The essays contained in this volume offer the results of a close examination carried over more than half a century of world history. The broad range of topics, which were covered in a span of time that stretches from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, is characteristic of the scientific output of Karl Polanyi. Thanks to a remarkable intersection of his personal trajectory with events of great political and historical importance,1 Polanyi was witness to several of the major historical moments of the twentieth century, from the belle époque to the Great War – in which Polanyi took part on the Austro-Hungarian side – to the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918 and 1919 to the radical transformations that occurred between the two wars to the first phase of the Cold War.
This history of the West, interwoven with the story of his life, is the great forge that shaped Polanyi's work. He was trained as a lawyer, worked as a journalist, and became a wandering exile, an “expatriate” from a bourgeois social order. He was always a careful and rigorous thinker.2
Simplifying the complexity of Polanyi's work is no easy task, but we can perhaps identify a singular and enduring focus in it: establishing the compatibility of democracy with human existence. This, for Polanyi, represented the goal of social activism.3 The story of his intellectual development is one of “nonconformism” and devotion to this ideal.
As already noted, Karl Polanyi completed his studies in law, though he never considered that field to be the primary focus of his intellectual efforts. In fact, reflection on legal theory is relatively marginal in Polanyi's work by comparison to reflection on economics. Nonetheless, the attitude to law that can at least be gleaned, in certain passages, from a trace of absence offers interesting food for thought on Polanyi's institutionalist perspective on law. The various writings in this volume highlight this dimension of his thought. His purposeful distancing from formalism led him to favor a normative model in which legal phenomena can act as a tool for understanding “embeddedness”4 and the “economistic fallacy.”
This “muting effect” invites reflection on a type of anthropology that deconstructs many traditional categories, and in particular that of the autonomy of the normative system. There are too few examples to allow an easy identification of Polanyi's position on law, and so we are justified in adapting an interpretation of his work that minimizes its significance. Just the same, the normative paradigm is relevant insofar as the legal scholar attempts to observe the law with the eyes of a “non-jurist.”
Polanyi always approaches the law in a factual manner: he pays heed to the social factors that determine the norms5 and uses facts taken from real life as the test of sociological analysis. This last premise would be taken up in studies of primitive societies and is notably convergent with the views of Malinowski6 and Mauss regarding the existence of total social facts, namely those facts that intersect with every type of institution: religious, judicial, moral, economic.7 Law, then, would join the group of those noneconomic institutions that serve to incorporate economy into society.
Of particular relevance in this regard is a passage from “The Eclipse of Panic and the Outlook for Socialism” in which Polanyi asserts:
Neither the legal fiction that defines labor as the subject of a specific contract nor the economic fiction that defines the scarce and useful thing sold as the commodity “labor” affects the actual world. What matters to us here is the human situation postulated in the organization described as labor market.8
The problem of social “cogency” seems, then, to absorb the problem of normative prescriptions.9 Further along he writes, more directly: “But social organization does not depend for its functioning on formal sanctions”10 but on the tangible relationship established between the individual and her own environmental and social context.11
For Polanyi, the legal narrative is, in and of itself, parallel with the social narrative. His sociological analysis, neither legal nor historical, of the Speenhamland Law of 1795 in The Great Transformation provides a good example.12 Polanyi focuses his attention on the social effects as a means to understanding the human condition in a given environment.13 For example, the legislation drafted in favor of the poor in England, from the Poor Law of 1601 to the abolition of the Speenhamland Law in 1834, did not improve the conditions of those who received the subsidies,14 because those laws were not rooted in the culture of the age. Instead they led to a deregulation of labor.15 If this aspect of the analysis – constant attention to the social effects of formal rules – is overlooked, then the apparently contradictory attitude toward the legal effects of the process of separation and reincorporation of the economy into social institutions remains unresolved. In Polanyi's reconstruction of the rise of the market economy, the law assumes a dual function: it operates both as a factor that dissociates the economy from society and as a societal self-defense mechanism, and therefore as a mechanism of economic re-embedding.16 One of the key elements in Polanyi's analysis is the enclosure – land that had at one time been free and open to communal use being closed off by aristocrats and other wealthy landowners. An initially gradual phase of enclosure, which accompanied the transition from cultivation to pastoralism,17 was followed by a period of agricultural industrialization that served only to worsen the quality of life of the peasantry.18 This second transition gave rise to that social disintegration, so well described not only in The Great Transformation but also in the essay “Culture in a Democratic England of the Future.”19 In parallel, a radical change in the relations between social classes occurred, following which the industrialists succeeded in dismantling the support system established for the poor by the monarchy. The development of cotton manufacturing is the main example of this phenomenon, and one in which law played a major role: “Just as cotton manufactures – the leading free trade industry – were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state.”20 The creation of a self-regulating market was also furthered by the repeal of the Elizabethan Poor Law in 1834 and of the Corn Laws in 1846 and by the approval of the Bank Act of 1844, which introduced the gold standard.21 On this interpretation, law acts as a mechanism for the institutionalization of the market. It also works to insure that the system functions freely, insofar as “nothing must be allowed to inhibit the formation of markets.”22 At the same time, however, law can present numerous constraints and limitations to the operation of the market. Polanyi cites the example of medieval guilds and mercantilist policies, under which land and labor constituted the foundation of military, juridical, administrative, and political systems; and their use was regulated and protected by law and custom,23 being thus withdrawn from the price mechanism. The paradoxical nature of law, as defined by Polanyi, is summarized in the saying “laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.”24 So, while laissez-faire was implemented by means of a variety of social systems and law played a particularly relevant role among them, the reaction to it was spontaneous. The conflict between the self-regulating market and the human instinct of self-preservation gave rise to a collective social reaction, aimed at neutralizing the destabilizing effects of a mechanism that was focused on reducing land and labor to the status of goods. However, the spontaneity of this reaction did not signify the absence of the law; on the contrary. This sentiment emerges clearly in the essay “The Eclipse of Panic and the Outlook of Socialism”:
Some of these interventions come from governmental or legislative bodies; others originate with voluntary associations like trade unions or cooperatives; still others spring from organs of moral life or public opinion such as churches, scientific organizations, or the press. With respect to labor, interventions were responsible for factory laws, social insurance, educational and cultural minima, municipal trading and the various forms of trade union activities, and so on. With regard to land, protectionist intervention took the form of land laws, agrarian laws, tenancy and homestead laws, including some forms of agrarian protectionism.25
In the spontaneous nature of this counter-movement, Polanyi identifies a legal space in which society can make an attempt at self-preservation and oppose the use of force by the state: “the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends.”26 This same passage contains an interesting observation about the separation of economics and politics: “Economic history reveals that the emergence of national markets was in no way the result of the gradual and spontaneous emancipation of the economic sphere from governmental control.”27 If one takes into consideration the rise and fall of liberal economy, the symmetric processes of disembedding and re-embedding – what Polanyi defines as the double movement – must be interpreted as related consequences of the same phenomenon. The role of law in this process appears, then, to be neutral, and its relevance changes in relation to a given conflict as a function of whether it is used in the assertion of power or in the settling of a claim. We can find a relevant example in the lecture “The Trend Toward an Integrated Society”: “The working class made use of the institutions of the democratic state in order to protect itself against the worst effects of the competitive system; the leaders of business, on their part, made use of industrial property and finance to weaken political democracy.”28 It is worth noting, however, that Polanyi does not view these counter-movements as necessarily “positive” phenomena, as can be gathered from his analysis of the effects of self-protective measures like laws on factories and unions, agricultural tariffs, and monetary controls: “But precisely this made self-regulation unworkable. It involved nationalism, which was merely the inevitable reaction of political bodies to the social dislocation caused by the international trade system (everywhere except in the strongest country – England).”29
From observations like these we can deduce that law can play a significant, if not always obvious, role in the context of Polanyi's discourse on economics as an institutional process.30
Nevertheless, in order to have a clearer idea of the function of law in Polanyi's thought, it is helpful to consider his 1920s writings on socialist accounting, in which the relationship between law and economics, though applied to a purely abstract model, is observed from a markedly different perspective.31
It is in the context of this reflection that the idea of “social law” emerges – by which “we mean those principles that point the orientation of production in a direction that is useful for the community.”32 In other words, within the framework of an ideal socialist economy in transition (like that described by Polanyi), social law seeks to fix the mistakes produced by a capitalist economy, directing productivity to social ends and ensuring an equal distribution of goods. For the author, the main objectives of social law are maximization of productivity, equitable distribution of social production, and orientation of the process of production toward public utility.33
In particular, the essay “The Crucial Issue Today: A Response” can be reread in the light cast by Polanyi's writings on socialist accountability.34 According to him, the associative legal form that distills the objectives of market socialism is the voluntary agricultural cooperative, wherein each member “is able to survey his position in relation to his environment.”35 This is a more personalized vision of the economy, which runs counter to the alienation produced by the market economy. Polanyi imagines a kind economy where management and organization are negotiated between associations of producers and consumer cooperatives. A method of industrial organization subject to the needs of agriculture would make a good example.36 In Polanyi's view, it follows that the legal framework – that is, the system of ownership and management – should be made subordinate to the interests of agriculture as defined by agricultural cooperatives. Conversely, an a priori legislative system for ownership and management that functions without taking into account those needs seems distant from Polanyi's point of view.37
The investigations reviewed above lead us to reflect on a type of social, economic, and political analysis that uses complexity as a metric of reality and prompts consideration of the relevance of scientific methods. In this regard it is worth citing two of the essays contained in this volume – “How to Make Use of the Social Sciences” and “On Political Theory” – in which Polanyi reflects on the methods and characteristics of the social sciences. As he writes in the former, “every science necessarily restricts its subject matter to such elements in the context of its environment as are susceptible to its method.”38 Therefore science, operating selectively in order to create an applicable abstract model, borrows only partially from – and occasionally excludes entirely from its purview – that natural or innate interest that gives rise to the problem of science itself. According to Polanyi, there is no continuum of knowledge,39 but rather an array of diverse techniques. The “innate interest” of humans when faced with their surrounding environment40 can never be exhausted by the methodology of the social sciences, including legal and political science.41 This point is stated concisely in “On Political Theory,” where Polanyi observes that the methodology of political science does not determine the knowledge of a political body but instead promotes the discovery of the potential rules of existence within it.42 Furthermore, the impact of the social sciences may cause a shift in evaluation criteria, and thus it may involve processes of constant differentiation that progressively distance themselves from the innate interest.43 Therefore Polanyi attempts to analyze the problem of consciousness in a non-self-referential manner: “The strands of interest also intermingle in the most varied ways. While each separate discipline satisfies some of it, none satisfies it completely, nor perhaps do they do so together.”44
The reference to political theory invites further consideration of Polanyi's use of certain juridical–political categories of western modernity – including the political, democracy, war and peace, and the very idea of Europe.
Polanyi firmly believes that an economy must exist and develop within political institutions and that the phenomenon of the self-regulating market, which emerged in the golden age of liberalism, was a function of that age. The essential element of every social system is not economic but political. By “political” Polanyi means – unequivocally – the ability to make choices for a given territory. He fully embraces the theory of modern law and, displaying his European background, employs the terminology of the nation-state, sometimes even when referring to global phenomena. While in the 1919 essay “The Crucial Issue Today: A Response” he still expresses a belief in the possibility that the borders of the nation-state are cancelled by the socialist revolution, in his later writings he appears to take a different approach, wherein the passage from struggle between states to struggle within the state entails only a quantitative difference. In reference to the second kind of struggle, Polanyi uses the phrase “internal civil war.” As Cangiani has pointed out, the allusion to Schmitt's friend–enemy pair, described in Schmitt's 1927 book The Concept of the Political,45 is significant, even though the allusive phrase is used in a completely different manner and on a par with a descriptive element of events related to war, but not constitutive of the political. For Polanyi, war is characteristically impersonal and does not embody a specific negative value of enmity, so much so that he cites the example of an unwanted war.46 Instead, as he argues in several chapters contained in Part II of this volume – “The Nature of International Understanding,” “The Meaning of Peace,” “The Roots of Pacifism” – war is an institution that serves to resolve conflicts. In order to do away with war, one would have to find new institutions that fulfill the same function.47 Polanyi's position is markedly different from that of Benjamin Constant, as the latter stated it in The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns: “War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”48 Constant presumably uses the term “commerce” not in a technical sense, but more likely to refer to contractual activity more generally. On the contrary, for Polanyi war can only be replaced by a political institution. One such institution is the international treaty, which serves to prevent duplicating the problem of civil war at an international level. The alternative mechanisms for resolving a conflict between states are, then, international treaty or armed conflict.
Elaboration on the “political” highlights a perpetual conflict between government of the people and government of the law, and between governors and governed. The essay “Public Opinion and Statesmanship” focuses on the responsibilities of a good ruler. Such a figure, according to Polanyi, would be able to comprehend public opinion and to consider its deeper levels in cases where “there is an essentially correct appraisal of the objective situation: of the present danger and the oncoming dangers of the future.”49 Ruling power must always reckon with a people it recognizes as the true custodian of culture, a people therefore called upon to act with social responsibility. By culture Polanyi means the use of the products of civilization50 in line with living conditions, and hence in correspondence with “the social realities of those who shape their way of life in conformity with it.”51 In the essay just mentioned, Polanyi identifies Roosevelt as a great statesman, capable of reviving America's fortunes after the crisis of 1929 through the political reforms of the New Deal. In fact he uses the example of this great statesman in order to analyze the characteristics of the statesman and his relationship with public opinion; and the latter is based on knowledge and understanding, both defining elements of a strong executive power.52 Regarding executive prerogatives, Polanyi significantly draws a parallel between the centralization of powers during the New Deal and the economic crises that developed under the Russian and German dictatorships.53 In a piece from 1935 Polanyi defends the possible adoption of emergency measures by the executive branch, demonstrating his skepticism toward the well-known Schechter ruling54 – which deemed the delegation of significant powers to president Roosevelt by Congress unconstitutional, banned federal decisions on economic policy except for those regarding commercial exchange and interstate transport, and ruled that legal and administrative actions that violated that principle were similarly unconstitutional.55 It is not, then, hard to imagine that, in the matter of the noted 1930–1 squabble between Kelsen56 and Schmitt on the “guardianship of the constitution,” Polanyi would prefer to assign that role to a constitutional court rather than to a president of the Reich [Reichspräsident], even though the concept of liberal constitutionalism had only been given as a hypothesis. What is, then, the role of the “political” in Karl Polanyi?
The concept of a statesman capable of monopolizing consensus and of translating the choice of the majority into his own decision, debatable though it may be, must be placed in a wider discussion of constitutional form. That discussion recalls the noted conflict between Polanyi and Mises in the early 1920s regarding the practicality of a socialist economy based on functionalist principles.57 Mises claimed that a reconciliation between syndicalism and collectivism was not possible because the constitutional form was the product of a conflict that could only end in victory for the stronger force. Polanyi, moreover, considered the alternative between syndicalism and collectivism unfounded, mainly because in the constitutional form the power relationship could never be independent from the relationship of social recognition; both would necessarily have to find an equilibrium. According to Polanyi, the economic activity of the individual is determined by two fundamentally distinct motivations – that of the producer and that of the consumer – both of which converge in the act of decision making.
The question of political legitimacy and of its various forms emerges against this backdrop. Polanyi's conceptual point of reference is Rousseau and not Hobbes,58 and his field of study is the institutional dimension.59 By institution he means something that can exist independently of legal or rational power. Frequently, however, institutional forms coincide with legitimate power structures, as in the case of the courts, which serve the purpose of guaranteeing social peace:
The advantages (or disadvantages) to the individual that derive from the existence of the court are of an entirely different character from the advantages (or disadvantages) deriving from the existence of the court to the community and, incidentally, to the individual as a member of the community. In this capacity the individual reaps the benefit of internal peace, while in his capacity as a litigant he may be securing for himself (or having to suffer) the various advantages (or eventual disadvantages) inherent in his personal contact with the law.60
Polanyi therefore recognizes that the goal of political obligation lies in the individual's pursuit of peaceful coexistence, which one realizes precisely with the help of those institutions in which one is at once free and “everywhere in chains.”
Polanyi's reflections on law and politics also focus on the subject of territory. In addition to the three essays on war presented in this volume,61 he addressed the topic in a 1937 essay entitled “Europe Today.”62 That work dealt mainly with Polanyi's disillusionment over the failure of the League of Nations of 1919 and focused on a critique of two articles in the Pact: Article 16, on the principle of collective action should any member of the League be the target of aggression; and Article 19, on the revision of treaties that have become inapplicable. His main accusation was that short-sighted international legislation was one of the factors that had led to the rise of totalitarianism among the democracies of continental Europe. Those opinions placed him in the company of his contemporaries Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, both of whom had critiqued the Treaty of Versailles, although from different perspectives. Kelsen, in particular, criticized the shortcomings of the system of sanctions imposed by the Pact of the League of Nations, proposing instead the creation of an International Court of Law.63 Schmitt, on the other hand, criticized the system of reparations as being out of proportion with the offense.64 Polanyi meanwhile drew inspiration from a traditional idea of modern politics: that a state can exist solely within determined boundaries, and that disagreement relating to the definition of these boundaries can be resolved through one of two decision-making processes: through an international treaty or, in extremis, through war.65 Polanyi's position was not one of exclusion – in fact he proposed a collective security policy enacted by the democratic and socialist nations within the League of Nations.
The border problem entails, according to Polanyi, a distinction between internal space and international space, which are not in reality heterogeneous. Where borders are undefined, no sort of political form can exist.66 War is the inevitable outcome when “the states in conflict owe no common allegiance to a higher sovereignty.”67 What seems to emerge here is the idea of a Weberian bond of obedience that joins people together in the face of rational legal power. Polanyi defines it as “loyalty”:68 “communities are organized in states; and, without some loyalty to the state, the community cannot function satisfactorily.”69
This problem is linked to the complex question of the West, and particularly to the international opportunities created by the Bretton Woods Agreement. If Polanyi's thoughts on the political at the end of the 1930s could be compared with the positions expressed by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political,70 his criticism of western universalism in the late 1950s can be readily compared to Schmitt's The nomos of the Earth.71 Polanyi attributes the triumph of western universalism to the affirmation of political power. Even if the goal of ius publicum europaeum does not belong in Polanyi's mental landscape,72 it is nonetheless interesting to explore certain ideas in this connection. Polanyi defines as “empty” only that space where there are no borders and attributes the success of England – the triumph of the logic of the sea, according to Carl Schmitt's postwar perspective73 – to two factors: the internal cohesion of the state and its external alliances. Nonetheless, he draws a political distinction between the European nation-state and a political state with limited power like the United States.74 In the essay on America contained in this volume, Polanyi offers a penetrating analysis of the institutional mechanism of the United States, emphasizing that, in contrast to European states, the US is much less invasive. According to Polanyi, “In the USA the political state is banished by the constitution to a remote corner in society. It exists only on sufferance and on condition that it will on no account try to gain powers and competences similar to those enjoyed by the European States.”75 Therefore society in the United States exists without the support of the political state. In fact the American system, alongside the continental model,76 can be counted among the egalitarian democracies, provided that we understand its outcome to be “the result of a national revolution against foreign feudalism.”77 Social differences in America – as compared to England – are only the product of income, not of class. Furthermore, since everyone is potentially subject to drastic changes of fortune, integration can, for this very reason, be achieved by democratic means,78 without running the risk of loss of freedom. Polanyi, then, does not have any bias toward Europe, in fact he considers Europe the source of the global crisis. His thoughts on the state are entirely oriented to the idea of freedoms, which Polanyi describes as
concrete institutions, civic liberties – freedoms (in the plural) – the capacity to follow one's personal conviction in the light of one's conscience: the freedom to differ, to hold views of one's own, to be in a minority of one, and yet to be an honored member of the community in which one plays the vital part of the deviant.79
The freedom in question is clearly one born and defined within the confines of a state, since “no community of this character can produce law and order, safety and security, education and morality, civilization and culture unless its frontiers are settled and there is no reasonable danger of their becoming unsettled.”80 If it is true, then, that the state is the guarantor of constitutional freedom understood as a negative freedom, and also of social freedom in the form of equality, it is also true that such freedom is only fully realized when society manages “to transmit to the masses the sense of labor, life, and routine.”81
Polanyi seems to endorse both the prospect of a European state as guarantor of equality in the form of social freedom and the prospect of an egalitarian society in which the role of the political state is marginalized to allow for the growth of personal freedoms. For Polanyi, the fundamental point is the impact of industrialization and of the development of class consciousness with regard to the dynamism of constitutional forms, that is, the relationship between the exercise of power and social awareness. The idea of freedom vanishes in the context of the self-regulating market or system of prices and in the absence of the regulatory mechanisms of the state. Polanyi maintains that the unregulated capitalism of the nineteenth century led to the erosion of the concept of liberty.82 This assumption embodies the limits of overlap between the two models of democracy, libertarian and egalitarian, which alternated in Europe between 800 and 1800.83 Although the two models overlap when it comes to the forms of constitutional democracy, they also contain profound differences that make them mutually exclusive: “In fact equality is never achieved by law but at the cost of liberty, nor was liberty secured in an unequal society but at the price of maintaining inequality.”84
Polanyi's reflections on the limits of freedom intersect with his criticism of economic determinism.85 Polanyi claims that the development of freedom is independent from technology or any type of economic organization, since “[i]nstitutional guarantees of personal freedom are in principle compatible with any economic system.”86 The phenomenon of the self-regulating market is therefore contingent, and an extension of political democracy throughout society is possible through the democratization of industry.87
Polanyi's call for realism, however, is even stronger and more radical when it is about the possible model for a social state. He asserts:
The actual forms of material existence of man are those of worldwide interdependence. The political forms of human existence must also be worldwide. Either within the boundaries of a world empire or in those of a world federation – either through conquest and subjection or by international cooperation – the nations of the globe must be brought within the folds of one embracing body if our civilization is to survive.88
This point seems to be at the center of Polanyi's thought. War and cooperation are in fact tools, used without distinction in interactions between social classes, between the victors and the vanquished, and between the haves and the have-nots. They are the forms through which an individual and a society are compatible or incompatible.
The connection between capitalism and democracy is linked to the compatibility between economics and politics. Abandonment of democratic forms necessarily impacts the multiplicity of human relations, and more generally the manifestations of social existence. By necessity, the sphere of democracy has to be inclusive; democracy cannot benefit some individuals but not others. Politics must, then, conform to the realities of material existence89 and not vice versa, as was the case with the rise of fascist regimes.90 The role of politics cannot be solely to allow risk to produce uncontrollable effects. In fact, were this to happen, modern rationality would inevitably be neutralized by the incalculability of the market, instead of performing its primary task of managing risk.91
In such a process, the idea of conflict92 represents the central nucleus of constitutional forms, in both national and international law.93 Joerges has argued, with reference to Polanyi, for a tripartite perspective on what he calls “conflicts law” – the conflict deriving from the multiplicity of institutional decisions made in a multilevel system – which confronts the present postnational constellation: the search for meta-norms that become operational in cases of substantially different regulatory systems; the implementation of international accords; and the inclusion of nongovernmental actors.94
Polanyi did not live long enough to witness the commodification of rights,95 which was one of the very forms he hypothesized as a tool for economic reintegration. Nor did he see the decline of the social democracies in the 1970s, and thus the era when the state began delegating risk management to informal powers.96 He did, however, witness the growth of a type of international cooperation that followed the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. Its goal was to avoid devastation of the sort experienced in the world wars while leaving plenty of room for operation of the invisible hand of capitalism97 – a program shortly afterward enacted in 1947 through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). During that same period he saw the creation of a similar system in Europe following on the Marshall Plan, which led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1949. As Polanyi writes in the essay “For a New West,” after which this book is named, the challenge that faced the West was to initiate a true cultural revolution – one that challenged a perverse system in which science, technology, and economic organization had assumed uncontrollable dimensions. The roots of this phenomenon date back to the nineteenth century, when liberal capitalism began separating itself from representative democracy.98 Curbing an unchecked progress would have meant sacrificing efficiency for the sake of humanity, namely democratic social integration.99 Polanyi never lost faith in the possibility for social reintegration; and yet he was equally aware of the intrinsic limitations of an intervention that was merely legislative. That awareness emerges clearly in his critical analysis of the advent and crisis of the market economy. In comparing his thoughts with current events, we might infer that laws, important though they may be, cannot, in and of themselves, guarantee “a sufficiently stable outlook on the future, such as would allow laying the foundations of human character and raising a new generation.”100 That guarantee must come from something more powerful than laws, which Polanyi identifies as the values inherent in our shared culture – that is, in our act of establishing a community, as a project of collective and inclusive existence.101 Laws without culture may prove to be weak, but most of all they run the risk of not serving an integrative function in society.
Polanyi's thoughts open unusual avenues of inquiry, which may either prove attractive to legal scholars or inspire their distrust. In the midst of a cultural and financial crisis that implicates human life rather than “structures,” these works invite us not to lose sight of the “forgotten man”102 and his unfolding throughout the world.
Translated by Carl Ipsen and Michael Ipsen
The president will always be suspected of aspiring to absolute power, while congress will instead be suspected of favoring special interests or groups of electors (if not the members of congress themselves) to the detriment of the collectivity. The constitution guarantees that the two will remain firmly in a position of mutual suspicion. Every line of the constitution expresses the profound aversion for the state, for any sort of constituted power, that characterized the founding fathers who were fundamentally anarchists. The prohibition against agreements between the head of state and the legislature was intended to protect the freedom of the individual. It is that purpose that explains a drastic measure like the separation of the executive from the legislative branch. (Karl Polanyi, “Roosevelt im Verfassungskampf,” in his Chronik der großen Transformation, vol. 1, 264–70)