19 Facts About Karl Polanyi

Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

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 fled Hungary for Vienna in 1919 when the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy seized power.

Karl Polanyi fled Vienna for London in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and fascism was on the ascendancy in Austria.

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.

Karl Polanyi left Hungary for Vienna in order to undergo medical treatment.

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 had for many years sought employment at British universities but was unsuccessful.

Karl Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation".

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