Magyar szociológiatörténeti füzetek, 2. (Budapest, 1986)

Summary

to time). His belief in free thinking, knowledge and the sciences is also unfailing. Machism, elitism and atheism are only characteristic of the first phase of his career though.

Publicist of Radical Bourgeois Ideas

The intellectual growth of the young Polanyi was - as he himself saw it - determined by Russian culture (especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) and revolution on the one hand, and by his family's intellectual orientation towards Anglo-Saxon civilization on the other. The aspiration to find a balance between these two cultural spheres seems to constitute one of the most important elements of his ideology. And his critics have commented that his inner moral struggle prevented him from taking sides explicitely.

His acquaintance with Marxism dates back to the first decade of the century. Although he himself insisted that Marxism had had no determining influence on his later ideas, the overall traces of Marxism in his whole oeuvre are clearly discernible. The influence of the Russian revolution (1905) was mediated by Samuel Klatschko, who was the fatherly friend of both Ervin Szabó and Karl Polanyi. He an was enthusiastic supporter of the Russian student movement and popularized it in the Galilei Circle. He was fa170