English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

This essay introduces Michael Polanyi’s 1937 lecture “Popular Education in Economics” and its context. This lecture is an important document sketching Polanyi’s initial critique of traditional liberalism and its alternatives (communism and fascism). Polanyi emphasizes the importance of mass enlightenment by education in economics in order to revise laissez faire economics “by some other means than civil war,” because until recently “man was not intelligent enough to understand the economic system.” Polanyi calls for “progress by persuasion” in order to empower man to master and direct the economic life. For the first time, Polanyi refers to the work of Keynes as an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of communism while allowing a reframing of liberal ideas. Introduction: Polanyi in Manchester, 1937 The year 1937 should have been a busy year for Michael Polanyi. He was 46 years old, a time when he was energetic, intellectually sharp, and successful as a scientist doing research in chemistry, but tormented by his intellectual ambitions and the dramas in his country and family. Chemistry was becoming a world too small for his concerns and ambitions. He was committed to applying his skills, learned and improved during the previous twenty years in the frontier of the world in science, in order to understand more than chemistry. He also aspired to understand his world and its tragic destiny. Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:3 9 His mind was full of ideas about a better understanding of the world—the world of economics and politics, but also the world of science itself. From 1933 to 1936, his first three years in Manchester after leaving Berlin, Polanyi had more than fifty publications, all but three in the area of chemistry. But now an important dimension of his intellectual concerns was not about his research in chemistry, but about investigating economics and public policy, or the economic foundations of political agency. In June of the previous year (1936), Polanyi had delivered a lecture to the Association for Education in Citizenship in Manchester about the “visual presentation of social matters.” I argued in an earlier issue of TAD that this was a foundational presentation for Polanyi’s thought, one that informed his next steps and inspired his efforts to produce a film on economics as an experimental prototype of a much more ambitious program of enlightenment using new media (films) to help both mass and specialized education. This seems to have been part of a turning point in his career, although his concerns had roots in earlier years. The working group and the meetings promoted by Polanyi in Berlin in 1930 brought natural scientists and economists together seems to have been the ignition point of these new paths. In February of 1937, Polanyi delivered another lecture at another conference, but not in the areas of chemistry or science. Scott and Moleski (2005) say this “extensive lecture” was delivered to the Manchester Political Society. This lecture follows up and complements his 1936 lecture (“Visual Presentation on Social Matters”), delivered less than one year before. The first section (two pages in the original) was not actually read during his presentation to the Political Society. We can understand this introductory section as a challenge to the political positions of some scholars and a call for political action by the academy: “The destruction of freedom of thought has been accomplished without much resistance on the part of those whose profession is science and learning” (PE 18). Polanyi affirmed and then proposed that each member of the society present his or her “personal approach to politics.” Polanyi considered this to be “a proper test” for the society, and then he moved into his own presentation which was a reframing of liberal policies. We do not know very much about the Manchester Political Society, which apparently included scholars, but we can imagine how challenging and disturbing these statements by Polanyi could have been. Maybe he had doubts about the sincerity of some of the members of the society; maybe he was considering previous political positions and omissions by some of them. We do not know, but in the end it seems Polanyi used his good diplomatic sense and took the option not to read these two pages, possibly to avoid potential conflict. Perhaps he was not very sure the society could survive such polemics and declined to test the water. Polanyi lectured again, one month later (March 1937), this time discussing the lessons of the Russian Revolution. He later wrote a proposal for “a new research section”

“On Popular Education in Economics”