IDEAS
MARKETS AND SOCIETY: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF KARL POLANYI
the increase since my twentieth year. Nothing more ghastly can be imagined than this illness. Tormenting, incessant, senseless inner excitement — that is one of its elements. Another: a poisoned feel to life, something like an inward sickliness, as if it were some infernal retching of the soul’s self. The third: narrowed-down consciousness, obsessed, compulsive thinking. You see only a white spot as large as your hand, space doesn’t open up…no third dimension…and what remains is one word in the middle of a patch where everything is clear: suicide. This word does not represent intent, nor something you are scared of, but a fate already consummated. (That you live is but an illusion, mere accident. Suicide is pre-ordained. You are “born to be a suicide,” and you haven’t much time left). This state of things kept getting steadily worse when I was in the field, coming on in bouts lasting two to three weeks, increasing in intensity and never letting up. This feature of the illness went together with a very ugly, little trait: It was simply impossible to tell anybody anything about it. If only you were able to tell about it, you felt, you’d be saved. But to tell about it was just as impossible as to die of it. You had to conceal it.
Paul Kennedy I’m Paul Kennedy, and this is Ideas about society, economy and Karl Polanyi. Kari Polanyi Levitt We had a bay window where you could see what was happening up and down the street, and just down the street from where we lived was an army barracks, so I could actually see them, see them rolling out these guns and coming along the street, and then you could hear the bombardment going on all night long. Paul Kennedy It was 1934 when 10-year-old Kari Polanyi sat in front of her bay window and watched Vienna descend into civil war. The year before, the brewing conflict had forced her father, Karl Polanyi, to leave Vienna for England, where she would soon join him. It was as an exile that Karl Polanyi had arrived in Vienna from Hungary in 1920, and it was as an exile that he would leave the city to begin a new life. Tonight on Ideas, we tell the story of those years, as we continue with David Cayley’s series on the life and thought of Karl Polanyi. Ranging across anthropology, economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi was one of the 20th century’s most penetrating critics of what he called the “market society.” His account of the origins of the modern market economy, The Great Transformation, is as fresh and pertinent today as when he wrote it in 1944. Here’s David Cayley with Part Two of “Markets and Society”…
David Cayley What Polanyi calls a “melancholia” would today be termed a depression. As his letter to Richard Wank continues, he diagnoses its cause… Reading My wrongly lived life had brought on the trouble. The illness was but the cry of pain of my miserably crippled true life…Then came the turning point, a tremendous transformation…I changed. I understood…Here was the starting point of my later life. My former ego knew duty and the joy of art passionately but in isolation, not leading to the building up of the personality. That’s how I was when I was in the field. Forbiddingly, rigidly dutyconscious, yet avidly grasping and delighting in poetry. Today, all is different… I don’t believe I’ll ever understand what then was choking me, as the rope chokes a man being hanged — the problems of pure artistic form. Something else has taken its place: the ethical world, to live and comprehend ethical reality and thus create it.
David Cayley uring the First World War, Karl Polanyi served on the Eastern Front as a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Conditions were unimaginable. “Here, there is nothing, nothing,” he wrote to his sister, “One should not be able to write, but bark only.” In the midst of this nightmare of cold, mud and misery, an illness that had been intensifying its grip on Karl Polanyi for ten years came to a head. He recalled the circumstances in a letter to a fellow officer written from Vienna on Christmas Day of 1925…
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Reading When first we met, I was mortally ill. My mind was sick, I was the victim of melancholia constantly on
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