Magyar szociológiatörténeti füzetek, 2. (Budapest, 1986)
Summary
chatechisms of petty moralists and defying these, digging out the foundation of law even against these laws and only yielding to the authority of the good and the true, turning away from the false authority of unprincipled success and conceited power." (Science, - politics - ideology) It is not possible to classify the books, studies and articles of Karl Po- lanyi according to the traditional disciplines. Economics, economic anthropology, economic, sociology, economic history, historical philosophy, politology - these are only a few of the possible choices. It is similarly difficult to categorize Polanyi's works according to their "genre". Ideological scholarship, scholarship proper or political journalism? In my opinion, most of his writings are typically interdisciplinary, somewhere on the borderlines of science, politics and ideology: his scholarly studies are strongly charged with politics and ideology, while his political writings are characterized by scholarly erudition. Polanyi did not think in categories of scolarly disciplines: he was interested in society as a whole. He never studied society and economics for themselves only. In the different phases of his career he held different views about the meaning of social and economic processes, but throughout his life he believed in the "third way", "third alternative", in both socialism and democracy. These are the problems he was always interested in; he was thus relentlessly in search of ways and means leading to a more humanistic society, to socialism where man is in the centre. This engagement, 172
