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Originally presented as a paper at the 1991 Kent State conference, this essay offers Prosch’s interpretation of Polanyi’s views on social order and economics. It also engages “Popular Education in Economics,” which is included in this issue of TAD. [Editor’s Note: This paper was originally published in From Polanyi to the 21st Century: Proceedings of A Centennial Conference, Kent State University, April 11-13, 1991, Richard Gelwick, editor (The Polanyi Society 1997), 295-304. Apart from some minor formatting changes and the addition of keywords and abstract, we reprint the paper as is. Unfortunately the superscripts for the endnotes are missing.] Now that Eastern Europe has discovered from experience the truth of what Michael Polanyi maintained so long ago: it is as impossible to operate a centrally planned economy as it is for a cat to swim the Atlantic Ocean, it might be useful for us all to look again at why he thought this was so, and at how he thought unplanned economies could be managed. My first introduction to Polanyi’s thought was to his views on economics and freedom in my reading of his The Logic of Liberty, which had just then come out. The book consists of a collection of his essays which had been published from 1941-50 in various journals. The economic views which he expressed in this book are part and parcel of its larger thesis concerning how a free society is structured. Thus the title: The Logic of Liberty. Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:3 36 He held that a free society is not an utterly free libertarian, open society, where everything is up for grabs, including even basic beliefs, the sharing of which made free society possible. A free society, he held, rested on a faith, held by the people in common, in the values of truth, honesty, justice, beauty, and God, and thus also respect for the freedom of the communities, or enclaves, which people have formed in their pursuit of such values, namely their scientific, legal, artistic, and religious communities. We have a free society, he claimed, when the value of such things as these are respected by people in such a society and are thus held to be of right free from State control, and we don’t have a free society when they are not so respected. The fact, which he went on to assert, that these commitments are and must remain held only by faith, that they cannot be proved to be worthy of commitment, struck me at first as being odd, since they have been argued for succinctly by many of our great philosophers for something like 2,000 years. I knew these philosopher’s writings rather well and I knew how cogent their arguments were. I came to realize, of course, after Personal Knowledge and other works of his, that by “proved” Michael meant logically or rationally demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt. His distinction between “proved beyond any conceivable doubt” and “proved beyond any reasonable doubt” made perfect sense to me. A philosopher’s basic principles could not, of course, be deduced from something more basic and thus could not be logically demonstrated or proved. Thus, “proved beyond any reasonable doubt” was the best I had ever supposed could be done with any philosopher’s basic principles. Polanyi, however, went on to show (beyond, it seems to me, any reasonable doubt) something that should, perhaps, be obvious, but the drastic import of which is often overlooked, viz., that we can have no explicit way of showing that any decision or judgment we reach is (objectively) beyond any reasonable doubt. So we Polanyians are and must remain obscurantists in the minds of our contemporary “analytical” friends. For, he held, all our decisions, including, of course, our judgments on our basic principles, are simply our own perceptions that they are sound or true, that they are adequate to our universal intent, and these focal perceptions of ours are actually rooted in myriads of subsidiary clues, in which, he held, we only dwell tacitly when we see, standing in them, that our decisions are right and sound. We do not explicitly deduce from these clues the logical conclusions which are our decisions. We cannot even explicitly know all of them. This distinction between “dwelling in” these clues to the decision and “deducing” the decision from these clues, is, I presume, well understood by you who are familiar with Michael’s thought. Thus the logic of liberty in a society requires that its liberty rest upon a tacitly and commonly held faith in what Polanyi called our traditional values. Within the bounds of these commonly held values resided the liberty of people to hold diverse views about

Polanyi’s Economics and the New Start in Europe