.
44. Michael Polanyi, Full Employment, 29. Karl noted that
    his views were particularly being attacked in Michael’s insistence
    on the separation of politics and economics. See Congdon, Seeing
    Red, 82–83 for his bitter rejoinder.
45. “”How should we consciously determine a future which is,
    by its very nature, beyond our comprehension? Such presumption
    reveals only the narrowness of an outlook uninformed by
    humility.”” Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and
    Rejoinders
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