Magyar szociológiatörténeti füzetek, 2. (Budapest, 1986)

Summary

to receive special attention; Karl Polanyi being the secretary of the National Radical Party and its outstanding publicist. His later works were soon discussed by ethnographers (Sárkány, Ecsedy) and philosophers (Kis, Márkus) in the late '60s. Several of his books appeared in Hungarian in the recent past. However, if we search for the reception and appraisal of his achievements , we should not be content. Hungarian scholars have scarcely attempted to introduce his ideas into economic and sociological researches in Hungary; it is even fewer the number of those thinkers who have tried to go beyond these ideas (Ferge, Heller-Fehér, Balogh, Komái, Sárkány). Let us summarize the most disputed - and thus the most exciting - questions of his personality and oeuvre.

"If I were to evoke the image of Karl Polanyi in a word," his wife Ilona Duczynska wrote, "it would be one that was not infrequently on his mind - the skandalon, the block of offence, der Stein des Anstosses. For throughout his life he went counter to encrusted notions, relentlessly shaking people to some new awareness - as the fiery young orator in his days of the Galilei Circle; in his apparent withdrawal in his early manhood; in his novel approaches to the social sciences in the late decades of his life." Indeed, Polanyi's studies were tremendously rich in brilliant and often shocking thoughts opening novel vistas; in almost every case they were ideologically and emotionally charged. The reader trained in sober and cool empirical sociology certainly finds

170