Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left
DALE Gareth, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 400 p.
Reference: Dale 2016a
In the East-West Salon
[32] In 1910 he resigned the presidency of the Galileo Circle and took on the leadership of the Committee for Workers’ Education. He was inducted into a Freemason’s lodge (where he found himself “well liked”) and joined the leading circles of the Radical Bourgeois Party.
Bearing the Cross of War
Triumph and tragedy of Red Vienna
Challenges and Responses
The cataclysm and its Origins
[156] In spring 1941 he had secured a Rockefeller Fellowship that would enable him to be employed at Bennington for two years, formally as a resident lecturer but without teaching responsibilities.
“Injustices and Inhumanities”
[205] It was a major disappointment when Ford cut the flow of funds in 1958 and the Rockefeller Foundation turned down a grant bid, but Polanyi was able to keep the seminar alive with assistance from other bodies.
The Precariousness of Existence
[249] During his time as sidekick to the Comintern leader Willi Münzenberg, Koestler had learned the arts of propaganda, in particular the technique of forming cultural front organizations through which to influence the political zeitgeist of Western nations. That strategy was now mirrored by the CIA. Acting in effect as the U.S. “Ministry of Culture” and disbursing money through the foundations of the “robber barons” Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, it financed networks of anticommunist artists and scholars and orchestrated an apparatus of organizations. It recognized in the Congress an already-fashioned instrument to serve its purposes, agreed to fund it, and took the helm.
Surprisingly perhaps, the CIA was seeking to cultivate a less overt anticommunism than was Koestler, whose abrasive and militant speeches alienated sections of the “democratic Left” (…). The CIA’s goal was to construct a “united front” that linked Cold War liberals with leftist intellectuals in Europe and to win the latter to the Atlanticist cause, establishing a bulwark against communist influence in the intelligentsia.