57/08

From Karl Polanyi
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KPI Description

Correspondence between Michael and Karl.

To Michael (13 October 1943)

To Michael (25 October 1943)

To Michael, 13 October 1943 (2)

[8][9] [Second times]

To Michael, 3 November 1945

[10]

To Michael, July 1949

[19]

To Michael, 25 February 1952

[20]

To Michael, 23 February 1956

[21]

To Michael, 29 February 1956

[23]

From Michael, 15 October 1956

[24]

To Michael, 21 January 1957

[28]

To Michael, 5 January 1958

[1] [31] My dear brother -

A 17 page letter (plus enclosure) mailed beginning of December and addressed to you[r] university address must have got lost – what a pity. I was elaborating on my old discussion with Mises, on the “young Hegel” (G. Lukacs, 1948[2]); the early Marx (“New Reasoner” n°2) and similar topicalities. Also I warmed you off your Lenin myth concerning Marx's 1875 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'. It was translated by P. Struve into Russian about 1893 or 94 and became focal to Lenin's early work on the Program of the Russian Soc.-Dem. Party, which he drafted in prison, starting with 1895.

Thanks for the Norman Cohen book. He makes out a case for the very late start of social revolutionary movements under the aegis of popular milleninism. This is both new and important (ca. 1380 A.D., pages 209, 213 ff.)

Interest in Ilona's is on the increase. W. Auden is undertaking to look the position in the U.S.; the Canadians are well started; a selection of some half-dozen show pieces are supposed to be published soon in a literary periodical. […] Maybe I have been overfeeding on Hegel these days, which has made unduly partial to Marx.

[32]

Please do write soon again -

P.S. on Lenin. You may be of course right (newly published letters or something - in scholarship everything is possible) but expresly looked up 'State & Revolution' and found the jibes against bourgeois scholars unrelated to this matter. Or did you simply rely on a 'reliable informant'? In that case he did you a bad turn, so it looks to me.

On the Mises conundrum there’s a very interesting comment in Maurice Dobb’s Introduction to the second edition of his own monograph on USSR economy. He gives valid reasons why good economics (i.e. of his own non-Marxian sort) do not apply to the Soviet economy! (He had bean called to account by the C.P. for his neo-classical economics. He insisted on keeping to it, and proceeded to explain why it would not fit Russian conditions anyway. This important paper has been overlooked, I am afraid.) (Incidentally, his econ. history of capitalism ondition is ______ous).

To Michael, 21 October 1959

[34] Misi dear,

Your withdrawal to Merton brought us a letter (Ilona's) of the kind that helps life all round. There were those years when I – my confused self – had you living beside me, a young saint; there was some selflessness store inside me, but all it produced …

But the Hungarian have my affection.

[35] I remember the depths from which they rose: A Magyar-Jewish mongrel, not deserving to be fully accepted as morally civilized, bearing the 'stamp' of the ethically defective, victime of the backyards standards of a church and aristocracy, whose heart (?) was elsewhere. A nobility, fitted with false pride, but without self-respect, linked to the West by a half-assimilated Jewry, not truly Western, and yet hindered in melting into the Magyar stock, in joining together the healthy ingredients of both into a mixture pregnant with possibilities of a great Eastern European people. (The Galilei was the only approximation of an entelechy of Russia's revolutionary Jewish emancipation.) And yet the Magyar stock too was denaturalized by the hothouse brood of a second-class foreign intelligentsia which pre-digested the valuable Western experiences Hungary required to nourish its peasant stock's rich undergrowth. (Maybe the throne was the

To Michael, 2 January 1960

[37]

To Michael, 14 January 1961

[38]

To Michael, 4 March 1961

[39]

To Michael, 8 April 1961

[42]

To Michael without date (1)

[44]

To Michael without date (2)

[48]

To Michael without date (3)

[49]

To Michael without date (4)

[51]

Notes and references

  1. This is a copy, the original is in the MPP.
  2. Der junge Hegel - Über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Ökonomie, 1948.