Intellectual Budapest, Hungarian Experience and the Republic of Science : Some Different Faces in Mihály Polányi’s Thinking

Abstract

The intellectual life in Budapest, since the turn of the twentieth century, developed in fact a hardly evident wealth of intellectual movements. The contours of the fundamental model of Budapest’s intellectual history of that time have been drawn by the interaction of two components. Despite the unavoidable generalization, the following thesis can be presented: the contents of the three “non-simultaneous” great waves of the European Modern Age revealed as “simultaneous” phenomena in the politics, science and aesthetics in the Budapest context. Tacit knowledge was the focus of interest in the second period of Polányi’s sociology of knowledge. He explained the concept, the mechanisms, and the functions of tacit knowledge in several studies and with complete persistence. The process described by Polányi is a ‘real process’. But not a real process can not become the criterion of truth or the foundation of a conception of truth. Most social scientists of that age held the opinion that the fact that the representatives of the Hungarian 1956 formulated and represented values in an explicit way made the judgement of the events impossible as it would violate Max Weber’s principles of value-free judgments. We believe that the evidence of ‘moral truth’ could be based more successfully on so-called fundamental consensus. i.e. consensus in basic values than on the universal truth approach of the sociology of knowledge. One of its constituents has already been mentioned: neither concept of evidence can avoid relativism. Scientific communities also have their own history. Thomas S. Kuhn’s concept of paradigms changed the situation dramatically. It settled scientific communities in the decisive position of scientific production. This theory liberated science very rapidly, also in practice. In this Kuhnian framework was born Polányi’s vision of democracy in the sciences. We don’t know what Polányi would say about our new trends. Certainly, he would stick to his special liberal position.