Polanyi, Karl (1886–1964)

Abstract

Polanyi was born in Vienna in 1886 and grew up in Budapest, where he studied law and philosophy. He served as an officer in the First World War, after which he turned to economic journalism as foreign editor of Vienna’s Osterreichisiche Volkswirt throughout the 1920s. He emigrated to England in 1933, where he worked in adult education, as a lecturer on world affairs for the Workers’ Educational Association and for the Extramural Delegacies of the Universities of Oxford and London. He became intensely interested in the origins of the British Industrial Revolution and the enormity of its economic and social consequences, the subject of his book, The Great Transformation (1944), written while he was a resident scholar at Bennington College in Vermont between 1940 and 1943.