Development and Regionalism Transformation of the World System

• Author: Prof. Kari Polanyi-Levitt
• Pages: 8-23

8CARICOM Options: Towards Full Integration Into the World Economy

November is a season for remembering. It is the season of all saints and

all souls. A season to take stock of the past and take courage for the struggles

of the future. It is a fitting season for this conference which marks the sixtieth

anniversary of the publication of The Great Transformation in 1944. This

book has now been translated into 15 languages and a new Hungarian edition

has been launched, including a translation of the preface by Joseph Stiglitz.

The last time we met in this hall was in 1986, and some of you present today

were there, when the Hungarian Academy of Sciences hosted an important

conference to celebrate the centenary of my father’s life and work, and the

earthly remains of my parents, Karl Polanyi and Ilona Duscynska, were

returned to their final resting place in Hungary. I wish to record a special

thanks to the late Joseph Bogner, who presided over the conference from this

platform. He was a true friend and we remember him with affection and

respect. The platform was also shared by Ilona’s ancient Corona Smith

typewriter on which she typed so many of my father’s manuscripts and her

own memoirs.

October 1986, happened also to be the thirtieth anniversary of 1956, a

historic event which united my parents in a kind of return to Hungary late in

their lives. They undertook a project of translating the work of some of their

favourite Hungarian Poets to English in the only book jointly authored by

them, The Plough and The Pen.1 A year before his death in 1964, my father

returned to Budapest for the first time since he left for Vienna in 1919.

Accompanied by Ilona, he was reunited with family members and old friends,

some of whom knew him since times of the Galilee Circle before the First

DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONALISM

TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD

SYSTEM

Professor Kari Polanyi-Levitt

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Development and Regionalism Transformation

World War.

Karl Polanyi’s life was, as he noted, ‘a world life’, but its formative

years were lived here in Budapest, more precisely in these streets and in this

area where we are presently meeting. It was here that he first confronted the

philosophical question of freedom in a modern industrial society, a continuing

concern throughout his life. On that occasion, I think, he wrote that all he

had achieved he owed ultimately to Hungary. I myself have never lived in

this country and I cannot speak your remarkable language which has given

rise to so much original thought in so many areas of science. I was born in

Vienna, but as I told Prof. Vizi, I know that my ultimate origins are here. It

gives me a special satisfaction to be receiving the honour of becoming a

member of your scientific community; it is a sort of return to origins late in

my life.

In 1919, my father emigrated to Vienna where he met my mother; they

were married in 1923. There, he contributed to an emigré Hungarian

publication edited by his friend Oskar Jaszi, and engaged Ludwig Von Mises

in a debate on the feasibility of a socialist economy in the pages of the

premier German language social science journal.2 From 1924 to 1933, his

position as a senior editor of Oesterreichische Volkswirt, the leading financial

and economic weekly of Central Europe, placed him in the eye of the storm

of economic and political upheavals on the continent. In ‘The Mechanisms

of the World Economic Crisis’ written in 1933, he traced the impact of the

crisis on workers, agricultural producers and middle-class rentiers and

concluded that the social and political fabric of these countries in continental

Europe could not withstand the adjustments required by adherence to the

financial discipline of the international gold standard. The first two chapters

of The Great Transformation are a vivid account of the crises of the inter-

war years. Many interesting comparisons can be made between the pressures

exerted on the weak and fragile succession states of Central Europe in the

inter-war period and the Structural Adjustment Programs imposed on indebted

developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s and indeed up to now.

In 1933, he was relieved of his position because the journal could not

afford to keep a prominent socialist on its editorial staff after the accession of

Hitler to office in Germany. Polanyi left Vienna for London but continued to

contribute to the journal until it ceased publication in 1938.

In England, he obtained employment as a tutor for the Workers

Educational Association (WEA), the adult education extension programme

of Oxford University. He taught evening classes in provincial towns of Kent