"In this view of a free society, both its liberties and its servitudes
are determined by its striving for self-improvement, which in its turn is determined
by the intimations of truths yet to be revealed, calling on men to reveal them."
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was the younger brother of the famous Karl
Polanyi, one of the staunchest critics historically of Western society and capitalist
values. Trained as a physician, Polanyi undertook a career as a chemist. Polanyi,
a native of Hungary with a Jewish heritage, immigrated first to Germany, where
he proved his brilliance as a scientist. When the Nazis hijacked German politics
in 1933, Polanyi ventured to Great Britain. There his interest shifted from
physical to social sciences. The concept of spontaneous order, on which F. A.
Hayek would later build his theory of cultural evolution, stems partially from
Michael Polanyi’s writings.
Polanyi anticipated the starting point of Hayek’s analysis by opposing
the general contemporary view that where order exists somebody must have been
consciously ordering it. In intricately complex social systems, an ordering
appropriate to the requirements of a permanently changing environment is possible
only by leaving sufficient room for self-determination and voluntary, mutual
adaptation to the members of these societies. Polanyi calls the orders resulting
from the voluntary and mutual adjustments between free individuals “spontaneous”
or “polycentric.” Maintaining order in a complex society then depends
on allowing people to have the freedom “to interact with each other on
their own initiative—subject only to laws which uniformly apply to all
of them.” General restrictions that apply broadly to each member of a
society emerge without the directive of a centralized authority. This spontaneous
order concept is the fruit of Polanyi’s cross of science with the market
process.
When Polanyi shifted his focus from scientific investigation to social and
philosophical questions, he also became interested in religion’s role
in society and in a modern individual’s life. At the request of his friend
J. H. Oldham, a British ecumenical leader, religious intellectual, and editor
of the Christian News Letter, Polanyi participated in several discussion
groups over a sixteen-year period with other British intellectuals preoccupied
with the relationship between Christianity and contemporary culture and politics.
In his last book, Meaning, Polanyi tries to extend the epistemological
model that he developed in his magnum opus Personal Knowledge to describe
the nature of human knowledge found in art, myth, and religion. Using his theory
of tacit knowing, Polanyi describes the differences between ordinary perceptual
and conceptual knowledge and that which is found in the class of special artifacts
available in art and religion. Along side of his insistence for allowing people
enough freedom to enable them to order society through their own self-determination,
Polanyi stresses the importance of the collective meaning in art, myth, and
religion in the contemporary world.
Source: Phil Mullins, “Gospel & Culture: M. Polanyi
1891–1976” (May 12, 2003), www.deepsight.org/articles/polanyi.htm
