Anthropological Materials in the Making of Michael Polanyi's Metascience

Anthropological Materials in the Making of Michael Polanyi’s Metascience Struan Jacobs Deakin University Phil Mullins Missouri Western State University 1. Introduction Anthropological discussions were important for Michael Polanyi in the middle phase of his intellectual career, in which he articulated in some detail his understanding of science, culture and society. This middle period commenced with his 1946 Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham Univer- sity in early 1946, published as Science, Faith and Society later that year, and extended through the publication of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post- Critical Philosophy in 1958, based on Polanyi’s 1951 and 1952 Gifford Lec- tures (Scott and Moleski 2005, p. 203ff.). The Riddell Lectures gave Polanyi’s most robust working out of his constructive theory of science to date, although some of the ideas developed in Science, Faith and Society can also be found in writing done a few years before his Riddell Lectures. Polanyi explained in his 1964 “Background and Prospect,” a retrospective introduction to a new edition of Science, Faith and Society, that the book had been catalyzed by the need to answer fundamental questions about the nature and justification of science raised by Marxist theory and, in the thirties and early 1940s, the Marxist-influenced “planned science” movement in the UK. Such questions concerned not only matters about the organization of science but what Polanyi ([1946] 1964, p. 17) called the Marxist- Leninist denial of “the intrinsic creative powers of thought.” His critique of “planned science” and his rejection of the Marxist perspective on knowledge and applied science have been well covered in the scholarly literature. For permission to use archival material in this article, we thank the University of Chicago Library Department of Special Collections which holds the Michael Polanyi Papers (MPP) and the Edward Shils Papers (ESP). We also thank the Karl Popper Library, Klagenfurt, and Sir Karl Popper Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Perspectives on Science 2017, vol. 25, no. 2 © 2017 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00243 261 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00243 by guest on 02 October 2021 262 Anthropology in Polanyi’s Metascience This article takes a different tack and focuses on Polanyi’s developing interest in anthropology in his middle period. We document Polanyi’s growing familiarity with anthropological literature and show that this serves as one of the important resources from which he constructed his own account of science and society.1 Some passages in Science, Faith and Society suggest that by 1946 Polanyi already was interested in anthropology, and the evidence of this interest becomes clearer in the years soon after 1946. We argue that Polanyi’s increasing interest in and exploration of anthropological work—particularly that of Lucian Lévy-Bruhl and Edward Evans-Pritchard—helped Polanyi (1) formulate his criticisms of contempo- rary accounts of science, and (2) develop what he came to call his “fiduciary philosophy,” the constructive “post-critical philosophy” he articulated in his middle period as an alternative to the modern critical tradition in philosophy. Polanyi’s “fiduciary philosophy” affirms the pervasiveness and im- portance of belief and commitment in scientific and cultural practices.2 Polanyi used what he learned from Evans-Pritchard and other anthropologists to help articulate his “fiduciary” account, and to highlight differ- ences between his view of science and Karl Popper’sfalsificationism which Polanyi regarded as the current popular embodiment of the critical tradition in philosophy. 2. Awakening of Polanyi’s Interest in Anthropology 2.1. Social order, Anthropological Ideas and Polanyi’s Involvement intheMootintheForties The earliest evidence of Polanyi taking a direct interest in anthropological literature is a two-page set of quotations extracted from Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), dated 29 October 1942.3 The quotations concern Malinowski’s thinking about laws and sanctions in Melanesian 1. Scholars have not traced historically Polanyi’s interest in anthropology nor have they carefully considered how anthropological perspectives are one of the resources Polanyi draws upon in articulating his criticisms of modern philosophy of science and his alternative constructive philosophical views. The recent biography of Polanyi by William Scott and Martin Moleski (2005, p. 224) and Mary Jo Nye’s Michael Polanyi and His Generation (2011, p. 234) are cases in point (also Blum 2010). 2. See Mullins, “An Introduction to Michael Polanyi’s Gifford Lectures” on the Polanyi Society web site. http://polanyisociety.org/Giffords/Intro-MP-Giffords-9-20-16.pdf (accessed September 21, 2016) for a concise discussion of Polanyi’s frequent references to and expla- nations of his “fiduciary philosophy” and his “post-critical” philosophical stance which he proposed as a counter to modern critical philosophy. 3. Box 24, Folder 8, Michael Polanyi Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library (hereafter MPP). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00243 by guest on 02 October 2021 Perspectives on Science 263 society, a topic that is only indirectly related to the later development of Polanyi’s “fiduciary philosophy.” His interest in Malinowski was loosely related to matters discussed in an important 1941 article (Polanyi 1941) out- lining the foundations of a stable but dynamic social order in which science as well as the legal system, the economy and other cultural practices could flourish. In the early 1940s Polanyi was particularly interested in the foundations of legal systems, and this led him to Malinowski.4 Not long after his reading of Malinowski, Polanyi came to be affiliated with J. H. Oldham and his circle of intellectual friends where there was a lively interest in reform of the social order as well as appreciation for anthropological literature. In November 1943, Oldham, an influential religious intellectual and ecumenical Christian activist who convened the British discussion group called the Moot, wrote a letter introducing him- self to Polanyi.5,6 Oldham requested Polanyi’s permission to republish ex- cerpts from his recent essay “The English and the Continent” (1943) as a “Christian News Letter” Supplement (a widely circulated publication that Oldham and others affiliated with the Moot published). Polanyi’s historically oriented essay, which caught the attention of several Moot members, praised the English reliance on traditional practices and gradual reform through religious ideas rather than Enlightenment philosophy and criticized the Continent for following the opposite course for social reform. On May 2, 1944, Oldham invited Polanyi to participate in a meeting of theMootonJune23–25, 1944.7 At a second Moot meeting Polanyi attended in December 1944, he, along with Karl Mannheim, was invited to respond to a paper by T. S. Eliot on the role of the “clerisy” in society. Polanyi’s short written comment discussed the important function of tradition in the scientific community (Jacobs and Mullins 2006). Polanyi 4. See also Polanyi’s eight pages of extracts from C. K Allen’s Law in the Making (1939), dated 17 February 1942, Box 23, Folder 1, MPP. 5. 12 Nov. 1943, Box 15, Folder 3, MPP. 6. The Moot, which began meeting in 1938, included a number of influential academic, literary and religious thinkers—for example, T. S. Elliot, Karl Mannheim, Walter Moberly, John Middleton Murry, Alec Vidler, and John Baillie—interested in shaping post war society in terms of Christian values (Kojecky 1971, pp. 163–97; Collini 2006. p. 316ff; Steele and Taylor 2010). Keith Clements (2009, p. 1) summarizes the interests and discussion of the Moot as concerned with “the nature of modern society, the relationship between social planning and freedom, and the role of religiously-based values in shaping society” (Clements 2009, pp. 12, 17) suggests that Mannheim was the central figure around which much discussion revolved in the Moot, and following his death in early 1947 Oldham set up and convened other groups modelled after the Moot, and Polanyi was often the central figure. For a discussion of Polanyi’s participation in Oldham-led groups, see Mullins (1997). 7. Oldham to Polanyi, 2 May, 1944, Box 15, Folder 3, MPP. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/POSC_a_00243 by guest on 02 October 2021 264 Anthropology in Polanyi’s Metascience participated in meetings of the Moot and later Moot-like intellectual discussion groups, convened by Oldham, from 1944 until about 1960. He acknowledged that only his experience as a research scientist was more important than Oldham and his circle in the development of his ideas (Gelwick 1965, p. 11n8). Oldham became a close friend of Polanyi who made reading suggestions for Polanyi and also read and criticized many of the things Polanyi wrote.8 By the late 1940s, he often made Polanyi’s essays and books the topic treated in sessions of his discussion groups (Clements 2009, p. 17, cf. Clements 1999, p. 462). Oldham took a keen interest in the findings of British anthropologists, supporting what Jack Goody (1995, pp. 17, 18–9) describes as “the acqui- sition and diffusion of scientific knowledge (in the widest sense) about Africa with a view to social amelioration.” On friendly terms with Bronislaw Malinowski and other anthropologists, Oldham was the key figure who helped lay the foundations of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1926 and, serving as its administrative director, he gained extensive knowledge about African anthropological research from the 1920s (Bennett 1960; Goody 1995, p. 17–21). Polanyi’sinvolvementwithOldham and his circle, beginning in 1944, brought him into contact with a remark- ably literate intellectual network that possibly encouraged Polanyi in the late 1940s to explore anthropological literature more fully.

Load more