Abstract:
This is my second thesis. The first one was done forty years ago at the university of Vienna, Austria. Its subject (State and Law as Objectifications) had nothing to do with the present one. But both are linked with each other by the spiritual guidance of Karl Polanyi, L.L.D., Ph.D. After a stormy carreer at Budapest and Vienna reflecting the upheavals of our time since 1914 he became in 1947 professor in economics at the Columbia University, New York. After his retirement in 1953 he served as director of the Interdisciplinary Project on the economic aspects of institutional growth administered by the Columbia University until his death on 23/4/64. "All his life a socialist" as an obituary says "he was never associated with any political party. Nor did he participate in any political movement. Never doctrinaire, he many times cut across the main trends of debate within the socialist movements of Europe. Although not a Marxist, he was much less a Social Democrat. Although a humanist, he was eminently a realist. Although aware of the reality of society, and the constraints which the reality places upon the action, values and ideas of all of us who inescapably live in society, his life was guided by an inner necessity to exercise freedom of action and thoughts and never to give in to determinism or fatalism... (His) creative intellect opened important new vistas in many areas of the social sciences." "Karl Polanyi and Co-existence" by Kari Levitt, Co-Existence a journal for the comparative study of economics, sociology and politics in a changing world, December 1964, p.113, 114, 115.
