1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910809302003321

Autore

Dale Gareth

Titolo

Karl Polanyi : a life on the left / / Gareth Dale

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Columbia University Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

0-231-54148-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (394 p.)

Classificazione

QE 800

Disciplina

330.15/42092

B

Soggetti

Economists - Hungary

Economics - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- In the East-West salon -- Bearing the cross of war -- Triumph and tragedy of Red Vienna -- Challenges and responses -- The ctaclysm and its origins -- Injustices and inhumanities -- The precariousness of existence -- Epilogue: a lost world of socialism.

Sommario/riassunto

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America.The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to



scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.