Book Review: Karl
Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale
blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/09/30/book-review-karl-polanyi-a-life-on-the-left-by-gareth-dale/
30/09/2016
In Karl Polanyi: A Life on
the Left, Gareth Dale
continues his longstanding intellectual engagement with one of the
twentieth-century’s leading theorists of the market economy in a biography that
traces the development of Polanyi’s thought against the backdrop of his life.
While the book may not fully grapple with the contradictions that emerge within
the account, Chris Moreh
praises this laudable and definitive work that is likely to inspire a new
generation of activist scholars through its exploration of Polanyi’s life and
times.
Karl
Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Gareth Dale. Columbia University
Press. 2016.
Find this book:
It is unlikely that any social
scientist today will be unfamiliar with at least some of the works of Karl
Polanyi (1886–1964), the social historian of the market economy whose
biography, authored by Gareth Dale, was recently published. For the uninitiated,
Dale’s previous book Karl
Polanyi: The Limits of the Market serves as a
perfect introduction. In this he critically examined the Polanyian
oeuvre and the main concepts emerging from it – such as the distinction between
‘embedded’ and ‘disembedded’ economies; the ‘ports of trade’ characteristic of
the former and the ‘fictitious commodities’ dominating the latter; the
‘economistic fallacy’ by which mainstream economics has linked market behaviour
with human nature; and, perhaps most famously, the Toynbee-inspired postulate
of the ‘double movement’, in which the expansion of marketisation into new
areas of life necessarily triggers a protectionist reaction that safeguards the
survival of society.
Nevertheless,
despite the conviction with which this critical introduction thrust Polanyi to
the forefront of socio-economic theory, Dale felt obliged to admit the dilemma
he encountered while writing the book: namely, that ‘a fully developed account
of Polanyi’s work requires a close look at his life’ as well as an
understanding of ‘that ‘‘Great Generation’’ of Jewish Budapest intellectuals to
which he belonged’ (The Limits of the
Market, 6). A Life on the Left,
alongside
shorter
biographical articles and an edited collection of Polanyi’s hitherto
unpublished works (Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings), takes up this
challenge.
There is no
nutshell that could accommodate Polanyi’s eventful life, and this becomes
apparent from the pages of Dale’s biography. Born in Vienna ‘of liberal minded
Jewish parents of the upper classes […] of German culture and western
education’ – in Polanyi’s own words (11) – he spent most of his youth in
Budapest. In his formative years in the Hungarian capital, Polanyi became
involved in various organisational, educational and political activities, and
developed the Christian socialist worldview that he would espouse, in one form
or another, throughout his lifetime.
Emerging
from the turmoil of the First World War into a new life in ‘Red Vienna’, he
began a fulfilling journalistic career and experienced for a whole decade the
possibility of social democracy, while developing more nuanced guild socialist
arguments through direct polemics with Ludwig von Mises and other notable
thinkers of the Austrian School. At the end of 1933 – when ‘Vienna was Red no
more’ (109) – he resettled to Britain. It was there that he ‘arrived at the
thesis for which he was to make his name’ (156).
The manuscript of his magnum opus, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, was completed while in exile in the United States during World War II. The book, however, ‘gained only a ‘‘marginal’’ place in mainstream and leftist social analysis [in the US], while in Britain it was ‘‘greeted with a deafening silence’”. It would only gain a larger readership in the 1980s, but ‘that turn of fortune lies outwith the scope of this biography’ (173). Unable to find appropriate employment in Britain after the war despite several attempts, Polanyi eventually settled at Columbia University, where he developed a new body of work on the ‘substantive economics’ of pre-capitalist societies. His intellectual story ends with the address delivered in the autumn of 1963 at the University of Budapest: ‘the same institution that had expelled him from its student body nearly six decades earlier and from whose podium he had denounced the rising communist tide in early 1919’ (280).
Around this
flimsy skeleton and across seven well-rounded chapters Dale builds up a sense
of a person not in isolation, but rather as embedded in intricate familial and
intellectual relationships. Based on substantial archival research in Montréal,
Chicago, New York, Oxford and Budapest, supplemented with interviews with
Polanyi’s family members, friends and former students, the book can safely be
considered the definitive biography of Polanyi,
unlikely to become rivalled by any other that may emerge on the wave of
Polanyi’s increasing popularity.
The book not
only benefits from its author’s deep familiarity and sympathy with Polanyi’s
work, but also from Dale’s skilful pen. His masterful balancing of
chronological and topical exposition should satisfy most of his readers, while
the sparse and well-placed apparent trivia – such as the humorous illustration
of Polanyi’s limited cookery skills (148) – will offer a moment of repose to
the reader, before they begin to assess the broader significance of such
details.
Perhaps the
only times when the text leaves us expecting more are the references to
‘contradictions’ in Polanyi’s thought and actions, which remain hanging in the
narrative as impenetrable black boxes. Such instances will remind the reader
that:
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the many unresolved contradictions in his work […] such puzzles
and paradoxes provided the initial impetus for the writing of this biography,
in part because to understand them requires a thinking through of Polanyi’s
life and times, but also because it is the tensions and contradictions in his
personal commitments and his oeuvre that give them their engagingly maverick
character ( 7).
That these
‘contradictions’ remain unpacked in the biography may be due to Dale’s
treatment of Polanyi as a Lukacsian ‘typical character’: one who ‘is not the
average representative of a social class or a historical movement nor an
allegorical avatar but a person in whom general aspects common to the mass are
synthesized with the peculiarities of their own singular life story’ (283).
Insofar as Polanyi’s ‘individuality [is] condensing the defining elements of a
movement or era’ (283), it could hardly be reduced to anything but
contradictory particles.
Rather
than an exercise in elucidating individual conflicts in Polanyi’s life and
work, A Life on the Left should be
seen as another laudable step in Dale’s intellectual struggle to reveal the
dangers of neoliberal market fundamentalism and to delineate the possibilities
of a ‘countermovement’. Polanyi’s life is, above all else, desired to inspire a
new generation of activist scholars who will see in him an intellectual hero,
one able to unify around a higher cause voices on the Left as yet disjointed by
various ‘tensions and contradictions’. As such, the book is anything but an
antiquarian undertaking, inasmuch as Polanyi’s work is far from merely
historical. ‘Despite common misconceptions’ – Dale reminds us – The Great Transformation in the title of
Polanyi’s now famous book ‘alludes to his prognostication, not to any
historical sociology’ (170). And yet, as Dale has argued elsewhere, the primary
significance of Polanyi’s work lies not in ‘any one or other of his specific
theses’, but in ‘the general example it sets’ through ‘the sort of critically
engaged social science of which Karl Polanyi is an outstanding representative’
(The Limits of the Market, 250).
-------------
Chris Moreh is a Research Fellow at the ESRC
Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton.
He received
his PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, and
holds an MA in
Sociology
and Social Anthropology from Central European University, and an MA in Cultural
Anthropology from Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. His recent research
focuses on the political sociology of transnational citizenship, primarily in
the context of migration from Central Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom,
having previously studied migration to Spain and Hungary. He has also conducted
research on topics as varied as gentrification and urban heritage, and the
political discourse of Asianisation. He Tweets @CGMoreh, and his writings are available
on academia.edu.
Read more by
Chris Moreh.
Note: This review gives the views of
the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the
London School of Economics.
Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books
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