From “Socialist Accounting” to the “Livelihood of Man”: The Viennese and the Columbia Polanyi

Abstract

Recent commentary on Karl Polanyi’s oeuvre has argued that the émigré scholar abandoned his earlier concerns of working out a (socialist) alternative to liberal market society when delving into the institutional study of ancient economies at Columbia University from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This article reconsiders Polanyi’s late work through the lens of his 1920s efforts to theorize socialist accounting and a socialist economy in the context of the early Viennese socialist calculation debate. While many interpretations have been provided of Polanyi’s early and late work, the gradual—for some even “great”—transformation that led to his focus on ancient economic history has neither been reconstructed in detail nor fully understood. Focusing on how Polanyi’s socialist agenda of the earlier years laid the grounds for his institutional approach to economic history, this article draws attention to certain authors who have only rarely been taken into account, in particular, to Otto Neurath and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Polanyi’s late work sits ambiguously between Austrian School economic theory on the one hand and economic history in a “substantive” key, first outlined by Neurath, on the other hand. This Viennese heritage bequeathed both an implicit naturalism and an implicit socialism in Polanyi’s late studies.