Freedom in a Complex Society

Part One: The Problems

The philosophical outlook of The Great Transformation (1944) is to be expanded here beyond the brief hints in which that book closed.

Our technological civilization … […]

From behind … […]

The self-regulating … […]

At the core … […]

The history … […]

At the root of it all is despair. […]

We are groping for answers.

Part Two: The Growth of a complex society

The human story …

Robert Owen's vision … […]

Implicit in this act … […]

Machine-created … […]

The market system … […]

Its cumulative impact … […]

However, the machine … […]

The promise and postulate of Jewish-Christian religion of the absoluteness of the individual's inner freedom, freedom also from society, had yielded step by step to the complex society engendered by the machine.

Part Three: Dilemma

Ever since … […]

There was the fact … […]

He then found himself … […] The more clearly the teaching of Jesus was understood, the more awful was that knowledge. Again, man as he was could not live with it. […]

This cross is what we mean by freedom. […]

It will be realized that Robert Owen foresaw … […]

We are on the horns of a dilemma: either to ignore the reality … […]

Text Informations

Reference:
Original Publication: “Freedom in a complex society”, 24 April 1957. The text is an outline for an introduction of Freedom and Technology, the book that Karl Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein intended to write. Polanyi sent it to Bledsoe. (See Weekend Notes XII, 20)
KPA: 37/03
Recent Publication in English: in Polanyi 2018, p. 320-324
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