Karl Polanyi

He married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, of Polish-Hungarian background. Their daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt carried on the family tradition of economic academic research.

In London

Polanyi was asked to resign from Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria. He left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what later became The Great Transformation. However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College. The book was published in 1944, to great acclaim. In it, Polanyi described the enclosure process in England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century.

United States and Canada

Polanyi joined the staff of

After the war, Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University (1947–1953). However, his wife, Ilona Duczyńska (1897–1978), had a background as a former communist, which made gaining an entrance visa in the United States impossible. As a result, they moved to Canada, and Polanyi commuted to New York City. In the early 1950s, Polanyi received a large grant from the Ford Foundation to study the economic systems of ancient empires.

Having described the emergence of the modern economic system, Polanyi now sought to understand how "the economy" emerged as a distinct sphere in the distant past. His seminar at Columbia drew several famous scholars and influenced a generation of teachers, resulting in the 1957 volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his later years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he lived in Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.

Selected works

• "Socialist Accounting" (1922)
• "The Essence of Fascism" (1933–1934); article^[17]
• The Great Transformation (1944)
• "Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?", The London Quarterly of World Affairs, vol. 10 (3) (1945)
• Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957, edited and with contributions by others)
• Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966)
• George Dalton (ed), Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968); collected essays and selections from his work.
• Harry W. Pearson (ed.), The Livelihood of Man (Academic Press, 1977)
• Karl Polanyi, For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 (Polity Press, 2014),
  ISBN 978-0745684444
• Gareth Dale (ed), Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (Manchester University Press, 2016)

• Michael Polanyi (brother)
• John Polanyi (nephew)
• Eva Zeisel (cousin)

Notes

References

Library resources about
Karl Polanyi

---

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

By Karl Polanyi

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Block, Fred (2008). "Polanyi's Double Movement and the Reconstruction of Critical Theory". Revue Interventions économiques [En ligne]. 38 (38).
  doi:10.4000/interventionseconomiques.274
  .
• Dale, Gareth (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, Polity,
  ISBN 978-0-7456-4072-3
• Dale, Gareth (2016), Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0745335186
• Dale, Gareth (2016). Karl Polanyi : a life on the left. New York: Columbia University Press.
  OCLC 948826672
  .
• Harrod, Tanya (15 January 2012). "Eva Zeisel obituary". The Guardian.
• McRobbie, Kenneth, ed. (1994), Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Black Rose Books Ltd.,
  ISBN 1-895431-84-0
• McRobbie, Kenneth; Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, eds. (2000), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Black Rose Books Ltd.,
  ISBN 1-55164-142-9
• Mendell, Marguerite; Salée, Daniel (1991), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, St. Martins Press,
  ISBN 0-312-04783-5
• Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, ed. (1990), The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration, Black Rose Books Ltd.,
  ISBN 0-921689-80-2
• Silver, Morris (2007). "Redistribution and Markets in the Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi". Antiguo Oriente. 5: 89–112.
• Stanfield, J. Ron (1986), The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood, Macmillan,
  ISBN 0-333-39629-4

Further reading

• Robert Kuttner, "The Man from Red Vienna" (review of Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Columbia University Press, 381 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 55–57. "In sum, Polanyi got some details wrong, but he got the big picture right. Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism. (Robert Kuttner, p. 57.)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Karl Polanyi.

• Karl Polanyi Digital Archive
• The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy – The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University web site.
• Karl Polanyi Wiki
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944) Review Essay by Anne Mayhew, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee
• Profile on Karl Polanyi – On the History of Economic Thought Website
• The free market is an impossible utopia (2014-07-18), The Washington Post. A conversation with
  Fred Block and Margaret Somers
  on their book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard University Press, 2014). The book argues that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to help understand economic recessions and their aftermath.
• [1] – Why Two Karls Are Better Than One: Integrating Polyani and Marx in a
  Critical Theory of the Current Crisis by Nancy Fraser
• Works by or about Karl Polanyi at Internet Archive