Michael Polanyi [antikvár]

Foreword The papers in this collection are revised versions of those given at the Poianyi Seminar, 28«'-3r' July 2011, at the Theodor-Heuss-Akademie of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung für die Freiheit, Gummersbach, Germany They are intended for readers new to Poianyi and aim to introduce to them the principal features of his distinctive philosophy and of his contributions to political, social and economic theory. The authors have striven to avoid jargon to require as little special knowledge as possible. After an outline of Polanyi's life and publications on philosophy, politics and economics, Endre Nagy and Phil Mullins consider the fundamental theme of freedom, of which Poianyi gives an distinctive and 'positive' account, after which comes a study by Simon Smith of the complementary theme of authority and Polanyi's distinction of two forms of it, general and specific, and application of it in science and society at large. Viktor Genk and Tihamér Margitay then survey and apply further a specific application of his philosophy, his account of moral inversion, the process whereby moral passions, which an ideology forbids persons explicitly to avow them, become tacitly attached to merely 'factual' objects. The centre of Polanyi's general philosophy, as expounded in Personal Knowledge and developed in subsequent books and articles, is the from-to structure of tacit integration, whereby we tacitly integrate subsidiary details, from which we attend, into a focal whole to which we attend. Richard Moodey shows how it applies to political and economic thinking, while R.T. Allen takes the ontological counterpart of tacit integration, Polanyi's account of the different levels of reality and how they are related, and applies it to the relations between political and economic activities. I I' I' ¦ The final three articles consider sociological strands in Polanyi's thinking. Moodey's second article shows how he turned to a more sociological view of economics. Klaus-Ulbricht Neumann, taking up from the first three articles the theme of the analogy that Poianyi often drew between the organisation of science and society at large, shows how his account of the former still applies today despite the vast expansion of the natural sciences since then. To close this collection, Klaus Allerbeck examines Polanyi's own forays into and contributions to sociology, which other and more pressing concerns prevented him from developing further. Michael Poianyi (Vor-) Denker des Liberalismus im 20. Jahrhundert