Polanyi, Karl

In 1922, Herzog had gathered a team of excellent physical chemists and physicists. Among them, Michael Polanyi, Karl Weissenberg, Erich Schmid, and Rudolf Brill. Since he intended to study organic fibers starting with cellulose, he felt it advisable to broaden this team with an organic chemist. 

Proponents of this view forget or ignore, I think, the fact that in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labor (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. Karl Polanyi s classic, The Great Transformation (Boston Beacon Press, 1957), is still perhaps the best case against pure market logic. 

As will be shown shortly, Marx believed that this process had taken place twice, once in antiquity and then again in the Middle Ages. It is not clear that he was right in either case. Karl Polanyi, who has been the foremost champion of the "priority of the external over the internal development of trade", did not think that the former gave birth to the latter. In antiquity, in his view, a national market never developed - there were only local markets and international trade. In the Middle Ages the towns were the focus of both local and international trade, but prevented the formation of a national market until their resistance was broken by the state. Broadly... 

Farewell gathering in the Institute garden, July 1933. First row standing on the right Friedrich Epstein seated from the right Hartmut Kallmann, Michael Polanyi, Fritz Haber seated in front of Haber Rita Cracauer two chairs left of Haber Herbert Freundlich far left, seated on the ground Karl Klein, glassbiower. 

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