Hann, Chris

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www.ssoar.infoStocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising Steeply: ThreeNew Books on Karl PolanyiHann, ChrisVeröffentlichungsversion / Published VersionZeitschriftenartikel / journal articleEmpfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Hann, C. (2016). Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising Steeply: Three New Books on Karl Polanyi. Soziopolis:Gesellschaft beobachten. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-82542-7Nutzungsbedingungen:Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zurVerfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen findenSie hier:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.deTerms of use:This document is made available under a CC BY Licence(Attribution). For more Information see:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016Chris Hann | Essay | 01.11.2016Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyThree New Books on Karl PolanyiGareth Dale, Karl Polanyi. A Life on the Left, New York 2016.Gareth Dale, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi. Excavation and Critique, London 2016.Gareth Dale (ed.), Karl Polanyi. The Hungarian Writings, Manchester 2016.If, in accordance with the tenor of the age, we imagine the Euro-American social sciences asa stock exchange, we can note both continuities and changes in the last half century. KarlMarx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are still canonical figures, “blue chip” investments,though certainly not the most exciting for those with ambition and the appropriate animalspirits. By contrast, the fate of Ulrich Beck, Francis Fukuyama and Anthony Giddens, all sopopular at the end of the last century, calls to mind the contemporaneous dot-com bubble.In the second decade of the 21st century there are grounds for concern about the long-termprospects for the market in social science theory. But stocks in Karl Polanyi have risensteadily and, thanks above all to these three volumes of Gareth Dale, 2016 is a bumper year.Before outlining how these new books complement each other in genre and build upon thefoundations laid in Dale’s earlier study,1 it is worth recalling that during his lifetime KarlPolanyi was virtually unknown in sociology and other core social sciences. This ignorancepersisted in the decades following his death in 1964. His stocks rose in economicanthropology, ancient history, and later archaeology, though a cult following in each ofthese fields had dwindled by the end of the century. But cometh the hour, cometh the man.The revival of mainstream social scientific interest in the work of Karl Polanyi is intimatelyconnected with the momentous events of our age: the transition from social democracy toneoliberalism, from Fordism to financialization, and from John Maynard Keynes toFriedrich von Hayek. Successive crises of the world’s monetary institutions, with far-reaching (albeit geographically quite localized) consequences for the real economy, havehelped to bring the arch-critic of laissez faire into the spotlight. For at least somespeculators on the social science market, Polanyi stocks are attractive because in the wakeof the Cold War it is self-evident that the original Marxist critique of capitalism has failed.Karl Polanyi is thought to offer a left-wing alternative to its alleged economic determinism,© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 1 / 6Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016and to the dogmatism and repression of power holders who invoked Marx to legitimatetheir rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.But who was Karl Polanyi and can he satisfy these high expectations? Where did his ideascome from? Is The Great Transformation, his opus magnum of 1944, much more than aneccentric economic history of industrial Britain infused with a quirkily romantic socialphilosophy? Are his efforts to theorise the emergence of Fascism in north-west Europe interms of a “double movement” pertinent to explaining the global contradictions ofdemocratic capitalism in the 21st century? Are further Polanyian concepts such as”fictitious commodities” original contributions that deserve to be operationalized today, notonly as analytic tools for social scientists but for their emancipatory political potential? Daledoes not provide simple answers to such questions. He offers persuasive interpretations,but also (especially in the Pluto volume) incisive summaries of rival approaches. Takentogether, these three volumes draw attention to numerous inconsistencies and productiveambiguities in Polanyi’s copious writings. Readers are free to draw conclusions which differfrom those of Dale as author or editor.No one would dispute that Karl Polanyi’s scholarly work was closely entangled with histurbulent life, which consisted of successive westwards migrations. Born into theprosperous Pollacsek family in 1886 in Vienna, he was raised in Budapest, the capital of theother half of that remarkable Mitteleuropa empire. The change from Pollacsek to the magyarisant Polanyi symbolized a patriotism that Karl never lost. He fought for hisEmperor in Galicia during the First World War, experiencing a trauma that persistedbeyond the collapse of Hungary’s Republic of Councils in 1919. As a student (of law) beforethe war he had already experienced the collapse of his father’s railway interests andacquired political experience as an organizer of the Galilei Circle and the Radical BourgeoisParty.2 His radicalism took a more distinct socialist turn in the 1920s “im roten Wien”where, by now married to the communist Ilona Duczyńska, he earned his living as ajournalist with the Österreichische Volkswirt. He took on Ludwig von Mises in the “socialistcalculation” debate, but preferred the ethical idealism of Christian guild socialism to theeconomic determinism of historical materialism. Christian networks helped him find aroute to England in 1932, where he taught unemployed workers and used his spare time tocompile the notes which led eventually to The Great Transformation. This was written upduring a wartime sojourn in Vermont and published in 1944. Alas it was not enough tobring him any job offers in Britain. After considering a return to Hungary, in 1947 he tookup an offer from New York (Columbia University), though due to Ilona’s communism hewas obliged to commute to his workplace from his new home in Ontario. The darkest years© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 2 / 6Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016of the Cold War were years of enormous intellectual productivity for Karl Polanyi. After the1956 revolution he paid two emotional visits to his beloved Hungary and, shortly before hisdeath in 1964, his last intellectual project was the establishment of a new journal, Co-Existence.Gareth Dale has done an outstanding job in linking life and oeuvre, emulating themultidisciplinary range of his subject along the way. He has combed the archives, especiallythat of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, Montréal,and drawn extensively on Polanyi’s voluminous correspondence. He has worked closelywith Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, born in Vienna in 1923 and herself adistinguished development economist. But Dale knows when to question both recollectionsof the daughter and self-mythologizing in print by the father. He is not afraid to criticizepolemical hyperbole (of which there is rather a lot in every phase of Polanyi’s career). Itbecomes clear in the Epilogue to the biography that Dale’s own political sympathies are notidentical to those of his subject. He develops his own arguments more vigorously in thePluto volume, in detailed studies that range from Ancient History to the current crisis of theEuropean Union. In this volume, Dale himself is not above the occasional polemical jibeagainst targets such as Tony Blair and the ‘troika’ recently sent by ‘Euroland’ to substitutefor democracy in the Greece of today.One central issue, both intellectual and practical, is the nature of Polanyi’s socialism: was it‘hard’, ‘full-blooded’ Kapitalismuskritik, or was it a softer Fabian or SPD variant, oriented topragmatic reform rather than revolution? Certainly Karl Polanyi did not elaborate atheoretical system comparable to that of Karl Marx. His historical political economyreached out adventurously to anthropology, archaeology and history, and this interest waseventually reciprocated in each of these fields. But, as Dale noted already in his 2010introductory volume and the debate with Mises illustrated, Karl Polanyi remained loyal tothe value theory of the Austrian marginalists. A generation later, in Chapter 21 of The GreatTransformation, and later in the 1950s, he waxed eloquent on the freedom of the individualin a complex society. Yet those who applaud his utopian vision of a holistic “embedded”triad of economy/society/environment must face the uncomfortable fact that Karl Polanyicontinued to defend Soviet socialism long after the abuses of Stalin’s camps had beenexposed (a niece was a victim of the breakdown of the rule of law in the 1930s and waslucky to leave Moscow alive).In trying to explain such contradictions (the Pluto blurb opts for paradoxes) it is onlynatural to dig back into the author’s formative years. This is why Dale’s instigation of© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 3 / 6Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016translations (by Adam Fabry) of Karl Polanyi’s early Hungarian texts is so valuable. Polanyischolars unable to read German (which was of course Polanyi’s main language during hisVienna years) are already missing a great deal. Even the celebrated 1922 essay on“Sozialistische Rechnungslegung” has only just been translated into English.3 Thepublications in Hungarian from this era, and others dating back to the pre-war years, shedfurther invaluable light on the early influences. First and foremost there was Ernst Mach,the Vienna philosopher who was also important for that other key figure in the origins ofeconomic anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski in Cracow. It is fascinating to discover thatPolanyi was brought up as an Anglophile imbibing not only Shakespeare, but also HerbertSpencer and G. K. Chesterton. Before and for quite some time after the revolutions in St.Petersburg and Budapest, his grasp of socialist theory owed more to G. D. H. Cole and evenH. G. Wells than to Karl Marx. Many of the Hungarian pieces that Dale has assembled areshort and journalistic. They include unpublished fragments from later years and areorganized into five sections: “Religion, metaphysics and ethics”; “Political ideas andideologies”; “World politics and philosophy of history”; “Hungarian politics”;“Correspondence”. It is noteworthy that economy, the broad field with which the work ofthe mature Karl Polanyi is most closely associated, barely figures in this collection. He didnot turn seriously to economics until after his arrival in Vienna, when he was already in hismid-thirties. “Correspondence” is the shortest of the sections. Letters to celebratedcompatriots such as Mihály Károlyi and Georg Lukács whet the appetite for a fuller edition.Ideally this would include examples of the exchanges with his brother Michael, on whichDale draws frequently in the Columbia biography.Dale’s 40 page introduction to Fabry’s excellent translations is a kind of digest of the fullbiography. Of course, not even the full 400 page version can resolve all of the puzzles. Forhis dissertation as a student of law before the First World War, Polanyi was advised byFelix (Bódog) Somló. Somló is mainly remembered as a legal philosopher, but hispioneering study of primitive exchange was a significant contribution to the debates of thelater German Historical School.4 It is plausible to suggest that the seeds of Polanyi’s basiceconomic philosophy, including his notion of “embeddedness”, were planted by thismentor; but it seems that this cannot be confirmed by any surviving archival materials.Polanyi did not begin to take an interest in ethnographic data until the 1930s, when he readworks by Malinowski, Thurnwald and others as the foundation for his analysis in Chapter 4of The Great Transformation. Uncertainties persist concerning the economic anthropologyof this chapter. In his critique of market society, Karl Polanyi evidently shares somecommon ground with Marcel Mauss, yet he seems not to have read the Essai sur le don untilafter the Second World War and he was curiously critical of Mauss in a posthumous© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 4 / 6Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016publication.5 Although familiar over decades with the work of Durkheim, he seems never tohave undertaken a deeper engagement with the French tradition that might have led him torenege on his Austrian “metaphysical” premises.Where the data are lacking, the answers to such specific questions can never be knownwith certainty. But perhaps the deep differences between French and Central Europeanepistemologies are parochial and irrelevant when it comes to applying Polanyi’s critique ofthe recommodification of land, labour and money on a global scale in the contemporaryworld? In any case, like all good biographers, Dale convinces in subtle ways through acareful piecing together of the words and actions of his subject with diverse other sourcesand his deep knowledge of the encompassing milieu. In all three of these books, heemphasizes the Jewish component of the latter. This might seem uncontroversial in view ofall that historians have already taught us about Jewish contributions to the intellectualferment of the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the salon run by his ownmother, as at most meetings of the Galilei Circle, the Jewish intellectual elite was dominant.To grasp Karl Polanyi’s lifelong commitment to notions of progress and emancipation,including his critique of laissez faire and the subsequent rise of Fascism, his Jewishbackground seems fundamental. Yet he himself downplayed this. We know that he dabbledinstead in various periods of his life with Christian theology. He was a patriotic Hungarianwho (as Dale points out in Chapter 5 of the Pluto volume) had no sympathy with the “smallnations” seeking emancipation from magyar oppression in the last decades of the Empire.How ironic, then, that intellectuals such as Karl Polanyi are viewed as deeply problematicby the parties that dominate politics in Hungary today, just as they were by many of theirethnic Hungarian contemporaries a century ago. Polanyi’s model of a “double movement”is a simple tool which can help us to theorise why this has come about in the neoliberaldecades that have followed the decades of socialist embeddedness in Eastern Europe.One non-Jewish key figure in Karl Polanyi’s wider intellectual milieu was FerdinandTönnies, to whose influence Dale drew attention already in his 2010 study. We learn in theColumbia biography that Polanyi read the German sociologist closely in his Vienna period(if not before), adapting his distinction between “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” for hisown purposes. This is corroborated in Polanyi’s archival notes, though he seldom citedTönnies in publications. A niche alongside Tönnies might well turn out to be Polanyi’sultimate place in the sociological canon (when the present bubble bursts and the puntersmove their chips elsewhere). This would be a more than respectable position for a socialscience autodidact who did not land a university position until he was over sixty years old.© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 5 / 6Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising SteeplyChris Hann | 01.11.2016Endnoten1. Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi. The Limits of the Market, New York 2010.2. The Radical Party (as it was usually abbreviated) was a notable albeit short-lived voicefor liberal democracy, associated with the Freemasons and led by Oszkár Jászi, to whomPolanyi remained close throughout their decades of exile. The Galilei Circle was anunusually open, student-dominated association of intellectuals. In a letter to Jásziwritten in 1950, included in Dale’s edition of The Hungarian writings (pp. 227–230),Polanyi blames his own lack of political competence for the Circle’s failure to realize its“revolutionary potential”.3. Karl Polanyi, Socialist Accounting, transl. and with a foreword “Socialism and theEmbedded Economy” by Johanna Bockman, Ariane Fischer and David Woodruff, in:Theory and Society 45 (2016), 5, pp. 385–427 (original edition: SozialistischeRechnungslegung, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 49 (1922), 2, pp.377–420).4. Felix Somló, Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft, Brussels / Leipzig 1908.5. Vgl. Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man, New York 1977, p. 104. Chris HannProfessor Dr. Chris Hann is a social anthropologist and ethnologist. He is director of theMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Dieser Beitrag wurde redaktionell betreut von Karsten Malowitz.Artikel auf soziopolis.de:https://www.soziopolis.de/stocks-in-trilingual-polymath-rising-steeply.htmlPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 6 / 6

Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising Steeply: Three New Books on Karl Polanyi

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Stocks in Trilingual Polymath Rising Steeply: Three New Books on Karl Polanyi

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