Karl Polanyi. Группа авторов

When he first arrived in 1933, he had no fixed employment. His support system there was Betty and John MacMurray and the Grant family who belonged to something called the Christian Left. They were Christian socialists. There were also communists and there were religious leaders, mostly Protestant. He wrote an important essay on the essence of fascism, which he considered to be an affront to Christian values, that would be included in a book he co-edited, Christianity and the Social Revolution. My father also led a study group of his English Christian friends, on the two volumes of Marx’s early writings, including The German Ideology and the famous Paris Manuscripts, which had just been published in 1932. He read to them from these writings, translating into English as he went along. He was very excited about these works. I remember the sense of his agreement with them. I call Marx’s early writings the common starting point of Marx and Polanyi.

       He says as much in The Great Transformation. So what did his teaching involve? How did England influence his thinking?

      POLANYI LEVITT: It was not until 1937 that Karl obtained employment with the Workers Education Association (WEA), a very large and very old adult education movement. In England it is connected to Ruskin College that enables working-class people, who were not able to go to university, to obtain further education. My father got the chance to teach in English provincial towns in Kent and Sussex. He stayed overnight with the families. He got to know more intimately the life of working-class families, and he was shocked at the conditions he found and, to be honest, the low cultural level. By comparison with working-class people in Vienna they were culturally poorer, even though Austria was a far poorer country in monetary terms than Britain. The subject that he was required to teach was English social and economic history, about which he did not know anything. It was a period of self-study for him. If you look at the back of the book – The Great Transformation – you will see the enormous range of the studies he undertook. It is very similar to Marx’s Grundrisse that interestingly enough relies on similar authors – Ricardo, Malthus and others – writing on the early industrial revolution. So, my mother wrote – and it is written in the foreword to the book called The Livelihood of Man, which was published posthumously – that it was in England that Karl put down the roots of a sacred hate of market society, which divested people of their humanity. That is how she put it. Then, of course, he discovered the class system in England. It consisted of differences of speech. And he described the class system as similar to caste in India, and race in the United States.

       In 1940 Karl Polanyi is invited to give lectures at Bennington College in the US.

      POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, in Bennington he received a two-year fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to write The Great Transformation. He had good support from the president of Bennington, but he had to report to the Rockefeller Foundation. Whatever he gave them to read, they did not like it. They had very serious doubts about his suitability to be in a university. They wrote that he really was more interested – and listen to this, as a put-down – in “Hungarian law, and college lecturing, and philosophy.” To say he was interested in philosophy is a total put-down. However, they renewed the grant. And at the end of the two years – we’re now in 1943 – my father was very keen to return to England. He did not want to stay in the United States. He wanted to participate in the post-war planning of England. By this time the Battle of Stalingrad had turned the tide of the war; it was very clear that the allies were going to win. And he left the two penultimate chapters of The Great Transformation unfinished. And if you look, those chapters have traces of being unfinished. Not the last chapter, but the two chapters before the last one. If he had stayed to finish the book, I think that the draft outline of a proposed book, “Common Man’s Masterplan” is really what he might have included in those last two chapters. Something of that. He left it with colleagues. There was a lot of contention and quarrel about these two penultimate chapters.

       But eventually he would return to the US to take a job at Columbia University, but your mother was prohibited from living in the US, so they ended up living in Canada.

      POLANYI LEVITT: The other option would have been to stay in England, where my father could have continued working for the WEA. But it was also clear that really, he had something to say. He had a book to write. And he had work to do. And he was not going to get any appointment at any university in England. That was very clear. So in 1947 came the offer from Columbia. It was based on The Great Transformation. The book had a foreword by Robert MacIver of Columbia University which is known in schools of economics for its institutionalism, and matched – in a sense – Polanyi’s approach. Then, in London, Ilona was told that she was prohibited from entering the United States. It was a big problem. My father was very, very upset. He wanted her to persuade the Americans to change their mind. And she said no way. That is not possible. So, he conceived the idea that perhaps they might make a home in Canada, and eventually he persuaded her that this was a feasible solution. And she made a beautiful home for them on the outskirts of Toronto, in a rural setting – a tiny little house. And that was in 1950. He commuted like a student, from New York. He came for Christmas and Easter, and summer vacations. And when he finally retired from teaching in 1953, he spent more time in Canada. His students came to visit him constantly. And many other people came.

       And his research turned in a new direction. He became more interested in anthropological studies. But that I’m afraid is a story for another conversation. Thank you very much for this wonderful account of Karl Polanyi’s life. You have delved into the extraordinary prehistory of The Great Transformation. I think we now understand far better how it was the product of very different historical experiences in the twentieth century and why it remains so important today.