Michael Polanyi's Economics: A Strange Rapprochement

Agnès Festré

No 2015-36, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: In this paper we provide an analysis of Michael Polanyi's contribution to economics. We stress two major influences on Polanyi's economics: first, Hayek's opposition to central planning and his defence of self-organization as a superior mechanism for coordinating individual plans; second, Keynes' macroeconomic disequilibrium approach to the adjustment of savings and investment that called for government intervention. Polanyi blent these two influences and provided an idiosyncratic synthesis, which is an unfortunately neglected contribution in the field of economics. Moreover, we show that this synthesis is consistent with two important features of Polanyi's intellectual background: on the one hand, liberalism, which entailed two overlapping notions of freedom (traditional private freedom together with public liberty); on the other hand, his humanistic end-oriented type of evolutionism tainted with Catholic ideas. The paper highlights that these two features go hand in hand with Polanyi's view of tacit knowledge, which shapes his original and rich reflection about institutions.

Keywords: Michael Polanyi; Hayek; Keynes; spontaneous order; State intervention; liberalism; evolutionism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 B31 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015-10, Revised 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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http://195.220.190.85/GREDEG-WP-2015-36.pdf Revised version, 2018-10 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Michael Polanyi's economics: a strange rapprochement (2018)
Working Paper: Michael Polanyi’s economics: A strange rapprochement (2015)
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