No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Spontaneous Order: Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek
Abstract
This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, involves different types of freedom to those advanced by Polanyi. Whereas Hayek (usually) portrays spontaneous order as a single entity, which is equivalent to free society as a whole ‐ the free‐catallactic society ‐ Polanyi by contrast is disposed to conceive of spontaneous orders as sub‐units or components within free society as a whole. These and other aspects of their thought ‐ including the distinction between spontaneous and planned social orders ‐ are reviewed and criticised.
... Although Hayek generally gets the credit for introducing, or at least popularizing the notion of spontaneous order, Jacobs (1997Jacobs ( -1998Jacobs ( , 2000 argues that Michael Polanyi was employing the term prior to Hayek. (See Bladel 2005 for an opposing view.) ...
... Although Hayek generally gets the credit for introducing, or at least popularizing the notion of spontaneous order, Jacobs (1997Jacobs ( -1998Jacobs ( , 2000 argues that Michael Polanyi was employing the term prior to Hayek. (See Bladel 2005 for an opposing view.) ...
... Polanyi y Hayek pensaron a la sociedad de posguerra entre un enfoque historicista, el cual contemplaba a las instituciones y a los mercados capitalistas como históricamente constituidos, mientras que el otro afirmaba que estos se conformaban por la espontaneidad misma de los individuos en su actividad económica. Para un análisis minucioso de este intercambio intelectual, recomiendo los trabajosde Mirowski (1998),Jacobs (2000) yMigone (2011), por nombrar solo algunos. ...
En este trabajo se explora la polisemia del concepto trabajo en una plataforma
de economías colaborativas, específicamente Uber, indagando sobre cómo se percibe
el trabajo, qué sentidos se crean sobre él, qué disputas hay respecto a estas nociones
y en qué acciones derivan. La pregunta de investigación que guio a este trabajo fue:
¿qué sentidos le otorgan a la palabra “trabajo” los conductores de Uber? Los choferes
actualizan y resignifican los conceptos relacionados con su trabajo según la
circunstancia, ponderando aspectos positivos sobre negativos, con el fin de justificar
su empleo o prosperar económicamente en esta actividad.
... However, they did not share the same vision of liberalism. Hayek could not easily move away from too abstract and universal definitions of liberty or from spontaneous order (see Jacobs, 2000). Moreover, he endorsed Popper's theory of open society and, as already emphasized, Polanyi was critical of Popper. ...
This paper gives an interpretation of Michael Polanyi’s vision of government and economics as spanning between Hayek and Keynes. The influence of Hayek is manifested by his opposition to central planning and the defence of self-organization as a superior mechanism for coordinating individual plans, while the influence of Keynes is evidenced by his strong support for government interventionism in order to dampen economic fluctuations, fight unemployment and limit income inequalities. Polanyi blended these two influences and produced an idiosyncratic approach to government and economics, which has until recently been underrated in the literature. Our aim in this paper is to show that, by considering Polanyi’s mixed vision of the market economy as embedded in his broader pursuits into the nature of knowledge and liberalism one can find coherence which cannot otherwise be found.
... I will return to Menger in subsection5.2.3. 10 According toJacobs [2000], the concept of a spontaneous order was used in the 20th century by Polany prior to Hayek's use and adaption of the concept. However, the concept is now primarily associated with Hayek[Whyte, 2019, p.161]. ...
In this thesis I argue that one way scientific descriptions can become self-fulfilling is by promoting social norms among the people they are disseminated to. Identifying this mechanism will enable us to change unwanted social implications caused by it. To make the argument, I rely on the definition of social norms given by Bicchieri [2006] in The Grammar of Society and use the case of microeconomics as it is presented in university textbooks. Thus, the aim of the thesis is to argue that one way microeconomics can be self-fulfilling is by promoting a social norm of self-interest - and often narrow self-interest - via its textbooks and university teaching practices. To do this, I first use the current empirical findings to argue that the dissemination of the rationality assumption as it is presented in microeconomics textbooks can make microeconomics self-fulfilling. Second, I conduct a historical analysis to show that the claims that greed and self-interest are beneficial have been a part of modern economics from its beginning and still is today. I then discuss why the rationality assumption is a part of contemporary microeconomics and analyse how it is presented in standard textbook models today. Here, we see that even though some of the models can account for other-regarding preferences, the textbooks do not mention this fact. Instead, they present the rationality assumption as focusing on self-interested preferences only, and justify it as being both descriptively plausible and normatively desirable. Finally, I use the above analyses to argue that microeconomics textbooks and teaching practices can change people’s behaviour by making them follow a social norm of self-interest in economic situations. I end the thesis by presenting the results of an empirical study designed to test this argument.
... The term "spontaneous order" was coined not by Hayek but by Michael Polanyi, but Hayek did most to popularize it. 25 In a 1967 text, whose title "The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design" is borrowed from Ferguson, Hayek provides a genealogy of spontaneous order, which he depicts as passing from Stoicism to the Spanish schoolmen, and then to Bernard Mandeville, Baron de. Montesquieu, David Hume, Josiah Tucker, Smith, and Ferguson. ...
Friedrich Hayek’s account of “spontaneous order” has generated increasing interest in recent decades. His argument for the superiority of the market in distributing knowledge without the need for central oversight has appealed to progressive democratic theorists, who are wary of the hubris of state planning and attracted to possibilities for self-organization, and to Foucaultians, who have long counseled political theory to cut off the King’s head. A spontaneous social order, organized by an invisible hand, would appear to dispense with arbitrary power and foster creativity and individual liberty. This article challenges this view by highlighting the centrality of submission to Hayek’s account of spontaneous order. It shows that Hayek struggles to obscure the providentialism underpinning the account of social order he derives from Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, his own account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible market forces.
... Although the Bergsonian élan can be rather opportunistic, at social and cognitive levels, it is also driven by an internally generated push, for example, the speculative profit opportunities of Knight or the idiosyncratic individual interests of Hayek and the more collective tacit understandings of progress highlighted by Polanyi (Mirowski 1998;Jacobs 2000). In practice, simple tinkering may also be important. ...
Unpredictability has two main sources: epistemic uncertainty and ontological unpredictability. When disruptive and downstream innovations become frequent, ontological unpredictability becomes increasingly important for innovation policy and strategy. The analysis of the nature of ontological unpredictability explains why future-oriented technology analysis and foresight frequently fail to grasp socially and economically important technical developments and clarifies why policy, strategy, and future-oriented analysis need to move beyond evidence-based approaches.
An early adopter of complexity theory in the social sciences, the Austrian school economist F. A. Hayek consciously strove to construct a grand synthesis, conceiving of society as an information system. I suggest that Hayek’s concept of complexity undergirds his promarket stances: it was his belief that because society is a complex information system, interventions which seek to transform the system as a whole inevitably run into insurmountable epistemological obstacles. Focusing mostly upon lesser-known texts dating from the 1950s and 1960s, I present a reading of Hayek concentrating on the role the concept of complexity plays in his work. Hayek viewed social complexity as inherently good and worthy of conservation from attempts to regulate society in various ways. Yet he also supported various forms of government interventionism. I argue that for Hayek complexity holds the key to determining which specific forms of intervention are permissible in Hayek’s vision of a classical liberal “Great Society.” On first impression, Hayek’s idea of complexity seems lopsided toward spontaneous order. However, he considered on multiple occasions the possibility of systemic chaos, unintended consequences of policy, and disequilibrium.
This essay argues for the deep affinities between neoliberalism and environmental thought that embraces such figures as fungi, swarms, and especially trees. While critics like Rob Nixon turn to trees to promote modes of cooperative biology and plant communication as blueprints for more symbiotic forms of sociality that offer alternatives to “hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption,” they share with neoliberalism a more fundamental ontology of what Friedrich Hayek (after Michael Polanyi) calls “spontaneous order.” Drawing on recent revisionary scholarship on neoliberalism, the first half of the essay argues that neoliberalism is less usefully thought of as an individualist anthropology than as a worldview that subordinates individuals to a nontransparent and distributed higher intelligence—that of the market. The second half of the essay illustrates the uncomfortable overlap between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries through a discussion of Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the novel has praised its power to embody the arboreal life cycle it represents, but it has remained curiously blind to the way the novel’s formal choices ask its characters to submit to the powers of a superior computerized intelligence—a gesture that is conspicuously close to the way neoliberalism compels individuals’ submission to nontransparent market forces. The novel and its critical reception, like particular strands in the environmental humanities more generally, show that the opposition between the environmental imagination and neoliberalism is neutralized by a shared commitment to fictions of spontaneous order.
Friedrich August von Hayek egy interdiszciplináris szintézis megalkotására vállalkozott. Célja a liberalizmus normatív igényeinek az alátámasztása volt, korszerű tudományos fogalmakkal. Ezirányú vizsgálódásai korai írásokra datálhatók. Jelen tanulmány keretén belül eddig alulértékelt Hayek-szövegeket fogunk szemügyre venni. Ezek demonstrálják, ahogyan Hayek az 1950-es és 1960-as évektől kibontakozó kibernetikát és komplexitáselméletet alkalmazzak saját politikafilozófiai modelljének megalkotásához. Sőt, Hayeket a komplexitáselmélet úttörőjeként is jellemezhetjük. A liberális elvek mentén szervezett, nagymértékben önműködő „Nagy Társadalom” (Great Society) Hayek szerint azért előnyösebb a központi gazdasági tervezéssel operáló alternatíváihoz képest, mert bonyolultabb és komplexebb rendet képez. Nézetében a komplexitás pozitívumként értékelendő, mivel az egyéni cselekvők számára nagyobb fokú szabadságot biztosít, ugyanakkor (az információs visszacsatolásnak köszönhetően) a decentralizált gazdasági cselekvésekből szövődő hálózati gazdasági modell kiterjedtebb struktúraként képes fennállni, jobban hasznosítva az információkat. Hayek a társadalmat információs rendszerként képzeli el. A komplexitásnak mindazonáltal negatív formái is elgondolhatók.
Spontaneous order literature (“Tradition of Spontaneous Order” (1982) by Norman Barry; The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (1987) by Ronald Hamowy; "Spontaneous Order" (1989) by Robert Sugden; "The Theory of Spontaneous Order and Cultural Evolution in the Social Theory of F.A. Hayek" (1990) by Peter J. Boettke; Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy (2001) by Peter J. Boettke; Hayek's Liberalism and Its Origins: His Idea of Spontaneous Order and the Scottish Enlightenment (2001) by Christina Petsoulas; "The Origin and Scope of Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order" (2007) by Louis Hunt; "Spontaneous Order" (2015) by Daniel J. D'Amico; "Spontaneous Economic Order" (2016) by Yong Tao) has long downplayed the ideas of Michael Polanyi. When attempts were being made to change this attitude ("Polanyi on Liberal Neutrality" (1996/97) by C. P. Goodman; "Michael Polanyi and Spontaneous Order, 1941-1951" (1997) by Struan Jacobs), they mostly suggested to replace Hayek with Polanyi as the key figure who recoined the concept for the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, scholars of Austrian economics jumped into the arena of competing priority claims ("Against Polanyi-Centrism: Hayek and the Re-Emergence of “Spontaneous Order”" (2005) by John P. Bladel) and claimed that Hayek, von Mises and Röpke have argued for such an order long before Polanyi’s first writing using this terminology was published in 1948. Only a few accounts attempted to present some kind of balance in this respect (Adam Smith's Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (2006) by Craig Smith; The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 15: The Market and Other Orders (2014) by Bruce Caldwell; "Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence" (2016) by Struan Jacobs and Phil Mullins; The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (2016) by Douglas Spencer; "Editorial Introduction to ‘Collectivist Planning’ by Michael Polanyi (1940)" (2019) by Geoffrey M. Hodgson). This paper aims to explore the so far untold characteristics of Polanyi’s spontaneous order theory through analysing archival materials and doing so offers a reason for reconsidering what we have to know about the history of spontaneous order theory. And this reconsideration might lead to developing new, more fine-grained and viable theories of spontaneous order, including those that can treat claims of spontaneous order and claims of social justice not as incompatible but as compatible aims in ordering social affairs. This perspective should, no doubt, come in handy in our increasingly polarized societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In this chapter we contrast marginal improvements in public policy with the radical alternative of a heterotopia based on the work of Michel Foucault and Robert Nozick. Artistic communities explore and imagine alternative social worlds which function as experiments in living and challenge the status quo, a process for which we believe there should be as much space as possible. This space can exist at the fringes of society and in largely neglected urban areas. But we argue that their function is not primarily as alternative space, rather as an integrated part of civil society in which they function as genuine and (semi-)permanent alternatives to established forms of living. This will require a sufficient degree of self-organization and self-governance for which it is important that public policy provides adequate legal forms which facilitate the formation of self-governing communities. We explore the challenges that such forms of self-governance within an urban setting face through an analysis of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen.
We present a Dewey-inspired pragmatic approach to the arts which starts from the values which artists and audiences seek to realize. We argue that these values are realized in online and offline communities in a process of four phases: value orientation, imagination, realization, and evaluation. We contrast this approach to various recent approaches to the arts which have explicitly or implicitly led to the instrumentalization of the arts. Various policies have supported the arts to boost economic development, foster social inclusion, or affirm national identity, rather than for the values which artists and audiences pursue. We develop the notion of cultural civil society to describe the heterogenous practices around the arts and argue that they are a key feature of a liberal democratic society. The challenge which arises from rival and sometimes antagonistic practices around the arts is how they can co-exist peacefully. We illustrate this challenge through an examination of the recent controversy over Confederate and colonial statues. Rather than resolving whether such statues should remain or be removed, we suggest that public space should welcome different practices and allow for contestation from different minority voices in society.
We propose an alternative perspective for the private, social, and public governance of the arts rooted in modus vivendi liberalism as opposed to political liberalism. In this perspective, the co-existence of a great diversity of social practices around the arts is the primary goal of cultural policy. We argue that to achieve this we should aim for a more complete separation between the art and state, analogous to the way that church and state are separated. This implies that the state should aim to create a stable legal framework in which practices can co-exist, minority voices are protected, and the government refrains from favoring certain art forms over others. We contrast the evolving social practices in cultural civil society with the backward looking and frequently static large organizations and monuments which are typically at the heart of cultural policy and argue that a heterogeneous cultural civil society is a better safeguard for pluralism in contemporary democratic society, and a better safeguard at attempts to essentialize (national) identities. Cultural civil society will depend to a large degree on private and social forms of governance and the chapter explores the legal forms which can enable communities to do so. Finally, we propose a few methods to measure the vibrancy of the more informal practices in cultural civil society.
We develop a social theory of innovation which is contrasted with the model of the artist as a lone genius. The chapter demonstrates that most art is a result of team production, and that even the art forms which are produced by one individual depend on artistic circles where creativity and imagination are stimulated. We present such artistic circles as contribution goods; practices which seek to attract meaningful contributions from the most talented artists. The practices developed in these circles are the basis of the imagination and creativity of the individual. In a thriving cultural civil society, many of such circles exist next to each other and partially overlap, a dynamic which enables both knowledge transmission and competition. We then examine how this social model of innovation changes the way we think about imagination, and suggest that imagination typically takes the form of both social and aesthetic imagination. In the contemporary art world artists do not merely seek to create new works of art, but also prefigure alternative forms of social organization, in which alternative small-scale experiments in living can take place. We illustrate this process through an analysis of the projects of grassroots artistic organizations in Venice, who contest the way overtourism and the prestigious Biennale shape the art world in this Italian city.
We analyze what values are, how they relate to more immediate ends individuals pursue, and how they give direction to the practices of artists and audiences. We start from the observation that goods bought in the market are key inputs into social practices which are produced through a combination of material inputs and the contributions of artists and audiences. Many value-based approaches suggest that values can be made explicit and listed, but we suggest that they are often embodied in social practices and hard to fully explicate. These social practices gain meaning against broader moral frameworks which exist in society, and which other scholars have termed orders of worth. We suggest that values are learned through an engagement with practices, and initially often have an aspirational nature: values are both pursued and performed. Because contemporary societies offer many heterogeneous social practices, individuals can choose which to join and seek to develop their personal identities through them. The incompatible nature of different practices is a source of potential value conflict. We analyze the process of value learning and the conflict between values through the career of the rapper and singer Phonte, known from his work in the groups Little Brother and Foreign Exchange.
In this chapter, we argue that consumers and audiences of cultural products are best understood as co-creative participants. The idea of co-creation is developed in contrast to that of the passive consumer, and we analyze how consumption or cultural capital contributes to the ability of individuals to contribute to the process of value realization. This process of co-creation is further enhanced by new technological possibilities which have lowered the costs of producing and transforming existing artistic creations, but also by artists who increasingly see art as a two-way street. In the remainder of the chapter, we analyze three cases to demonstrate how co-creation happens. In our case study of traditional and modern dance, we argue that the performing arts have historically deeply involved the audience and are perhaps best viewed as communal creations. A case study about the Trekkers shows how the fan communities and the fan fiction galaxy have sought to cultivate and expand the original Star Trek universe. Through the case of the Queer Museum in Brazil, we demonstrate the importance of institutional diversity and the potential of crowdfunding for self-organization of co-creative communities. In conjunction with the previous chapter, through our emphasis on the social nature of creativity and process of co-creation, we seek to undermine the traditional distinction between the production and the consumption of art.
This paper examines the evolution of Michael Polanyi’s critique of economic planning. It portrays how the focal point of his critique shifted from addressing the ‘spirit,’ ‘social consciousness,’ and ‘public emotion’ of the people supporting planned economies to addressing the administrative ‘unmanageability’ and the logical impossibility of economic planning. Polanyi developed thought experiments of imaginary economies, contrasted the ‘pyramid of authority’ with the polygons of liberty, and explained organic (spontaneous order) and inorganic (corporate order) ways of adjusting economic relations. He attempted to relax the Leviathan of Soviet economics, and drew the conclusion that mathematics is not sufficient in itself to properly address the economy. Eventually, Polanyi developed an institutionalist approach in order to be able to address both the variability of market economies and the failures of socialist ‘super-planners’ who claimed to eliminate the drift of individual economic adjustments.
After an esteemed academic career as a chemist, Michael Polanyi switched to the social sciences and made significant contributions to our understanding of the nature and role of knowledge in society. Polanyi's argument concerning knowledge led him to emphasise the vital importance of decentralised mechanisms of adjustment and coordination, including markets. His article ‘Collectivist Planning’ (1940) enters into debates about the possibility (or otherwise) of centrally planning scientific and economic activity. This early article also foreshadows post-war debates within the Mont Pèlerin Socierty (formed in 1947) concerning the economic role of the state and the future of liberalism.
This book poses the question: How can we organize society in such a way that our disagreement about facts and norms works to the benefit of everyone? In response, it makes the argument for polycentric democracy, a political arrangement consisting of various political units that enjoy different degrees of independence.
It is argued that to progress towards justice, we first need to change our attitude towards reasonable disagreement. Theorists have always viewed reasonable disagreement as nuisance, if not as a threat. However, this work puts forward that the diversity of perspectives which underlie reasonable disagreement should be viewed as a resource to be harvested rather than a threat to be tamed. Resting on two key arguments, the author proposes the idea of polycentric democracy as the most capable method of making pluralism productive. The book explores what such a political order might look like and concludes that only an institutional system which is capable of profiting from diversity, such as polycentric democracy, might reasonably be expected to generate an overlapping consensus.
Continuing in the tradition of Karl Popper and Friedrich August von Hayek, this book lies at the intersection of philosophy, political economy and political theory. It will be of great interest to academics and scholars working in philosophy, politics and economics.
Published in GLOBALIZATIONS, special issue on Hayek/Polanyi.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the concepts of spontaneity and spontaneous order, in
particular their deployment by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Although in
many respects these thinkers were poles apart, the article identifies a point of
convergence. They both mobilize the concept of spontaneity in a manner
that naturalizes a particular social process: for Hayek, the market economy,
for Polanyi, society’s protective movement that arises in reaction against the
market economy. To contextualize the uses of spontaneity by Hayek and
Polanyi, I trace its evolution, with reference to Leibniz, Mandeville, and the
thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Having sketched the ways in which
earlier thinkers understood spontaneity, I turn finally to Hayek and Polanyi. I
argue that their invocations of spontaneity and spontaneous order contribute
to a downplaying of relations of domination and exploitation. While Hayek
sees the market system as the exemplar of spontaneous order, for Polanyi,
the concept of spontaneity underpins his belief that the protective
countermovement is a ‘natural’ reaction to the evils of market society; as
such, power relations pass beneath the radar.
The paper is focused on the problem of freedom in F. A. Hayek. Content of the work is targeted for analysis of order in society. Te paper is trying to define, describe and analyze two kinds of order, and that spontaneous and created, and then find and break down first and most fundamental prerequisite for defining a need for a clearer grasp of negative liberty. The aim of this work is also to analyze a set of rules in general, because the rules of human behavior stopped in Hayek's idea produced equally significant position as the order. In this context, it wants the text to highlight the causal connection of order with the rules, which built so to prevent chaos in society and maintaining its functional progress. The intention of this paper is through the order and rules, as two general as well as probably the most important pillars of Hayek's ideological concept to highlight their importance as indicators of the minimal efforts to define the scope of freedom.
Neoliberalism is a doctrine that adopts a free market policy in a deregulated political framework. In recent years, neoliberalism has become increasingly prominent as a doctrine in Western society, and has been heavily discussed in both academia and the media. In The Origins of Neoliberalism, the joint effort of an economist and a philosopher offers a theoretical overview of both neoliberalisms genesis within economic theory and social studies as well as its development outside academia. Tracing the sources of neoliberalism within the history of economic thought, the book explores the differences between neoliberalism and classical liberalism. This books aim is to make clear that neoliberalism is not a natural development of the old classical liberalism, but rather that it represents a dramatic alteration of its original nature and meaning. Also, it fights against the current idea according to which neoliberalism would coincide with the triumph of free market economy. In its use of both history of economics and philosophy, this book takes a highly original approach to the concept of neoliberalism. The analysis presented here will be of great interest to scholars and students of history of economics, political economy, and philosophy of social science.
The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which was a defense of bourgeois liberal order. His philosophy of science and his economic thought were mutually supporting elements within this political project. Polanyi's intellectual corpus formed a contradictory unity, the tensions within which were manageable only under particular historical conditions. His attempt to hold together traditional authority and the free market fit with, and derived plausibility from, the social conditions under which his philosophical work came to maturity: Keynesian class compromise and surviving habits of social deference within postwar Britain.
Critique de l'approche de la formation de la theorie de la communaute scientifique chez T. S. Kuhn. Comparant les positions de M. Polanyi et L. Fleck sur la sociologie de la pensee collective, l'A. met en evidence l'emergence historique d'une veritable perspective sociale sur la science.
ABSTRACT For anthropologists, the term neoliberal often becomes a shorthand for indicating all that is wrong with the present. But such usage of the term can foreclose our ability to imagine different futures. In this article, I go back to a time before neoliberalism, when economists and philosophers were engaged in debates about the rationality of economic planning within market economies, and in which the concept of “tacit knowledge” was pivotal. These 1920s and 1930s thinkers, especially Hayek and von Mises, were convinced that collectivism and planning would not work, and their work is cited still today as having established the basis for laissez-faire (neoliberal) capitalism. I critically juxtapose their findings with a historical analysis of the public sector in Egypt, with a short excursis into management theory (and research on tacit knowledge), and with my own ethnography. Looking at the case of a successful public sector banker I worked with in Cairo, I show how he relied on tacit knowledge as a collective inheritance that was embodied in collective subjects and “secrets of the trade.” My findings thus call into question Hayek's argument about the irrationality of collectivism and economic planning. They also point to the importance of tacit knowledge practices as collective and public goods in our economic imaginary of the future.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992), the Austrian economist and Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), the Hungarian-born physical chemist turned philosopher, stand as two of the more influential figures in the social sciences over the last 60 years. Despite a close intellectual and personal friendship, one that spanned nearly 40 years, there has been surprising very little in the literature devoted to a systematic evaluation of their unique epistemic project (excepting R.T. Allen's Beyond Liberalism [1998] and a few articles by Struan Jacobs and Phil Mirowski). To commemorate the 50 th anniversary of Polanyi's seminal work, Personal Knowledge (1958), this paper contends that, despite significant differences in their respective conceptions of liberty, philosophy of science, and technical economics, the two authors were engaged in a "joint pursuit" that provided complementary solutions to the same epistemological and ontological issues.
Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1891. He used to recall how his father, a civil engineer and entrepreneur involved in the planning and development of railways, would return from his travels in Germany and the West with tales of tunnels and washouts and with new scientific and educational ideas. But, as a result of some unfortunate mishap, he lost all his fortune in 1899 when Michael was eight years old. This placed a severe financial strain on the family which was greatly aggravated in 1905 when Michael’s father died. Michael or Mishi, as his early friends called him throughout life, then earned some of the money needed in the family by tutoring other high school students. The widowed mother, despite straitened means, was able to remain the centre of a social and intellectual circle of which many of the young poets, painters and scholars of that period in Hungary were members. Thus it was that his mother’s persistent interest in social problems, in poetry and art, came to have a great influence on Michael’s emotional development. He had two brothers and two sisters, older than him, who were all, in their ways, distinguished.
1. Introduction 2. From Socialism to The Road to Serfdom 3. Hayek's Later Thought 4. Commercial Society, Social Justice and Disaggregation 5. Post-Hayekian Political Economy 6. Why Our Freedom Matters to Others 7. Knowledge and Imperfection in a Minimal State
Hayek's Social and Economic Philosophy. London: Macmillan. 1982b. 'The tradition of spontaneous order
- Barry
- Norman
Barry, Norman. 1982a. Hayek's Social and Economic Philosophy. London: Macmillan. 1982b. 'The tradition of spontaneous order'. Literature of Liberty, 5, 7-58.
Planning and spontaneous order 237-68, subsequently reprinted as 'The span of central direction'. Polanyi 1951: 111-37. 1951. The Logic of Liberty
- Science
- Faith
- Society
- Chicago
Science, Faith and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1948. 'Planning and spontaneous order'. The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 16, 237-68, subsequently reprinted as 'The span of central direction'. Polanyi 1951: 111-37. 1951. The Logic of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1958. Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Polanyi, Michael & Harry Prosch. 1975. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shearmur, Jeremy. 1996. Hayek and After. London: Routledge.
Michael Polanyi 1891-1976'. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the
- E Wigner
- R Hodgkin
Wigner, E. & R. Hodgkin. 1977. 'Michael Polanyi 1891-1976'. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 23, 413-48.
Hayek. London: Temple Smith. de Jouvenel, Bertrand. 1967. The Art of Conjecture
- Butler
- Eamonn
Butler, Eamonn. 1983. Hayek. London: Temple Smith. de Jouvenel, Bertrand. 1967. The Art of Conjecture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Studies in Philosophy
- Hayek
- Friedrich
Hayek, Friedrich. 1978. Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
‘The span of central direction
- Polanyi