14 Facts About Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent.

Karl Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture.

Karl Polanyi was active in politics, and helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party in 1914, serving as its secretary.

Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna, at the time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Karl Polanyi was well educated despite the ups and downs of his father's fortune, and he immersed himself in Budapest's active intellectual and artistic scene.

Karl Polanyi founded the radical and influential Galileo Circle while at the University of Budapest, a club which would have far reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual thought.

Karl Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in Law.

Karl Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest.

Karl Polanyi supported the republican government of Mihaly Karolyi and its Social Democratic regime.

The republic was short-lived and when Bela Kun toppled the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Karl Polanyi left for Vienna.

Karl Polanyi married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczynska, of Polish-Hungarian background.

Karl Polanyi was asked to resign from Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria.

Karl Polanyi left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936.

Karl Polanyi continued to write in his later years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence.