Society, Economics, and Philosophy: Selected Papers

Society, Economics, and Philosophy represents the full range of Polanyi's interests outside his scientific work: economics, politics, society, philosophy of science, religion and positivist obstacles to it, and art. Precisely because of Polanyi's work in the physical sciences, his writings have a unique dimension not found in other advocates of the market and too infrequently found even in philosophers of science. Polanyi showed that an industrial economy can operate only "polycentrically", that central planning is logically impossible, and that what was called by that name in the Soviet Union was in reality no such thing. Likewise, scientific research can proceed, not by a central plan, but only by the spontaneous self-adjustment of separate initiatives to discover a common reality. Against the positivism dominant within philosophy of science, he argued that the notion of reality must be restored and made central. Yet physical sciences, he also argued, are only one branch of science, and the sciences of life and mind are logically richer and more complex and cannot be reduced to the former, nor mind to body or to computers, nor art to its physical bases.

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester.