Abstract
In The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi, a stylishly written, frequently creative and compelling book —albeit messy, with some significant gaps in information—the Hungarian philosopher and historian of science Gábor Bíró takes on the economic theory of the other Polanyi, Michael. Who knew he was an economist as well? Michael Polanyi started life in Hungary as a medical doctor; in 1916 while on sick leave from the front line during World War I, he wrote a PhD thesis in chemistry; in 1933, with Hitler taking power and Polanyi being Jewish, he moved from Germany to England, becoming Professor of Chemistry at Manchester University (and, later, Fellow of the Royal Society); and from 1948 he was concurrently appointed Professor of Social Science. In 1958 he authored Personal Knowledge, a critique of positivism often considered to be the conceptual basis for Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
During especially the 1930s and 1940s, Polanyi also somehow managed to squeeze in theorizing the economy, writing about the economies of both capitalism and communism. In 1940, he released the first-ever film made about economic theory, the not-Hollywood-titled Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved. It was a forty-minute animation with hand-drawn consumers (“houseworkers,” all women), workers (all men, some in flat caps, others in bowlers), coinage and goods circulating among homes, shops, factories, and banks to illustrate the operation of the Keynesian economy.
For reasons never fully explained, Bíró terms Polanyi’s approach “postmodern economics” (pp. 1–2). It is neither related to Lyotard’s (1984) classic statement (although he is cited), nor to post-Marxists who used the term such as Gibson-Graham (1996). Rather, Bíró uses the phrase to signal a third-way Polanyian redemption between two socially catastrophic extremes: the Scylla of unadorned Western European and North American laissez-faire capitalism and the Charybdis of Soviet authoritarian command-economy state socialism. Pure market-based capitalism fails because it presumes (and creates) calculative machinic agents, soulless and hollow, stuck in a spiritual waste land. And state socialism fails because it denies democracy and liberalism, Polanyi’s highest political ideals, reducing individuals to mere dupes of a pernicious collective state ideology.
For Polanyi, the whole shebang—”liberalism, democracy, and Western civilization” (p. 152)—was consequently in danger of going under. It needed to be rescued. His work in economics, Bíró contends, was the lifeboat. That goes to Polanyi’s film. To be saved, to be good liberal citizens, sentient and fully formed, people—”the masses” (p. 153)—must understand the nature of the economy, and for that they needed appropriate education. Here Bíró draws a parallel between the projects of Polanyi and another twentieth-century polymath, Ivan Illich (pp. 151–56). While Illich was much more radical than Polanyi, Illich believed change could come about through only appropriate education, detached from the state, delivered by “convivial tools” allowing “individual freedom,” “personal interdependence,” and the realization of “intrinsic ethical values” (p. 152). Polanyi’s film was his version of a “convivial tool,” in his case, to stave off looming social disaster.
I admired the sweep of Bíró’s book, the chutzpah in taking on the entire fate of western civilization. Commendable also was his use of Polanyi’s archive, especially his correspondence, which allowed him to draw into his narrative key public intellectuals, both domestic and émigrés, living in interwar and war-time England—George Orwell, Victor Gollancz, Arthur Koestler, Harold Laski, Friedrich von Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, even T. S. Eliot. And I appreciated the focus on big questions like state versus market, or “moral deafness” (p. 151), or the nature of science. But there were a number of things not explained that should have been and material that I expected to be there but wasn’t.
The lack of an explanation for the term “postmodern” was perhaps the most puzzling. Another was the unexplained relation of Polanyi to Keynesian economics. Throughout the book there was an implication that Polanyi thought the third way between market fundamentalism and a state-controlled command economy was Keynesianism. Polanyi’s film, after all, was an exposition of Keynesian theory. Presumably Polanyi thought people should see the film because Keynesianism would be the means through which western civilization would be saved. It is true that Keynesianism is often portrayed as occupying a middle ground. Joan Robinson always said Keynes’s economics was pink, lying between the deep blue of unembellished neoclassicism and the bright red of Marxism. If so, does that mean Polanyi, contrary to the book’s title, never really had his own economic thought? His was really only Keynes’s? That also makes the claim about postmodern economics even stranger. There are post-Keynesians but not postmodern Keynesians. The larger issue of the relation between Polanyi and Keynes needed reflection and interpretation.
Also missing from Bíró’s book was the context both to understand Polanyi’s life and the larger setting, both national and international, in which his work was carried out and to which it was also a response. In an online ad for the book distributed by its publisher, Routledge, “biography” is listed as the volume’s “genre.” Not really. There are few biographical details given, not even a basic chronology of Polanyi’s life. Occasionally aspects of his career as a chemist appear, but seldom, and Polanyi’s book, Personal Knowledge, is not even in the bibliography. One might make an argument that Polanyi’s biographical details and future works are irrelevant given Bíró’s focus on a limited period of his life, the 1930s and 1940s, and a single interest, his economic thought. In this case, however, such absences go against Polanyi’s own approach to understanding knowledge, including presumably his own, as personal, thus requiring some biographical elaboration. Similarly, I would have benefited from knowing more about the larger historical and intellectual context informing the debates found in Polanyi’s correspondence quoted throughout the book. Those epistolic voices were fascinating, but they were sometimes clumped together as a wodge of responses without much sense of either how they related one to another or to their broader context, making the text feel untidy, not fully integrated, and at odds with Bíró’s otherwise elegant prose.
Likely, this is being too critical. I was glad to read Bíró’s book. I’d been reading the other Polanyi since I was an undergraduate. I appreciated now learning about the brother. My main complaint, I think, is that I wanted always to know more about Michael Polanyi than Bíró provided. But maybe that only shows he did his job well. I eagerly await the film, “The Brothers Polanyi.”