Michael Polanyi formed his liberal social theory partly from direct Soviet observation

Evidence

By the late 1930s, Polanyi, the polymath older brother of Karl, had turned away from his core specialty in chemistry to the social sciences. At the time of the WLC, he was shooting his Rockefeller Foundation-funded film on Unemployment and Money. He had also been to the Soviet Union on several occasions in the 1930s, where he had seen the alternative to the liberal way and formed his opinion on both the kind of society he believed in and science’s role for that society. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 377

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader scholarship on Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and liberal defense of science, and to the question of how anti-communist liberalism was shaped by firsthand Soviet observation. — connects to: Polanyi’s ‘spontaneous order’ concept originated in attacks on Soviet science policy — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 279; Polanyi attributed pro-Soviet sentiment to the opacity of markets — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 69