Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Two reviewers summarize and analyze Gábor Bíró’s book, The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi. The author then responds to each.

The Ford Foundation funded not only the important 1965 and 1966 Bowdoin College interdisciplinary conferences of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity (SGFCU), but also the many later conferences from 1967-1972 of the SGFCU successor group, the Study Group for the Unity of Knowledge (SGUK). Michael Polanyi chaired the group making these grant proposals and his cultural criticisms and his constructive post-critical philosophical ideas underlay both the SGFCU and the early SGUK programs which Ford generously supported. There is interesting Ford Foundation archival material about these grants and their programs as well as many relevant letters in the Michael Polanyi Papers. This essay focuses on Polanyi’s limited role in three SGUK meet­ings and its decisive importance in shaping late Polanyi publications. It also traces the declining Polanyi’s aspiration to work with Marjorie Grene to convene a never realized European SGUK conference (in the early seventies) that used his ideas to illumine the destruction of Europe in the twentieth century.

This essay contextualizes Polanyi’s 1947 talk, “What to Believe.” After reviewing connections that probably led to Polanyi’s invitation to make this presentation at the Student Christian Movement conference in Manchester, I comment on Polanyi’s effort to compare the connection between understanding, believing and belonging in science, Christianity and “civic morality.” The main ideas in this talk should be viewed in relation to other writing from the mid-forties to the early fifties when Polanyi begins to develop his “fiduciary” philosophy as an alternative to what he views as the excessively skeptical disposition of the modern mind.