Karl Polanyi

On 8 May 2018, the International Karl Polanyi Society was founded in Vienna. This marked the beginning of a new phase of engagement with a thinker who had already come to be regarded as a centennial figure in the Anglo-Saxon world.

This book serves as an introduction to The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s magnum opus and one of the most important works of the 20th century. It helps us to understand the background to Karl Polanyi’s intellectual career, sketches the lives of his family members, describes the milieus of Budapest, Vienna, London and New York, which were such informative influences in his life, and sheds light on his relationship with contemporaries such as Keynes, Mises and Hayek.

Renowned Polanyi researchers, including, most notably his daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt, elucidate Polanyian concepts such as ‘fictitious commodities’ and apply his analysis to an era when everything seems to be subjected to the mechanics of the market.

BRIGITTE AULENBACHER, MARKUS MARTERBAUER, ANDREAS NOVY, KARI POLANYI LEVITT, ARMIN THURNHER (EDS.)

KARL

POLANYI

The Life and Works of an Epochal Thinker

Translated by Jan-Peter Herrmann and Carla Welch

The translation has been funded by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

FALTER VERLAG

© 2020 Falter Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H.

1011 Vienna, Marc-Aurel-Straße 9

T: +43/1/536 60-0, E: bv@falter.at, W: www.falter.at

All rights reserved. No unauthorized copying

ISBN ePub: 978-3-85439-344-3

ISBN Kindle: 978-3-85439-357-3

ISBN Print edition: 978-3-85439-689-5

1st digital edition: Zeilenwert GmbH 2020

TABLE OF CONTENT

Brigitte Aulenbacher, Andreas Novy: Acknowledgements

Marguerite Mendell: Foreword

Armin Thurnher: Foreword of the German edition

I. The Renaissance

Brigitte Aulenbacher, Veronika Heimerl, Andreas Novy: The Limits of a Market Society

Armin Thurnher: ‘Many graze on Polanyi’s pasture’

Michael Burawoy: Fictitious Commodities and the Three Waves of Marketization

II. The Personal and the Historical

Michael Burawoy: ‘Wherever my father lived he was engaged in whatever was going on’. Shaping The Great Transformation: a conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

Michael Brie, Claus Thomasberger: Freedom in a Threatened Society

Veronika Helfert: Born a Rebel, Always a Rebel

Andreas Novy: From Development Economist to Trailblazer of the Polanyi Renaissance

Franz Tödtling: From Physical Chemistry to the Philosophy of Knowledge

Michael Mesch: Milieus in Karl Polanyi’s Life

Gareth Dale: Karl Polanyi in Budapest

Robert Kuttner: Karl Polanyi and the Legacy of Red Vienna

Sabine Lichtenberger: ‘The Earliest Beginnings of His Later Teaching Life’

III. Intellectual Debates

Andreas Novy, Richard Bärnthaler: The Great Transformation: Reflections on a Liberal Illusion

Andreas Novy: Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Defining Freedom: What Kind of Freedom? And Whose Freedom?

Peter Rosner: Karl Polanyi, Ludwig von Mises and the Issue of Planning

Kari Polanyi Levitt: Karl Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises: Contested Views on World Development

Elisabeth Springler: Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes: Two Men Bucking the Mainstream

Michael Brie: Karl Polanyi and Nancy Fraser in Dialogue

IV. Understanding Contemporary Capitalism

Margaret Somers, Fred Block: Polanyi’s Prescience: Covid-19, Market Utopianism, and the Reality of Society

Karina Becker, Sophie Bose: ‘You, as a German, are worth nothing at all’

Markus Wissen: Why Polanyi Dubbed Nature a ‘Fictitious Commodity’

Brigitte Aulenbacher: Care Markets: From Careless to Caring Capitalism?

Michele Cangiani: Knowledge as ‘Fictitious Commodity’ and the Knowledge Society

Hans-Jürgen Urban: The Second Great Transformation

V. Polanyi Today

Andreas Novy, Brigitte Aulenbacher: It’s Time for Change!

Markus Marterbauer, Andreas Novy: Why Polanyi in Vienna Today?

Brigitte Aulenbacher, Fabienne Décieux and Christian Leitner: Brush Up Your Polanyi

Polanyi Research International: Four cities, three continents and four institutions dedicated to the work and influence of Karl Polanyi

Authors

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BRIGITTE AULENBACHER AND ANDREAS NOVY

Karl Polanyi was engaged as a journalist, educator and scientist and his work provides a wide range of economic, cultural, historical and anthropological perspectives on industrial civilisation and capitalist market societies. How mankind can survive both, this most pressing question of his times, has not lost its significance. This book addresses academic and non-academic audiences, strives to be of interest to those who have never heard of Karl Polanyi, but also to long-standing experts from diverse disciplines. It aims to inspire public and scientific debates as well as teaching within and beyond universities. And it seeks to give intellectual support to initiatives, movements and policymakers that strive to put the economy in its place. Such a collective effort cannot succeed without generous support.

To begin with, this book would not have been possible without the generous and ongoing support from Falter, the leading Viennese weekly and our co-editor Armin Thurnher. Originally published as a supplement to Falter, it brings together a unique combination of texts, photos and graphics. The enlarged and revised German and English book edition have maintained this light and stimulating style of a weekly.

The publication emerged in the context of the foundation of the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) in Vienna in 2018. IKPS, from the start, aimed to provide accessible debates on contemporary challenges, inspired by the thought of Karl Polanyi. We would like to thank the Vienna Chamber of Labour and our co-editor Markus Marterbauer for hosting and funding the inaugural conference of the IKPS as well as further activities and publications. Karl Polanyi had a strong affinity to popular education and the work of the Chamber of Labour. No other location better symbolises Polanyi’s ambition: There is the need for clear ethical and political positioning, without abdicating the necessity of gathering diverse perspectives and stimulating controversies to better grasp current problems and identify potential alternatives.

It is a great honour that Kari Polanyi Levitt accepted the invitation to co-edit the English version of the book. With her amazing work on the legacy of her father she has become a driving force of the renaissance of Polanyi’s oeuvre. As an honorary president of the International Karl Polanyi Society she has stimulated vivid and pluralist contemporary discussions in the Polanyi community without abdicating a proper reading of her father’s work. We thank her for her many inspiring ideas, her important contributions and her ongoing collaboration.

It is difficult to apply for funding for the translation of a book that is neither directed solely to an academic publication nor a broader popular segment of readers. Therefore, we would like to thank the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and Michael Brie for their generous support. We would also like to thank Jan-Peter Herrmann and Carla Welch for facing the challenges of the academic and journalistic style of the book and providing a thoughtful and precise translation. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to Tobias Eder and Melissa Erhardt who contributed to the copy-editing of the texts and the work on the literature.

Without all this support, it would not have been possible to publish this edition.

FOREWORD

MARGUERITE MENDELL

In 1988, two years after an international conference hosted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest to commemorate Karl Polanyi’s centenary, Kari Polanyi Levitt and I established the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University Montreal. The Institute would provide a space to continue the interdisciplinary dialogue begun in Budapest, inspired by the life and works of Karl Polanyi. Yet the translation of The Great Transformation into Hungarian would have to wait 13 years. Within Hungarian academic circles at the time, Polanyi was largely known for his work in economic anthropology and economic history, with some exceptions. Situating his work politically generated much debate, especially following the publication of Polányi Károly: Fasizmus, Demokrácia, ipari Társadalom (Fascism, Democracy and Industrial Civilisation. Unpublished Work of Karl Polanyi.), a collection of Polanyi’s writings translated into Hungarian, edited by myself and Kari Polanyi and launched at the Budapest conference. I recall this period because it created an international Polanyi community of scholars, students, activists, public intellectuals that ushered in the Polanyi renaissance over the next two decades, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Seattle protests in 1999 and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Cutting across these events and the growing interest in the work of Karl Polanyi and into the 21st century, is climate change and the threat to planetary survival.

Spaces for Polanyi-inspired dialogue have since established in Seoul and Budapest in 2014 and most recently in Vienna in 2018. What we refer to as sister institutes in North America, Europe and Asia, are contributing to a broad, international Polanyi conversation, each with its own mandate and institutional anchors. The Institute in Seoul is a cooperative, with members drawn from all sectors of society. In Budapest, Polanyi dialogue is integrated into an academic programme at the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies within Corvinus University. The International Karl Polanyi Society established in Vienna in 2018, a unique collaboration between universities in Austria and the Vienna Chamber of Labour, is dedicated to widening the Polanyi conversation between academics and social actors on challenges and transformations of the 21st century. The Polanyi Institute in Montreal, the repository of the Karl Polanyi Archive has received visiting researchers and has hosted seminars and biennial international Polanyi conferences for over three decades.

This volume, a remarkable collection of short essays on Karl Polanyi, first appeared in German as a supplement to the weekly Vienna newspaper Falter. It includes several papers presented at the inaugural conference of the International Karl Polanyi Society in May 2018 as well as invited contributions, providing readers with an extraordinary opportunity to discover or rediscover the breadth of the work and influence of Karl Polanyi. Many essays will introduce German authors to an English readership for the first time. The numerous short sketches navigate across many Polanyi themes. The volume covers a wide spectrum of themes, from the reasons for the renewed interest in Polanyi today to the revisiting of fundamental concepts in Polanyi’s writings, from the compatibility and differences between Polanyi and key 20th century theorists such as von Mises, Hayek and Keynes to the impact of Polanyi’s life and engagement in Red Vienna on his thought and lifelong commitment to democratic socialism, and the contemporary relevance of his early writings on freedom and democracy. Biographical essays introduce readers to Polanyi’s early life in Austria and Hungary and the social, political and cultural upheavals of the times. A rare contribution on Karl Polanyi’s relationship to his brother Michael and an engaging interview with his daughter Kari Polanyi deepen our understanding of the formative influences that shaped Polanyi’s thinking throughout his life.

Essays in this volume also explore the resonance of Polanyi’s concepts and analysis to critical issues such as the commodification of care, the emancipatory and destructive impact of technology in the digital age, the search for alternatives rooted in solidarity and community and their capacity to counter a market-driven global agenda. Essays on the rise of right-wing populism as a powerful counter-movement to neoliberalism and the growing threat to freedom recall Polanyi’s writings on fascism as a countermovement to market liberalism.

This volume is published as we face the gravest crisis of our times. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the weakness and destructive power of capitalism. As thousands perish from the virus, as the global economy lurches on the edge of collapse, as government spending soars in unimaginable magnitude and as a desperately awaited vaccine must emerge as a global public good, Polanyi-influenced debate assumes an urgency. The publication of this volume of essays in English translation comes at a time of deep societal disruption that no one could have predicted. How societies will respond to this global crisis requires a reset of priorities. The challenges of the pandemic summon a global response, a global countermovement to restore our habitation, in Polanyi’s words. Any attempt to resume business as usual is futile. Nothing is usual anymore. Polanyi’s vision for economic democracy and freedom in a complex society is realisable if the many countermovements around the world insist, through their collective actions, that nothing less is acceptable.

I wish to extend my congratulations to the editors of this important volume. And I wish to commend Falter for publishing this as a supplement to a weekly newspaper and bringing these ideas to a large public and now to English-speaking readers. Polanyi was a scholar, a journalist, a public educator and an academic in the later years of his life. He was a public intellectual. His years as a journalist began in Vienna. It is more than fitting that Falter is publishing this exceptional collection dedicated to the life and works of Karl Polanyi.

References

Polanyi, Karl (1944/2001): The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

Polányi, Károly (1986): Fasizmus, Demokrácia, ipari Társadalom. Budapest: Gondolat.

FOREWORD OF THE GERMAN EDITION

ARMIN THURNHER

No one would deny that we are currently witnessing a great transformation. Globalisation, digitalisation, neoliberalisation, climate change – who isn’t tired of hearing these buzzwords? One dramatic effect of the current sea change is expressed by the helplessness of traditional left-wing politics. In a time that would provide unprecedented opportunities for political intervention the left is no longer certain who it should refer to, who its historical role models should be. Consequently, with some delay, the work of Karl Polanyi has once again entered the spotlight.

On 8 May 2018, the International Karl Polanyi Society was founded in Vienna. At the founding conference, which took place in the Chamber of Labour, numerous substantial lectures were delivered on the subject, some of which were documented and compiled in a supplement to the Vienna newspaper Falter, entitled ‘Transformation of Capitalism? Karl Polanyi, the Rediscovery of an Economist’ (‘Transformation des Kapitalismus? Karl Polanyi, Wiederentdeckung eines Ökonomen’). The conference location was no coincidence, as Polanyi considered the accomplishments of Red Vienna to be one of the high points of western civilisation.

The initiative for the present volume, which is based on that supplement, came from the President and vice-President of the International Karl Polanyi Society, Andreas Novy and Brigitte Aulenbacher, who developed the concept together with Markus Marterbauer, Michael Mesch and Reinhold Russinger from the Vienna Chamber of Labour, and the author of this text. Through their contacts, they greatly contributed to the fact that the A-list of Polanyi researchers became involved in this book. And that economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, the daughter of Karl Polanyi’s and custodian of his estate and honorary president of the International Karl Polanyi Society, also features in this volume in the form of a lengthy interview about her father.

New texts include the introduction to Polanyi’s work. Some contributions were revised, others substantially expanded, such as that by Michael Mesch about the biographical milieus in Karl Polanyi’s life. The book’s intention is to help initiate a renewed engagement – including in the German-speaking world – with a thinker who has come to be regarded as a centennial figure in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Karl Polanyi offers no political directions, but analyses. He is widely referenced in the debates across the Anglo-Saxon left. In these politically precarious times, in which so-called political advisors set the tone and social media teams dominate public discourse, Karl Polanyi’s work provides a more substantial kind of food for thought. In this sense, this book seeks to take our thinking and our debates a step further.

The book reflects on the renaissance of Polanyi’s works. What makes Polanyi’s ideas so popular in the current situation, even going as far as to earn him the title ‘personality of our century’? Well, this is most likely down to the fact that the era he analysed, the rise of the unbridled market society, displays such striking similarities with our own time. But what is this ‘market society’? And do the counter-movements we are now seeing among those groups in society that fit the description of ‘völkisch (i.e. ethno-nationalist) populists’ not coincide with the patterns Polanyi analysed? And what is the relationship between the print media across the Anglo-Saxon world and the renaissance of Karl Polanyi?

It reconstructs his life and works. Who would be better placed to tell us about Karl Polanyi’s life than his daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt? In order to improve our understanding of Karl Polanyi, the person, we need to find out more about the people who were close to him: his wife Ilona Duczyńska, his brother Michael and of course his daughter Kari. Polanyi was born in Vienna and grew up in Budapest; the situation for Hungarian Jews was marked by uncertainty, with waves of anti-Semitism occurring from the late 19th century onward. As many others during the 20th century, Polanyi ended up moving from one place to another: Vienna, London and the United States were subsequent stations in his life.

The book presents some import issues of his and our times. As a conservative critic of Polanyi’s magnum opus The Great Transformation once said: great books can also be pernicious books. But how did The Great Transformation come about and what was Polanyi’s motivation for writing it? How are his words all too often misunderstood by those reading them today, despite their best intentions? How does Polanyi’s work relate to the writings of his influential contemporaries Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes? What do Polanyian terms like ‘fictitious commodities’ actually mean? And lastly, how does Polanyi’s analysis help us to understand care, digitalisation and science in an era when everything is subordinated to the market?

Last but not least, it asks: Why Polanyi now? The Great Transformation is regarded as one of the most important books of the 20th century; at least it has been since the London Times put it on its list of greatest books. That was in 1977, in other words 33 years after the book was first published. In the same year, the first German translation of Polanyi’s magnum opus appeared. We present some annotated excerpts from the book, which provide us with an insight into Karl Polanyi’s thinking, ideas that have been the inspiration for so much research and scholarly debate. A map of the world provides an overview of Polanyi Institutes across the globe. We also include information about how to become a member of the Vienna-based Karl Polanyi Society.