Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left

Abstract

Karl Polanyi—Gareth Dale concludes in the epilogue to his expansive biography—was more ‘typical’ of his generation of social democrats than a ‘dominant’ figure among them. In following his life we are not looking at a pivotal presence but for whom things might have turned out differently. We meet, rather, a person who ‘encapsulates a historical moment, their individuality condensing the defining elements of a movement or era’. Polanyi was not the outstanding figure among his generation of intellectuals in Budapest before the war, Vienna between the wars or Britain and the United States from 1934 onwards. But he is a protagonist —Dale suggests—through whom the ‘details’ of the intellectual movements with which he is associated (liberal reformism in post-Habsburg Hungary; socialism in interwar Britain; pluralism in the postwar social-scientific academy) ‘can be limned in a way that is not possible when a dominant figure is selected for portrayal’. (p. 283)