Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Volume 41, Issue 2, 2014/2015

Richard W. Moodey
Pages 25-34

“Visual Presentations of Social Matters” and Later Changes in Polanyi’s Social Theory

In a 1936 lecture, Polanyi claimed too much for the efficacy of visual presentations of relations among economic things. His 1945 book, Full Employment and Free Trade was the last of his major publications in which he used many diagrams to illustrate his points. In that book, he stated his objective of trying to popularize the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. But after 1945, he seems to have stopped trying to help people understand Keynesian theory, and in Personal Knowledge, his only references to Keynes are criticisms of some of his ideas about probability and statistics. He later moved away from writing about the economy as an isolated system, towards treating it as just one of the four major aspects of society.