In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
Othmar Spann was a conservative Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist. His radical anti-liberal and anti-socialist views, based on early 19th century Romantic ideas expressed by Adam Müller et al. and popularized in his books and lecture courses, helped antagonise political factions in Austria during the interwar years.
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.
Eva Striker Zeisel was a Hungarian-born American industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she immigrated to the United States. Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships. Work from throughout her prodigious career is included in important museum collections across the world. Zeisel declared herself a "maker of useful things."
Jenő Fock was a Hungarian Communist politician who served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary from 1967 to 1975.
The Great Transformation is a book by Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian political economist. First published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, it deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as a single human invention, which he calls the "Market Society".
Polányi, Polanyi is a surname. There have been a number of prominent individuals in the Polanyi family, illustrated in the following family tree:
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian–American Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism and the power of consumers. He is best known for his work on praxeology studies comparing communism and capitalism.
Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Research Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists. His interests are wide ranging. He has been noted as an influential follower of Karl Polanyi.
Substantivism is an economic position that helps to explain the social relations embedded within the economy. First proposed by Karl Polanyi he argues that the term "economics" has two meanings. The formal meaning, used by today's neoclassical economists, refers to economics as the logic of rational action and decision-making, as rational choice between the alternative uses of limited (scarce) means, as "economizing", "maximizing", or "optimizing".
Ilona Duczynska was a Polish-Hungarian-Canadian revolutionary, journalist, translator, engineer, and historian. Her husband was Karl Polanyi and her daughter is Kari Polanyi Levitt.
The Budapest School was a school of thought, originally of Marxist humanism, but later of post-Marxism and dissident liberalism that emerged in Hungary in the early 1960s, belonging to so-called Hungarian New Left. Its members were students or colleagues of Georg Lukács. The school was originally oriented towards developing Lukács' later works on social ontology and aesthetics, but quickly began to challenge the paradigm of Lukácsian-Marxism, thus reconstructing contemporary critical theory. Most of the members later came to abandon Marxism. The school also critiqued the "dictatorship over needs" of the Soviet states. Most of the members were forced into exile by the pro-Soviet Hungarian government.
The Sonntagskreis was an intellectual discussion group in Budapest, Hungary, between 1915 and 1918. The main focus of the group was on the relationship between ideas and the social and historical context of those ideas, a line of thought that led towards the later concepts of "social history of art" and "sociology of knowledge".
Liberal socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates liberal principles to socialism. This synthesis sees liberalism as the political theory that takes the inner freedom of the human spirit as a given and adopts liberty as the goal, means and rule of shared human life. Socialism is seen as the method to realize this recognition of liberty through political and economic autonomy and emancipation from the grip of pressing material necessity. Liberal socialism opposes abolishing certain components of capitalism and supports something approximating a mixed economy that includes both social ownership and private property in capital goods.
Alabert Fogarasi, also known as Béla Fogarasi was a Hungarian philosopher and politician.
The double movement is a concept originating with Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation. The phrase refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. First, laissez-faire reformers seek to "disembed" the economy to establish what Polanyi calls a "market society" wherein all things are commodified, including what Polanyi terms "fictitious commodities": land, labor, and money. Second, a reactionary "countermovement" arises whereby society attempts to re-embed the economy through the creation of social protections such as labor laws and tariffs. In Polanyi's view, these liberal reformers seek to subordinate society to the market economy, which is taken by these reformers to be self-regulating. To Polanyi, this is a utopian project, as economies are always embedded in societies.
The concept of fictitious commodities originated in Karl Polanyi's 1944 book The Great Transformation and refers to anything treated as market commodity that is not created for the market, specifically land, labor, and money.
Chris Hann is a British social anthropologist who has done field research in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe and the Turkic-speaking world. His main theoretical interests lie in economic anthropology, religion, and long-term history. After holding university posts in Cambridge and Canterbury, UK, Hann has worked since 1999 in Germany as one of the founding Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. Hann has made significant contributions to the subfield of economic anthropology.
The Galileo Circle was an atheist-materialist student organization that functioned in Budapest between 1908 and 1919. Their center was located at the Anker Köz in Terézváros, Budapest. The circle had several subgroups with four different world views: the radical liberals, the Marxists, the anarcho-syndicalists and the socialists. However they had common goals, which included the protection of free scientific research and thinking at universities, the cultivation of social sciences, the social assistance of poor students, the spread of anti-clericalist and atheist views, the support of anti-nationalism and promoting internationalism, the propagation of anti-alcoholism, the opposition to large estates and the "reorientation of Hungarian social perception".
