IDEAS MARKETS AND SOCIETY: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF KARL POLANYI Paul Kennedy any number of similar proscribed organizations could I’m Paul Kennedy and this is Ideas. not be admitted to the United States, so my mother was not able to join my father. My father and his In October of 1961, Marshall McLuhan sat down at colleagues attempted to do something about this, his typewriter to send greetings to his friend Karl and they went on a delegation, I think, to the Polanyi on the occasion of his 75th birthday. “Not president of the university, which was Dwight very long ago,” he wrote, “you were to me only the Eisenhower, at that time, and he said that he remote and fabulous artificer of The Great couldn’t do anything about that. So, my mother Transformation.” So, it seemed quite improbable, decided to set up home in Canada so that my father McLuhan continued, to learn a year or two later that could come home on vacations, and my father would Karl Polanyi himself was dwelling near Toronto. commute, like a student. He would come for Others shared McLuhan’s surprise at finding the Christmas and Easter and, of course, the summer vaunted Hungarian scholar living in a small cottage vacations. near Pickering, Ontario. And many became friends and enjoyed in Karl Polanyi’s company what David Cayley McLuhan called a “continuous flow of insight and Ilona Duczynska found a little cottage in the hamlet discovery.” of Rosebank, 20 miles from Toronto near Pickering. It stood at the edge of a steep bank, which led down Tonight on Ideas, we recall Karl Polanyi’s last years towards the Rouge River near its entrance into Lake in Canada, as we continue with David Cayley’s Ontario. Trains whistled as they crossed a trestle series on Polanyi’s life and thought. Karl Polanyi left bridge nearby. The Polanyis called the place his native Hungary in 1920. He lived first in Vienna “Skunk’s Hollow,” and in time, it became a and then in England, making his living as a writer, destination for an ever-widening circle of new friends teacher and journalist. In 1944, he published the from Toronto. One of them was Ursula Franklin, who book Marshall McLuhan admired so extravagantly, had come to Canada from Germany in 1949 to The Great Transformation, a study of the origins and pursue a career as a research scientist. She met development of modern market society. The book Karl Polanyi through her friend C.B. Macpherson, began a new career for Polanyi in the United States Brough Macpherson as she knew him. and led him, by and by, to Canada. David Cayley picks up the story in Part Four of “Markets and Ursula Franklin Society.” I must have mentioned to Brough how much I gained from reading The Great Transformation, and it was David Cayley Brough who said, “You know that he’s here,” and I n 1947, on the strength of his pioneering work in had no idea that Karl Polanyi would be in Canada, economic history in his book The Great around Toronto. So, Brough invited the two of us for I Transformation, Karl Polanyi was invited to teach lunch to the Faculty Club, and somehow Karl and I at Columbia University, in New York, his first hit it off, because he was so much like the university appointment at the age of 61. The generation of my parents and my teachers, with that university would prove a vital and sympathetic milieu European urbanity where it really didn’t matter for Polanyi’s work, but he was prevented from whether they were German or Hungarian, where I making New York his year-round home. knew instinctively all the tribal rites. I knew the references that one would make. I almost anticipated Kari Polanyi Levitt is Karl Polanyi’s daughter. The the Goethe quote at a certain point. So, it was hitch, she says, was her mother, Ilona Duczynska, something extremely comforting, like getting into a who had once belonged to the Communist parties of garment that you knew. And I think for him it was a both Hungary and Austria. surprise that somebody wasn’t surprised at him. So, he invited me out, and I went to Pickering, to that Kari Polanyi Levitt little cottage, and that same being comfortable My mother applied for a visa, but she was a victim of replicated itself and even amplified with Ilona. Ilona the McCarran Act, and it said that anybody who is or was like my mother: an academic as well as an ever has been a member of the Communist Party or extraordinary political person interested in people. 29 IDEAS MARKETS AND SOCIETY: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF KARL POLANYI David Cayley David Cayley Ilona Duczynska was a revolutionary socialist with an Karl Polanyi had many friends. He was a convivial academic background in engineering. She had been man — mild, tolerant and passionately talkative — jailed in Hungary during what she called the and there was only one kind of person that really “revolutionary years” of 1917 and 1918, and during irritated him, his daughter says. the 1930s, she had fought the right-wing takeover in Austria. She and Ursula Franklin became dear Kari Polanyi Levitt friends, and Franklin came to greatly admire the way He was dismissive only of educated fools. When I Duczynska and Polanyi lived. say “educated,” I mean people pretending to education: degrees in university, credentials and so Ursula Franklin on. And his worst form of abuse of anybody was, “He That little cottage in Pickering was simple, if not was a monumental ass!” That was absolutely the shabby. It was that sense of priority that I grew up worst. But a “monumental ass” was only something with. Material things mattered only as long as they that might be said about somebody who was made one useful. Beyond that, it didn’t matter two pompous and foolish, somebody pretending to be hoots what you would be wearing, whether your learned. windows were clean, what was on the table. But while they were more than frugal about material David Cayley things, by the same token, they were incredibly The first amongst Karl Polanyi’s many generous in terms of the use of their money, and conversational partners was always his wife, Ilona there was surely not much. When it came to a long- Duczynska. It was in her, Ursula Franklin came to distance call, there was no question that one would think, that he found the intellectual counterpoise that phone to Italy in the middle of the night because he needed. some poor Hungarian or Eastern European intellectual whom they didn’t know couldn’t get a Ursula Franklin manuscript that they didn’t know out of Hungary. And One cannot understand Karl if one doesn’t take Ilona it was the ‘60s, and overseas calls were expensive, seriously, not just being there and being his wife, but but every piece of bread, I’m sure, in that house was that there was an intense interaction between the day-old bread, and every piece of clothing came two throughout their lives. And that was a generation somewhere from a secondhand store or sale. But that talked. Their medium was conversation. People you buy every book that matters. You subscribe to talked, talked endlessly to each other about things every obscure little magazine that is novel. that mattered, not about the weather, not about money, not about the neighbours, but about politics, David Cayley about ideas, about action. So, underlying Ilona’s life Ursula Franklin was not the Polanyis only admirer is that baseline of conversations with Karl, just as amongst Toronto’s more adventuresome thinkers. underlying Karl’s life is the point-counterpoint of Another regular visitor to Skunk’s Hollow was talking with Ilona. Marshall McLuhan and his family… Kari Polanyi Levitt Kari Polanyi Levitt My parents had an extraordinary relationship. They Marshall McLuhan would come with his whole tribe were very close, and they were very separate. My of children, and then the children would go down to father adored my mother, and within limits, Ilona the river where there was an old boat. You went could do whatever she wished. He granted her total down through a rather steep set of bushes, and at freedom, as far as he was concerned, to do the bottom, there was the River Rouge, slow flowing, whatever she might wish to do. I never, ever heard rather muddy, but a perfectly respectable river and an argument or voices raised between my parents — enough of a river to float a boat. The children would ever — which is quite extraordinary. And my mother go down. And he came. He used to like to talk to my was enormously respectful of my father, and he was father, so they were good friends. a person who had to talk his ideas. He had to talk his ideas to somebody, and at the receiving end was usually Ilona, my mother. They would talk in the 30 IDEAS MARKETS AND SOCIETY: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF KARL POLANYI bathtub. They would talk on all other occasions. And David Cayley really, he needed a listener. He was a teacher, and Instead Abe Rotstein transferred to Columbia, and whatever ideas were forming he wanted to share, to there, without knowing anything of the professor, he impart, and my mother listened very faithfully. She enrolled in Karl Polanyi’s course in general economic also typed his manuscripts all the time, in the days history.