Abstract
Having watched totalitarianism emerge in its left-wing (Russian Soviet) and right-wing (Nazi) forms, Michael Polanyi devoted considerable attention to analysing totalitarianism in its development, makeup and mode of operation. At the same time as he developed his account of totalitarianism incrementally he pieced together his picture of liberalism. His fundamental insight is that while liberal civilization is dedicated to protecting, and is animated by, a set of ideals that includes freedom, truth, toleration, equality and justice, totalitarian regimes aim at erasing ideals such as these from their social face.
After teaching for many years at Deakin University, Struan Jacobs retired in 2018 and works now as an independent scholar
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
According to David Roberts (2020, p. 1) totalitarianism was coined by an Italian anti-fascist in the early 1920s.
- 3.
Polanyi, 1940b, pp. 97, 98. See also Polanyi’s points regarding truth on pages 115–116 of the same essay. “Dictatorship” was also Polanyi’s preferred term in his lecture “On Popular Education in Economics” to the Manchester Political Society, 1937a, reprinted in Tradition & Discovery, July 2016, pp. 22–23. It is the comprehensiveness of modern dictatorship that he comes to stress most, distinguishing it from pre-modern authoritarianism. Whether a modern dictatorship is of the political left or right matters little, Polanyi came to think; Fascist and Communist regimes amounting to much the same thing (1941b, p. 429). An idiosyncrasy of “Truth and Propaganda” in Polanyi’s (1940b/1936, p. 96) contrast of “modern dictatorships” and absolute monarchies/tyrannies of the past, is his suggestion that the modern regimes incorporate the “machine of democracy” as a prominent feature. W. F. W. Wynne-Jones (1936) wrote critically about this to Polanyi (13 December 1936) whereas C. S. Reynolds (1936) approved Polanyi’s “reconciliation between the existence of the machinery of democracy and the substance of dictatorship” considering it “most illuminating”, Polanyi having shown that “the machinery of democracy can be made a more effective tool of dictatorship than any which a dictator could devise for himself, and that this is the great discovery of modern dictators”. Heeding his negative critics, Polanyi by 1941 (1941b, pp. 429–430) has taken the decision to exclude democracy from his definition of totalitarianism.
- 4.
The citation is from Chapter 5, “The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State”, section 4, “The Higher Phase Communist Society”. Polanyi cited no page number. See Lenin’s State and Revolution, annotated and introduced by Todd Chretien (Lenin [1918] 2014, p. 141). I am indebted for these details to the peer reviewer of my paper.
- 5.
See also Péter Hartl’s essay “The Ethos of Science and Central Planning: Merton and Michael Polanyi on the Autonomy of Science” (Hartl, 2021).
- 6.
Polanyi and Hayek met each other for the first time in 1938 at the colloquium Louis Rougier convened in Paris to discuss Walter Lippmann’s recently published The Good Society (Lippmann, 1938). On friendly terms, they corresponded with each other over several decades, as discussed by Jacobs & Mullins, 2016.
- 7.
Alexis de Tocqueville in his study of nineteenth century American democracy prefigures Polanyi’s idea of autonomous orders. In Zetterbaum’s (1987, p. 775) paraphrase of de Tocqueville, democratic society and its associations afford individuals with opportunities to “learn the art of adapting themselves to a common purpose”, the associations forming in diverse fields, including the “educational, scientific, commercial.” On civil society see Nagy, https://polanyiana.org/articles/polanyiana-1992-1-2-2_endre-j-nagy-hungary-civil-society-in-michael-polanyi-s-thought.pdf accessed 29/05/22.
- 8.
There is text suggesting Polanyi borrowed the distinction of orders from the Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Kohler (Jacobs, 1997–1998, p. 17). From “The Span of Central Direction” (1948, reprinted in 1951h) Polanyi preferred to use the term “spontaneous order” rather than that of “dynamic order” (Jacobs, 1997–1998, p. 18).
- 9.
Polanyi took the idea public liberty very seriously indeed, prefacing his book The Logic of Liberty (1951), with the suggestion that its essays analyse public liberty as the fundamental form of liberty in liberal society, an essential element in the new form of liberalism he was explicating.
- 10.
A theme not dissimilar to Benda’s, and likely to have impressed Polanyi, was expressed by his illustrious colleague, the German Nobel physicist Max Planck (1858–1947), who credited science with enhancing “the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor [sic.] to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being” (Planck, 1932, p. 169). That there are such ideals animating the activities of what are commonly understood to constitute Western civilization is a belief, as we have severally noted above, lying at the heart of Polanyi’s Liberal thought. For further evidence of this belief see his 1940c, p. 10; 1941b, pp. 428–429, 441, 447, 450; 1951e, pp. 38, 42–46, and 1951f, p. 84. See also Polanyi (1945).
- 11.
This at any rate is how Polanyi interpreted von Mises and Hayek. Whether they really believed what Polanyi says they believed is open to question as Peter Hartl makes clear in his 2021 essay.
- 12.
Gábor Bíró has published extensively on Polanyi’s economic theory. He describes Polanyi’s economics as “neutral Keynesianism”, being a via media between orthodox Keynesianism and laissez-faire. See for example Biró’s, 2020 essay.
- 13.
Polanyi’s comments are confusing in that they imply that his own writing on totalitarianism lacks a unified and unifying concept of it. But what, the reader asks, is Polanyi (1951b, p. 108) expressing here if not a unified concept of totalitarianism: “the simple logic of totalitarianism” consists in its being “a nihilistic regime” that directs “all activities that are otherwise guided by the intellectual and moral principles that nihilism declares empty and void”?
- 14.
Polanyi had been working on some of the themes of “Perils of Inconsistency” in the decade or so leading up to its publication. His suggestion in “Perils of Inconsistency” is that Liberalism must collapse before totalitarianism can take command, but his assessment oversimplifies. Other possible scenarios are that rather than lead to totalitarianism, Liberalism might collapse by fissuring into smaller states, or it might be absorbed into a more powerful (but non-totalitarian) state.
- 15.
A later piece of Polanyian text, titled “Background and Prospect”, that Polanyi (1964, p. 18) added to his book Science, Faith and Society gives the following sketch of “moral inversion”. It is a process that “makes violence the embodiment of the values it overrides.” Those figures who were responsible for totalitarianism on the Continent installed governments that were exempt from the standards of humanity. Leaders of totalitarian regimes “were themselves prompted by an intense passion for the ideals which they so contemptuously brushed aside. They had rejected the overt professions of these ideals as philosophically unsound but they had covertly injected the same ideals into the new despotisms which they set up.” As a result of this, the ideals of humanity became surreptitiously embedded “in the violence which ruthlessly rejected them”. The “very immoralism of this power”, the fact of its rejecting humane standards of justice, truth, tolerance etc., serve its devotees as a sign of its honesty, its veracity and its “moral purity”. In view of their moral inversion, totalitarian governments could “honestly reject an accusation of immorality” in the same breath as they claimed their own power and ruthlessness to be immoral. Yeager (2002) discusses “moral inversion” in considerable detail in her excellent essay “Confronting the Minotaur: Moral inversion and Polanyi’s Moral Philosophy”. See also the discussion of Harry Prosch (1986, pp. 26–28, 35, 42–44, 49, 181, 205–206).
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Acknowledgements
The author expresses his gratitude to Emeritus Professor Phil Mullins and to Dr. Gábor Bíró for providing him with copies of several otherwise inaccessible pertinent texts of Polanyi, to Rafe Champion for helpfully clarifying for me some recondite points in Polanyi’s writings, and to Kerry Cardell and Barry Gillard for constructive criticism of the paper in late draft form. Finally, I express my thanks to the proof reader of my paper for his/her valuable suggestions that enabled me to improve it in a number of ways,
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Jacobs, S. (2024). Michael Polanyi’s Understanding of Totalitarianism Against the Backdrop of Liberal Civilization. In: Hartl, P. (eds) Science, Faith, Society: New Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51228-5_10
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