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Michael Polanyi's Social/Political Order: Design for a Society of Explorers

Abstract Michael Polanyi's fascinations throughout his lifetime were threefold: (1) science—specifically physical chemistry; (2) philosophy—specifically epistemology and ontology; and (3) political society, understood, in the British tradition, to include economics. In developing his recommendations for political society, Polanyi draws broadly upon insights and even concepts from his experiences and reflections in both science and philosophy. His search for meaning in all of his philosophical works provides for him the definition of what he considers the most important human endeavor and is that which the political order must strive to encourage and protect. In addition, the gratification he found in the collegiality and conviviality of scientific research, conducted most productively in what Polanyi identified as “societies of explorers,” suggested to him the diverse groups—as in science, “polycentrically” ordered—and engaged in all kinds of productive activities that came to represent, for him, the grassroots source of a society's creative vitality. Having come to appreciate the necessity of freedom for scientific discovery, freedom became a paramount value in the model he proposed for political society. But this freedom, he realized, had to operate within the boundaries of legal and moral constraint if it was not to dissolve into the oppressions of anarchy. So we find in Polanyi's model of political society a dynamic very similar to that which he had developed in his epistemology: an indwelling of tradition for the purpose of social stability but also a “breaking-out” of established ways to engage in creative endeavors. Similarly, as Polanyi had recognized higher and lower “orders” of existence in his ontology that were necessary for the “emergence” of more comprehensive and novel entities, “greater than the sum of their parts,” he provided for a similar vertical, or qualitative, “layering” in his social order. These insights, and more, that Polanyi draws from his scientific and philosophical reflections in the process of constructing his model of a political society are what I attempt to develop in this essay.