Richard Moodey

Michael Polanyi’s use of Gestalt as his model for acts of knowing and his ideal of performative consistency are two reasons why his mature theory of language is radical. That theory serves as metaphorical spectacles for viewing the radical meanings Polanyi created and attributed to “science,” “faith,” and “society.” He held that only a person can mean something by a word, and a word can mean nothing by itself. What a person means by a word is always partially indeterminate. Faith is especially important. For a period of time he called his philosophy his “fiduciary programme.” Faith always had a indeterminate religious dimension for Polanyi. There is tension between Polanyi’s mature theory of language and his epistemological and ontological realism. The language he used in writing about moral inversion as a pathology of the “modern mind” was sometimes inconsistent with his theory of language.

This edited volume of original contributions deals with the economic and political thought of Michael Polanyi. Requiring little prior knowledge of Polanyi, this volume further develops a somewhat neglected side of Polanyi's work. In particular it examines the 'tacit integration', of subsidiary details into focal objects or actions as central to all knowing and action. It traces ontological counterparts in the structures of comprehensive entities and complex actions, and a multi-level universe in which lower levels have their boundary conditions, the extents to which they apply, determined by those of the next higher level, whilst each possessing its own laws or operative principles. This schema of 'dual control' preserves the reality and relative autonomy of each level, and its interactions with others, against the various reductions. The essays in this volume also employ and develop important additional concepts and distinctions such as: 'corporate' and 'spontaneous' order; 'public' and 'private' liberties; 'general' and 'specific authority'; and 'moral inversion'; which, as the essays show, are necessary for understanding and maintaining a free society and the freedom of institutions within it. Among the topics treated with them are: more of the prerequisites of freedom in public liberties dedicated to principles and transcendent values; totalitarianism and society as spontaneous order; the balance of general and specific authority in society and particular institutions; reductionism, totalitarianism and consumption in consumer societies, as moral inversions; the mutual interactions of economics and politics as distinct and autonomous but interacting levels; the sociological aspects of economics; and Polanyi's own contributions to sociology. Although, as indicated, Polanyi has his special terms, the essays in this volume, like his works, give them meaning with concrete examples and so avoid merely shuffling a mass of abstractions. Together the essays show that his work is a rich seam of ideas and inspiration for yet further extension and application--Publisher.

Similarities between what Michael Polanyi and Daniel Kahneman wrote about the acts of judging and deciding are partly the result of taking seriously the findings of Gestalt psychology. Both men treat acts of judging and deciding as analogous to acts of perceiving. This similarity is the reason that the differences between Kahneman and Polanyi are mostly complementary, rather than contradictory. Among the things Polanyians can contribute to the interdisciplinary field of judgment and decision making are commitment, the from-to structure, and the image of leaping across a logical gap. Among the things Polanyians can learn from Kahneman is a pragmatic distinction between judging and deciding, a distinction between fast and slow thinking, and a heightened awareness of the many ways tacit heuristics and biases lead to mistaken judgments and bad decisions.

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, a problem of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events.

Michael Polanyi began thinking and writing about tradition long before he met Edward Shils in 1946. Polanyi’s religious experience in 1913 became part of the background for his thinking about tradition, and tradition entered into his thinking about spontaneous order and moral inversion. Polanyi and Shils both knew Karl Mannheim before they met one another, and had similar criticisms of Mannheim’s sociology. Soon after they met, both Polanyi and Shils were briefly enthusiastic about the Action Frame of Reference, which Shils helped create. Neither of them used the Action Frame of Reference in their later work. One of the reasons was its neglect of tradition, and another was that is was simply too complex to be a useful conceptual tool. Polanyi’s thinking about tradition did not change much after Personal Knowledge, but Shils continued to modify his thinking about tradition until the final years of his life