Abstract
Reviewed by: Ola Innset, European University Institute, Italy
Gareth Dale’s previous work includes the monograph Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (2010), Reconstructing Karl Polanyi (2016) and the edited collection, Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (2016). As such, he should be well equipped for the task of writing this book, which looks set to be the definitive intellectual biography of this far-ranging Austro-Hungarian intellectual.
One of my favourite things about Dale’s latest and, it is promised, last book on the work of Karl Polanyi is its subtitle: A Life on the Left. It would be impossible to appreciate Polanyi’s far-ranging ideas without the context of what Dale, in his epilogue, calls ‘A Lost World of Socialism’, and the writer does well to situate his subject’s thinking in relation to the many political movements he took part in, opposed and observed. In his younger days in Budapest, Polanyi could be considered a ‘liberal socialist’ and something of a believer in free trade. Upon return from the First World War, he sided with the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic, but as part of the more bourgeois wing of the coalition behind social democratic prime minister Mihály Károlyi. It could be argued that Polanyi’s background in liberalism helps explain some of his later, more radical work. During the early, German-language version of the infamous Socialist Calculation Debates, whose backdrop was the extensive municipal socialism in the ‘Red Vienna’ to which Polanyi had moved in 1918, Polanyi advocated a form of guild socialism. Inspired by English socialists like G.D.H. Cole, Polanyi attempted to create a blueprint for a socialist society in which states did not ‘intervene in economic functions that should by rights be the domain of trade unions (‘guilds’)’ (87). At early stages, and also in this transitional phase then, Dale argues that Polanyi was ‘occasionally susceptible to the ‘economistic fallacy’ of which in later life he would become a zealous critic’ (50). Perhaps Polanyi’s background in liberalism does something to explain the way in which he, somewhat similarly to right-wing opponents such as the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), saw markets as operating according to a logic of their own with which state interference could have grave consequences. In The Great Transformation (1944) he famously argued that capitalism turned land, labour and capital into ‘fictitious commodities’ to be traded in markets, something which tore at the very fabric of society and prompted counter-movements as society tried to ‘protect itself’ against market arrangements. In this sense, Polanyi agreed with his contemporaries, the early neoliberals, that ‘interference’ with markets lay behind the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s. At a deeper level, however, he argued that it was liberalism itself which was to blame for ‘the cataclysm’, due to the utopian attempt at separating the economy from society. Polanyi would spend much of the rest of his life studying the economies of ancient Greece and the African kingdom of Dahomey, always emphasizing how markets were only one possible mode of exchange, and not at all as ‘natural’ as the ideology of laissez-faire would have it.
The quality of this book, and yet again, its subtitle, is apparent also when one thinks of the many biographies written of Polanyi’s main opponents: the previously mentioned early neoliberal intellectuals like Mises and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). They shared much of the same context as Polanyi and many of the same intellectual tools, but approached the problems of their times with a radically different political outlook. Hayek arguably participated much more actively in politics than Polanyi, setting up the well-funded Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, and helping to invent a new form of political organization through a vast network of neoliberal think-tanks, which now extends across the globe. However, the day when the Adam Smith Institute publishes a biography of Hayek with the subtitle A Life on the Right does not appear to be on the horizon. This is a shame, since it could cast much needed light on social theories that are often presented as almost a-political, or as expressions of some sort of ‘classical’ wisdom. Like Polanyi, Gareth Dale is a politically engaged scholar, but his impressive biography manages to be both sympathetic and critical. More importantly, his penetrating analyses do more than just restate Polanyi’s own views and then criticize them from a contemporary standpoint. Through multiple layers of contextualization, Polanyi’s work is illuminated in ways neither he himself nor contemporary critics without Dale’s fine-tuned appreciation of this period in time, would have been able to achieve. By placing Polanyi’s thought in the intersections between the grand problems of modernity, his vague visions for a socialist future, and the concrete political struggles in which he took part, Dale has delivered much-needed, excellent scholarship on the intellectual history of the twentieth century.