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Contents

• Letter to Kari (01.1963) [40-41]
• Biographical notes to Kari-Polanyi-Levitt [42-45]

Excerpts

January 1963

[40] I am sure that I am all mistaken that a year ago I wrote to you, what my father’s death meant to me. How many years went by until I stopped dreaming of him – he had in my dream returned to life; he had never died. I loved him so much! One of the certainties I understood was that he would have loved me to marry a girl just like mother is. Of course there was much about that was obvious since he adored my mother who belonged culturally to the Russian world, and I myself was in love with the thought of the Russian girl […] But the truth was that my father’s pure, unadulterated idealism of the Western {brand} (supported by the Hungarian standards of the XIXth Century) infiltrated my {sympathizing}.

Biographical Notes

[43] The prophetic writer who in the beginning of the last century discovered the machine and society was Robert Owen. He did not turn against the machine, yet proclaimed that great institutional changes were needed if we were to avoid great calamities from its unchecked employment. These thoughts which developed in the second decade of the nineteenth century sprang from the industrial revolution in England and the wretched “condition of the poor”.

Apart from the consumers’ co-operatives and the vital stimulus they offered to the trade union movement, Owen’s activities bore no practical fruit, but the philosopher of British socialism owed everything to him. Also, of the “utopian” thinkers of the early nineteenth century, he was the one to have exercised a great influence on Karl Marx. Like Owen himself, Marx never ceased to demand the perfectioning of the industrial society as an instrument of human advance towards ideal ends. From whatever angle we approach the theme, we find their values polarized as efficiency and humanity; technological and social progress; institutional requirements and personal needs.

Such a parallel is, of course, not meant to be substantiated through detailed evidence. It assumes a close knowledge of Owen’s various plans for “Village of Union” and the young Marx’ philosophical essays on economic and political subjects.

It was particularly on the issue of the organization of the economy that Owen and Marx diverged most strongly. A centralized economy run by the State was quite foreign to Robert Owen’s monde who considered the market system as the natural form of man’s livelihood; Karl Marx thought of the future of industrial civilization in terms of the supersession of the market economy by a socialized economy.

Hegel

[58] Hegel:

Break with the peace in yourself	Brich mit dem Frieden in Dir
Break with the values of the world	Brich mit den Werte der Welt
Not to be better than the Age	Besseres nicht, als di­e Zeit
But to be this at its best	Aber auf’s Beste zu sei

25 January 1962?

[65] For many, many years I woke from my dreams to a happy wakening – he was back to life, he had never died! You were already with us almost twenty years had gone by. Those we love with a child’s love live on deep and far and real into lifetimes of our own beloved ones in an other, and still on other generation, who do not know whence they feel the breath of life that assures them of a happy future, they can read it off the skis, they hear it in the morning of the feet on the play ground. For my gratitude for the love of my father still mingles with the sunshine in our children and grand-children’s lives.