Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics by Gregory Baum (review)

302 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 In the space left to me I can do little more than list the other essays in this collection that I would especially recommend. Holly Laird explores the ambivalences of the early poetry. James C. Cowan confronts an early psychoanalytic account of Sons and Lovers with a more recent one; a biographically and critically illuminating exercise. Ginette Katz-Roy documents Lawrence's apocalyptic response to the portents of mass civilization, setting it in the context of social psychological theories current in his lifetime. (MICHAEL KIRKHAM) Gregory Baum. Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics McGill-Queen's University Press. xi, 94· $12.95 Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was a distinguished European intellectual with Canadian connections. Born in Hungary, he lived most of his life as an exile, first as a refugee in Vienna, then in England, then in the United States, where he finally completed the manuscript for his most famous book, The Great Transformation, published in 1944. Though he finished his academic career after the Second World War teaching at Columbia University in New York, he chose to live near Toronto when his wife liona was refused admission to the United States. Karl and Ilona had one child, Karl Polanyi Levitt, who became a leading Canadian economist and author of the influential Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (1970). K11rl Polanyi on Ethicsand Economics constitutes McGill's Sproule lectures for 1993. Here Gregory Baum examines the ethical foundation of Polanyi's thought and establishes the relevance of Polanyi's approach for contemporary human struggles to live with an ethic of solidarity, responsibility, and respect for nature. The strength of Baum's book lies in the second chapter, where he teases out the ethical foundations of Polanyi's work through an examination of early writings and ancillary articles. Here Baum finds and illumines a consistent critic of value-free science, one who would be at home in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He also describes a thinker moving easily with the personalist philosophy of John Macmurray - one who understands human beings as persons-in-commllllity. Fundamentally, Baum uncovers an intellectual who believes we are beings of conscience. Polanyi persisted in 'the day-to-day task of ethical living, the Lebensweg as he called it,' seeking the freedom required to live responsibly and self-critically. Baum described an engaged intellectual who 'argues with the people of his day who refuse to concede the primacy of the ethical' and who advocates a 'new socialism' which is concerned with the spiritual dimension of human existence. For people on the Left today, Polanyi is an important discovery. HUMANITIES 303 This is a contextual Norton was ...