Jon Fennell

Among the most prominent reviewers of Polanyi's Personal Knowledge, certainly in England, is Michael Oakeshott. The critical features of his review are well known. Less often noted is Oakeshott's overall approval of the book as well as his considerable enthusiasm for it. What accounts for this positive appraisal? The thesis of this study is that Oakeshott is attracted to Polanyi's magnum opus due to an affinity for its portrayal of the human condition of which he is not fully and explicitly aware. Although Oakeshott is a skeptical idealist and Polanyi a hopeful realist, their positions converge in regard to justification. In fundamental respects, Polanyi and Oakeshott are in concert. Oakeshott is sometimes alleged to be a moral relativist. Polanyi scholars understand that he at times has been similarly accused. In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi responds effectively to this accusation. Because Oakeshott on relevant matters agrees with Polanyi, he is immune to the charge of relativism as well. While Oakeshott offers his own defense against this indictment, he is drawn to Polanyi because he tacitly grasps that, in Polanyi's personalist expansion and enrichment of the concept of experience, there is a deeper and thereby more effectual response to the charge. In sum, if Oakeshott is a moral relativist, so too is Polanyi. But Polanyi is not, and, for the very reason we say this, neither is Oakeshott. The inclination to assert the opposite, in addition to maligning Oakeshott, comes at the cost of overlooking Polanyi's primary contribution to intellectual history.

In Science, Faith and Society Michael Polanyi incisively examines the world of scientific practice. There is, he observes, much that a scientist takes for granted and seldom if ever doubts. Science rests upon agreement regarding fundamentals that is the product of training and other forms of initiation. Polanyi calls these fundamentals the “premisses” of science. Among the vital matters Polanyi examines under this heading is “primary education,” the early formative process by which a person becomes who and what he is. The importance of what Polanyi has to say about “primary education” ranges far beyond science. In his penetrating account of how a scientist is formed and then as a practitioner carries out his work, Polanyi appropriately emphasizes the role of conscience. Science, Faith and Society is a masterful account of character formation and moral education. What at first appears to be a detailed study of the prerequisites of science emerges as an extraordinarily insightful cautionary reminder of the necessary conditions for the preservation of a free society. At the heart of this process is cultivation of the moral imagination, the site of deep, life-defining beliefs that operate tacitly and possess only a circular justification.

This paper explores the epistemological justification of liberal education for all, and of foundations courses for teachers, set forth by Harry Broudy, the paramount voice in philosophy of education during the mid to late twentieth century. This justification, grounded in Michael Polanyi's revolutionary theory of tacit knowing, reveals that such education and preparation, issuing in a capable and confident person, is entailed by commitment to equal opportunity and democratic life.

What would we have the school teach? To what end? In the name of democracy, and building on the pioneering epistemology of Michael Polanyi, Harry S. Broudy, a leading voice in philosophy of education during the twentieth century, calls for a liberal arts core curriculum for all. The envisioned product of such schooling is a certain sort of person. Anticipating the predictable relativistic challenge so much on display in our own time, Broudy justifies the selection of subject matter (and thus the envisioned character formation and cultivation of moral imagination) by reference to the authority of experts in the disciplines. This response fails to fully repel the assault, thereby revealing the need for a dimension of Polanyi's thought whose significance exceeds even that of the epistemology that Broudy so effectively invokes.

•Michael Polanyi was an original thinker who provided an interesting view on government and economics spanning between Hayek and Keynes.•Michael Polanyi’s view on government and economics derives from his deep understanding of the interplay between spontaneous and organized orders of coordination in human social activities.•Michael Polanyi’s view on government and economics is linked to his conservative liberalism and his view of tacit knowledge.•Michael Polanyi’s conservative liberalism relies on tradition in the form of shared beliefs in transcendental values such as truth and justice and public liberty, which entails commitment to those values.•Tradition and public liberty provide the institutional bedrocks of the growth of knowledge in society due to the tacit dimension of knowledge.•Public liberty is both the condition of and the result of the human struggle for new knowledge because it gives meaning and purpose to the indeterminate scope of opportunities for free individual initiatives. This paper gives an interpretation of Michael Polanyi’s vision of government and economics as spanning between Hayek and Keynes. The influence of Hayek is manifested by his opposition to central planning and the defence of self-organization as a superior mechanism for coordinating individual plans, while the influence of Keynes is evidenced by his strong support for government interventionism in order to dampen economic fluctuations, fight unemployment and limit income inequalities. Polanyi blended these two influences and produced an idiosyncratic approach to government and economics, which has until recently been underrated in the literature. Our aim in this paper is to show that, by considering Polanyi’s mixed vision of the market economy as embedded in his broader pursuits into the nature of knowledge and liberalism one can find coherence which cannot otherwise be found.

The Abolition of Man , though short in length and casual in tone, is among the most important books of the twentieth century. The reason it possesses such significance is that it reveals through penetrating analysis the contemporary sceptical assault on the very possibility of rational morality and, indeed, on the very meaning of human life. In meeting and overcoming this assault, Lewis embraces the concept of objective value. But this concept is itself under attack in modernity, most notably in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil . There is, however, an effective response to this withering onslaught. It is found in Michael Polanyi's ‘fiduciary’ philosophy. This study shows how Polanyi's account of justification inoculates Lewis' objective value against Nietzsche's virulent attack, thereby preserving the defence of meaning and morality that constitutes the essential contribution of The Abolition of Man .

In Chapter V of his autobiography, John Stuart Mill describes the 'crisis in my mental history' that cast this brilliant mind into profound gloom at age 20. Mill makes clear that his plight had everything to do with the extraordinary analytical and critical education imparted to him by his father. That which prompts Mill's deep distress, as well as that which is necessary in order to escape it, are the central concern of Michael Polanyi's monumental Personal Knowledge. The thesis of this essay is that Polanyi in his book offers a penetrating analysis of the disorder from which Mill suffered and, even more significantly, Polanyi explains more perceptively than does Mill himself what is required in order to resolve the mental crisis and establish what both authors refer to as 'balance' of mind.