Magyar szociológiatörténeti füzetek, 2. (Budapest, 1986)

Summary

selection of writings - prose and poetry - born in the period between 1930 and 1956.

In the autumn of 1963 he visited home: "I returned to socialism in the years of a crisis threatening humanity: socialism has ceased to be only a working class issue, it has become mankind's vital question. It was not a minor role that Hungary played in this. The final and definitive point of view is that of my homeland to whom I owe everything, having grown up under the determining influence of the Hungarian lot."

(Continuity - discontinuity) The intellectual legacy of Karl Polanyi is more than mere ideology though. In his later works he attempted at the foundation of a new social economics. This is the most enduring part of his oeuvre.

In this respect his intellectual activity prior 1944 is indeed of lesser importance. But another approach is also justified to his work: that from the»radicalism of the Hungarian fin du siècle and its irradiation (Oscar Jászi, Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Paul Szende).

All taken together one can state that the intellectual development of Polanyi was by no means steady: it is full of discontinuities and contradictions; therefore it cannot be described as a unilinear process. The ethical starting point and view seems to be the most enduring of all. Also, one can trace throughout his career the demand and ambition to surpass bourgeois society and the ethical- liberal conception of socialism (although the concrete exposition of this conception seems to modify from time

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