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Michael Polanyi and the Treason of the Intellectuals
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11914 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
3,995 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
In the years after the Second World War, Michael Polanyi emerged as a philosopher of the first rank. His major work, Personal Knowledge (1958), was a brilliant tour de force that managed to steer a course between the Scylla of a critical philosophy that insists upon completely objective epistemological criteria and the Charybdis of a subjectivism that denies the possibility of surmounting caprice. By demonstrating the viability of a personal knowledge that was neither wholly objective nor arbitrary, Polanyi helped to clear paths of thought and existence previously obstructed. Although this philosophic achievement deserves comprehensive examination, my present intention is more modest; I should like to call attention to Polanyi's lifelong concern with the question of moral and intellectual responsibility and to his thoughtful and devastating indictment of the treason of the intellectuals.
Unlike Julien Benda, whose La Trahison des clercs (1927) is generally regarded as the classic statement on the subject, Polanyi recognized that by far the greatest number of traitorous intellectuals have abandoned the independent search for truth in order to further the revolutionary goals of Marxism. They have offered not only their intellectual freedom but also their moral principles as ransom for a world made perfect; paradoxically, they have sacrificed morality for moral reasons.
Although Polanyi dated the beginning of his attempts to expose the treason of the intellectuals to the 1930s, he had, in fact, become initially concerned with the question before 1920, in his native Hungary. Indeed, as his friend and countryman, Paul Ignotus once wrote, "the intellectual environment of his youth has profoundly influenced his development." Before turning to his mature critique of Marxism, therefore, it would be well to consider his years in Hungary.
The Development of Polanyi's Thought
Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1891, the scion of an extraordinary Hungarian-Jewish family. His father, Mihaly Pollacsek, a building contractor for Budapest's suburban railways, watched his fortunes soar in the last years of the nineteenth century only to plummet to earth in the early years of the twentieth. More important, however, Pollacsek was a man of exemplary character whose life bore eloquent witness to his commitment to the highest moral standards. When, for example, a business venture of his failed, he insisted that every shareholder be paid to the last penny, even though to do so spelled his own financial ruin. For Michael Polanyi, as well as for his
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