the Galileo Circle, whose journal was Szabad Gondolat, meaning “Free Thought.” It was against the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church, against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not a socialist movement, although many of its participants were socialists. And finally, it included also young people from the gymnasiums, as well as from universities. It gave, I read somewhere, up to 2,000 literacy classes a year. So its main activity was education.
And then there was World War I.
POLANYI LEVITT: He was a cavalry officer in the war, on the Russian front. The situation was horrible. It was equally horrible for the Austro-Hungarians as for the Russians. He contracted typhus, which is a terrible illness. Eventually, he told me, when his horse tripped and fell on top of him, he thought that he was going to die but he woke up in a military hospital in Budapest.
And at the end of the war there was the Hungarian Revolution.
POLANYI LEVITT: The Hungarian Revolution of 1918 ended the war, with the First Republic and Count Karolyi as the first president in the autumn of that year. Therefore it’s usually called the Aster or Chrysanthemum Revolution, or after some other flower denoting autumn. It was then followed by the short-lived Revolution of the Councils, which ended in August of 1919 when it was defeated in a counter-revolution that led Hungarian intellectuals, activists, communists, socialists, liberals into exile in Vienna. Including my father.
So your father left before the end of the revolution, right?
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, he left before the end.
How did he view the Hungarian Revolution?
POLANYI LEVITT: He was ambivalent, as were many others. I think they initially welcomed the formation of the councils all over the country. But when the councils decided on a wholesale nationalization of business – of everything – I think he thought it was going to have a very bad end. Which it did, in reality.
So the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party fled from Budapest to Vienna?
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes. The Communist Party in exile had two leaders, Bela Kun and George Lukács. There was a certain rivalry between the two. And here’s a funny story that involved my mother who spent the year 1919 in Moscow, where she – because of her linguistic abilities and education – worked in the office with Karl Radek, organizing the meetings of the Second Communist International. Eventually, when she returned to Vienna, she was given some financial assistance to deliver to the exiled Hungarian Communists there. It was in the form of a diamond, and it was put in a tube of toothpaste. But the interesting thing is that she was to deliver it to Lukács, because as the son of a banker he was perhaps thought to be more reliable than Kun.
But at this point your mother and father had not met. In fact, they would meet in Vienna in the following year, 1920. Is that right?
POLANYI LEVITT: It was a fateful meeting – in a villa put at the disposal of Hungarian communists and leftist émigrés by a Viennese well-wisher. As the darling of this company of young men, according to my mother, no one would have expected that she would be attracted to a gentleman ten years older than her, whose life appeared to be behind him – who was depressed, and scribbling notes in the corner …
But they were very different characters, these two. One is more the activist and the other is more the intellectual; one spends her time in the trenches and the other in the study.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes and no. You know, my father wherever he lived was engaged in whatever was going on. He wrote articles for the general public, for whomever would read what he had to say – published by whoever would publish whatever it was. In Hungary it was like that. In Vienna it was like that. In England too. So, he was really engaged with the present. He was an intellectual, yes. But he was not an intellectual with an idée fixe, an obsession which they nurture, and who, wherever they go – from one place to another – take the same idea with them. No, no. Not at all. My mother had really started her activities with a very high-profile participation as a remarkable young woman in the Hungarian Revolution: in a way, there was nothing she could do for the rest of her life that quite equalled that. And there was a certain sadness about her. You know, when you achieve at a very early age what you really aspire to do – which is to play an obviously important role in history, in this case, in the communist socialist movement – whatever you do for the rest of your life never quite lives up to that.
So they both had their sad experiences but then in 1923, something very special happened. You were born! And your parents were rejuvenated.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, according to his own account, my birth helped to pull my father out of depression, which was, like all such things, a private experience. Nevertheless, he wrote a lot about it. He wrote about what he felt was the responsibility of his generation for all the awful things that had happened, particularly the terrible, meaningless, stupid war. He wrote a lot about the First World War – how it really changed very little. It was never very clear – according to him – what it was really about. It was just a terrible massacre. A human disaster. And he felt the responsibility of his generation. And that sense of responsibility – social responsibility for the state of the world, the state of the country – I wonder whether it was an attribute of that generation, and whether that sense of responsibility has passed. Do we still have people – including intellectuals – who bear a sense of responsibility for our society, in the way he and many others of his generation did?
This was a very special generation, indeed, and for many reasons. But one of the reasons was Red Vienna – the socialist reconstruction of Vienna from 1918 to 1933, overlapping the years that your father was also in Vienna.
POLANYI LEVITT: Yes, Red Vienna was an amazing episode in history – a remarkable experiment in municipal socialism. It was really a situation in which workers were privileged, and were privileged socially – in terms of the services, in terms of the wonderful collective tenements that were built; Karl-Marx-Hof, of course, being the outstanding example. But not only that. The atmosphere and the cultural level were very unusual, marked by the fact that somebody like Karl Polanyi, who had no status and was not employed by any university, gave public lectures on socialism and other matters. He could challenge the market-oriented thinking of Ludwig von Mises in an established financial journal. Mises would reply, and my father would respond. There was an intellectual life outside the university, in the community.
What do you remember of this period?
POLANYI LEVITT: I was only a child, but I do remember the wonderful summer camps in the most desirable lakes in Salzburg that were all organized by the socialist movement. And the people came from all over the world to look at Red Vienna, as an example of modern urbanism at its best. Although neither of my parents had great affection for social democracy, both of them conceded later in life that those years in Vienna – so-called Red Vienna – were remarkable, and laudable. It was the only time I ever heard my mother say anything laudable about social democrats. My father, as a matter of fact, was no big enthusiast either.
In 1922 your father wrote his famous article on socialist calculation, which is a sort of celebration of another vision of socialism – Guild Socialism – that was also influenced by Vienna’s municipal socialism.
POLANYI LEVITT: Well, look. At that time there was no country in the world that had a socialist economy, right? Russia was emerging out of a brutal civil war. So, there was an intellectual debate on the possibility of organizing a socialist national economy. And Mises
