Polanyi, Karl (25 Oct. 1886-23 Apr. 1964), economic historian, was born Károly Pál Pollacsek in Vienna, the son of Mihály Pollacsek, a prosperous Hungarian railroad contractor, and Cecile Wohl, a salon convener. Educated at home, the Minta Gymnasium, and the University of Budapest, Karl was expelled in 1907 for helping defend Professor Gyula Pikler against reactionary students and officials. Pikler's relativist approach to social institutions and the law had led to his being subjected to classroom disruptions and other forms of harassment, to which Polanyi and other students objected. Having earned a doctorate of jurisprudence from the University of Kolozsvár under Bódog Somló in 1909, Polanyi took additional courses at Budapest, was admitted to the bar, and received his diploma in 1913.

The five Pollacsek children who survived childhood independently Magyarized their surname to Polányi (then Anglicized as Polanyi). Along with their cousins this remarkable family produced generations of public intellectuals, scholars, political activists, and artists. Karl's older sister Laura was one of the first Hungarian women to earn a doctorate, and his younger brother Mihály (Michael) gained renown as a physical chemist, philosopher of science, and social thinker.

In 1908 Karl Polanyi was founding president of the Galileo Circle, a radical group of assimilated Jewish university students that broadly promoted the scientific worldview. The group was loosely linked to the Sociological Society, involving Pikler, Somló, Ozskár Jászi, and others. Polanyi coedited the Galileist journal Szabadgondolat (Free Thought) and helped found Jászi's National Citizens' Radical Party in 1914. Polanyi's cavalry service during World War I left him with typhus and a serious hernia, and also significantly exacerbated a depression from which he had been suffering for over a decade.

Polanyi was tied through Jászi to the Hungarian People's Republic, the postwar coalition government formed under Count Mihály Károlyi. In 1919, as the subsequent Bolshevik regime strengthened and Szabadgondolat was suppressed, Polanyi left Budapest for Vienna. Recovery from an operation led him to a boardinghouse frequented by Hungarian émigrés, including Ilona Duczynska, a young revolutionary firebrand inspired by Polanyi's cousin Ervin Szabó. In 1923 Polanyi and Duczynska married and had a child, Karoline Hélène Polanyi (now better known as the Canadian economist Kari Levitt).

From 1919 to 1933 Polanyi practiced higher-order journalism, taught part-time at the People's College, and conducted private seminars in "Red Vienna." Analysis of guild socialism led to involvement in the socialist accountancy debates with Ludwig von Mises. In 1924 Polanyi became the foreign affairs editor of Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). He associated with British Christian Left figures engaged in postwar relief work in Vienna, and through the Austrian League of Religious Socialists he attacked corporatist tendencies within the Catholic Church.

To maintain liberty and livelihood Polanyi left for London in 1933, as did his daughter Kari in 1934. Duczynska abandoned her studies and Schutzbund activities to join them in 1936, after contracting tuberculosis. Meanwhile Polanyi had become an intellectual leader of the British Christian Left, along with the philosopher John Macmurray. His Christian Left contributions included coediting, with John Lewis and Donald K. Kitchin, Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935). He continued writing for Der Österreichische Volkswirt until 1938, published elsewhere, and earned a living by teaching economic history through the Workers' Educational Association and the extramural delegacies of Oxford University and the University of London. This entailed close contact with working people throughout southern England, as well as with various prominent Fabian socialists.

From the mid-1930s Polanyi lectured frequently in the United States on international affairs, sometimes for extended periods. Stranded in America in 1940 when the "phony war" ended in Europe, Polanyi settled at Bennington College in Vermont to write The Great Transformation (1944), with Rockefeller Foundation support. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi analyzed the socially-dislocating emergence of market society in the nineteenth century, the protective societal reaction that it provoked, and the market society's subsequent decline. He argued that attempts to restore market society after World War I engendered political tensions and economic crises that led to the collapse of democracy, the rise of various forms of fascism, and worldwide war. His vivid style and dramatic analysis caught the imagination of contemporaries concerned with the dehumanizing implications of the disembedded and self-regulating market, directed the thinking of many social scientists and humanists away from the "obsolete market mentality" and towards a substantivist view of economy, and later influenced the arguments of opponents of neoliberalism and globalization. After Duczynska joined him in Bennington in late 1941, the Polanyis returned to England in 1943, where Karl resumed part-time teaching and writing and where the couple aligned with the Károlyi faction of the expatriate Hungarian community in London.

Securing permanent academic employment in England seemed unlikely, so from 1947 to 1953 Polanyi accepted one-year appointments in economics at Columbia University, offered on the strength of the impact of The Great Transformation. Duczynska was by then barred from the United States because of her former membership in the Communist Party, so she and Polanyi moved to Pickering, Ontario, near Toronto, in 1950, with Polanyi also maintaining a New York apartment. At Columbia he taught an influential graduate course in general economic history, the main elements of which are in The Livelihood of Man (1977), edited by Harry W. Pearson.

Polanyi and the anthropologist Conrad Arensberg secured Ford Foundation support for an interdisciplinary project on economic aspects of institutional growth. This culminated in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (1957), coedited with Arensberg and Pearson, which reignited old debates within and between anthropology and economics, now under the rubric of substantivism versus formalism. After funding ceased in 1958, the so-called Continuation Group met regularly until 1961, involving Polanyi, the anthropologist Paul Bohannan, and former Polanyi students Pearson, George Dalton, Terence K. Hopkins, Paul Medow, Walter C. Neale, and Abraham Rotstein.

Twice visiting Hungary in the early 1960s, the Polanyis coedited The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary, 1930-1956 (1963), a collection of verse and prose by Hungarian Populists and Communist reformers. Collaboration with Rotstein resulted in posthumous publication of Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (1966). A close relationship with Medow laid the groundwork for Polanyi's last great project, the journal Co-existence. He was buried in Pickering but his remains were moved to Budapest in 1986.

Polanyi is typically applauded for identifying reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange as distinct modes of integration; for condemning the social dislocations caused by the nineteenth-century self-regulating market; and for analyzing socialism and fascism as opposed forms of the societal protective response to attempts to restore a deleterious "liberal utopia." Such other groundbreaking Polanyi concepts as the economy as instituted process, the disembedded economy, fictitious commodities, special-purpose and general-purpose money, and gift trade, administered trade, and ports of trade, as well as his consideration of "the reality of society" and the possibilities of freedom in a complex society, have also been influential. His impact can be discerned in institutionalist and environmental economics; economic sociology, anthropology, and geography; classics; political science; international relations; and the opposition to economic globalization. Polanyi's declamatory style and forceful critique of the economistic fallacy and assumptions of necessary links among trade, money, and markets have made him anathema for many orthodox economists, neoliberals, and libertarians. Particularly caustic have been economic historian A.J.H. Latham, essayist Roger Sandall, and Mises enthusiast Murray N. Rothbard, who have criticized Polanyi for supposedly romanticizing primitive society, allegedly denying the existence of markets and money in archaic societies, demonizing capitalism, and advocating socialism.

The Karl Polanyi Archive is housed at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University, Montreal (http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/polanyi/). Related sites have been established by the Institut Karl Polanyi (https://www.karlpolanyi.org/) and the Karl Polanyi Research Network (https://www.crisisstates.com/associated/Polanyi/). Encyclopedia entries and obituaries abound, but no book-length biography of Polanyi exists. The most comprehensive biographical sketch is Kari Polanyi Levitt and Marguerite Mendell, "Karl Polanyi: His Life and Times," Studies in Political Economy 22 (Spring 1987): 7-39.