Karl Polanyi. Группа авторов
Novy, Brigitte Aulenbacher: It’s Time for Change!
Markus Marterbauer, Andreas Novy: Why Polanyi in Vienna Today?
Brigitte Aulenbacher, Fabienne Décieux and Christian Leitner: Brush Up Your Polanyi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BRIGITTE AULENBACHER AND ANDREAS NOVY
Karl Polanyi was engaged as a journalist, educator and scientist and his work provides a wide range of economic, cultural, historical and anthropological perspectives on industrial civilisation and capitalist market societies. How mankind can survive both, this most pressing question of his times, has not lost its significance. This book addresses academic and non-academic audiences, strives to be of interest to those who have never heard of Karl Polanyi, but also to long-standing experts from diverse disciplines. It aims to inspire public and scientific debates as well as teaching within and beyond universities. And it seeks to give intellectual support to initiatives, movements and policymakers that strive to put the economy in its place. Such a collective effort cannot succeed without generous support.
To begin with, this book would not have been possible without the generous and ongoing support from Falter, the leading Viennese weekly and our co-editor Armin Thurnher. Originally published as a supplement to Falter, it brings together a unique combination of texts, photos and graphics. The enlarged and revised German and English book edition have maintained this light and stimulating style of a weekly.
The publication emerged in the context of the foundation of the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS) in Vienna in 2018. IKPS, from the start, aimed to provide accessible debates on contemporary challenges, inspired by the thought of Karl Polanyi. We would like to thank the Vienna Chamber of Labour and our co-editor Markus Marterbauer for hosting and funding the inaugural conference of the IKPS as well as further activities and publications. Karl Polanyi had a strong affinity to popular education and the work of the Chamber of Labour. No other location better symbolises Polanyi’s ambition: There is the need for clear ethical and political positioning, without abdicating the necessity of gathering diverse perspectives and stimulating controversies to better grasp current problems and identify potential alternatives.
It is a great honour that Kari Polanyi Levitt accepted the invitation to co-edit the English version of the book. With her amazing work on the legacy of her father she has become a driving force of the renaissance of Polanyi’s oeuvre. As an honorary president of the International Karl Polanyi Society she has stimulated vivid and pluralist contemporary discussions in the Polanyi community without abdicating a proper reading of her father’s work. We thank her for her many inspiring ideas, her important contributions and her ongoing collaboration.
It is difficult to apply for funding for the translation of a book that is neither directed solely to an academic publication nor a broader popular segment of readers. Therefore, we would like to thank the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and Michael Brie for their generous support. We would also like to thank Jan-Peter Herrmann and Carla Welch for facing the challenges of the academic and journalistic style of the book and providing a thoughtful and precise translation. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to Tobias Eder and Melissa Erhardt who contributed to the copy-editing of the texts and the work on the literature.
Without all this support, it would not have been possible to publish this edition.
FOREWORD
MARGUERITE MENDELL
In 1988, two years after an international conference hosted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest to commemorate Karl Polanyi’s centenary, Kari Polanyi Levitt and I established the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University Montreal. The Institute would provide a space to continue the interdisciplinary dialogue begun in Budapest, inspired by the life and works of Karl Polanyi. Yet the translation of The Great Transformation into Hungarian would have to wait 13 years. Within Hungarian academic circles at the time, Polanyi was largely known for his work in economic anthropology and economic history, with some exceptions. Situating his work politically generated much debate, especially following the publication of Polányi Károly: Fasizmus, Demokrácia, ipari Társadalom (Fascism, Democracy and Industrial Civilisation. Unpublished Work of Karl Polanyi.), a collection of Polanyi’s writings translated into Hungarian, edited by myself and Kari Polanyi and launched at the Budapest conference. I recall this period because it created an international Polanyi community of scholars, students, activists, public intellectuals that ushered in the Polanyi renaissance over the next two decades, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Seattle protests in 1999 and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Cutting across these events and the growing interest in the work of Karl Polanyi and into the 21st century, is climate change and the threat to planetary survival.
Spaces for Polanyi-inspired dialogue have since established in Seoul and Budapest in 2014 and most recently in Vienna in 2018. What we refer to as sister institutes in North America, Europe and Asia, are contributing to a broad, international Polanyi conversation, each with its own mandate and institutional anchors. The Institute in Seoul is a cooperative, with members drawn from all sectors of society. In Budapest, Polanyi dialogue is integrated into an academic programme at the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies within Corvinus University. The International Karl Polanyi Society established in Vienna in 2018, a unique collaboration between universities in Austria and the Vienna Chamber of Labour, is dedicated to widening the Polanyi conversation between academics and social actors on challenges and transformations of the 21st century. The Polanyi Institute in Montreal, the repository of the Karl Polanyi Archive has received visiting researchers and has hosted seminars and biennial international Polanyi conferences for over three decades.
This volume, a remarkable collection of short essays on Karl Polanyi, first appeared in German as a supplement to the weekly Vienna newspaper Falter. It includes several papers presented at the inaugural conference of the International Karl Polanyi Society in May 2018 as well as invited contributions, providing readers with an extraordinary opportunity to discover or rediscover the breadth of the work and influence of Karl Polanyi. Many essays will introduce German authors to an English readership for the first time. The numerous short sketches navigate across many Polanyi themes. The volume covers a wide spectrum of themes, from the reasons for the renewed interest in Polanyi today to the revisiting of fundamental concepts in Polanyi’s writings, from the compatibility and differences between Polanyi and key 20th century theorists such as von Mises, Hayek and Keynes to the impact of Polanyi’s life and engagement in Red Vienna on his thought and lifelong commitment to democratic socialism, and the contemporary relevance of his early writings on freedom and democracy. Biographical essays introduce readers to Polanyi’s early life in Austria and Hungary and the social, political and cultural upheavals of the times. A rare contribution on Karl Polanyi’s relationship to his brother Michael and an engaging interview with his daughter Kari Polanyi deepen our understanding of the formative influences that shaped Polanyi’s thinking throughout his life.
Essays in this volume also explore the resonance of Polanyi’s concepts and analysis to critical issues such as the commodification of care, the emancipatory and destructive impact of technology in the digital age, the search for alternatives rooted in solidarity and community and their capacity to counter a market-driven global agenda. Essays on the rise of right-wing populism as a powerful counter-movement to neoliberalism and the growing threat to freedom recall Polanyi’s writings on fascism as a countermovement to market liberalism.
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