With Notes by Phil Mullins
The process of moral inversion inevitably undermines the very conception of facts—of ordinary matters of fact. After all, the overwhelming part of our factual beliefs are held at second hand through trusting others; and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of certain persons, either by virtue of their public office or as our chosen intellectual leaders. The establishment of public facts outside science is entrusted, in free societies, to newspapers, parliaments, and the law courts. Their fact-finding is continuous with that of sociologists, historians, and scientists, and is granted strong presumptive credit also by the whole of society, even though there are always dubious cases in which rival affirmations will compete for public acceptance. As in science, this system of shared beliefs relies on a chain of overlapping areas within each of which a few authoritative persons can keep watch over each other’s integrity and the sense of what is important. A society possessing such a network of mutual confidence may be said to maintain a certain standard of “factuality,” to use Hannah Arendt’s expression.1
This widely extended network of mutual trust, on which the factual consensus of a free society depends, is fragile. Any conflict which sharply divides people will tend to destroy mutual trust and make universal agreement on facts bearing on the conflict difficult to achieve. . .
Such temporary and partial failures of factuality may of course be excused as passing excesses of political passion. But under totalitarianism we can see factuality reduced to the extent of allowing the state to fashion public facts almost at will, as it suits its own interests. . . any willing acceptance of these facts is evidence of a persuasiveness of their own, which much be assumed to be decisive also in gaining currency for them with the territories under coercion. This indicates a corruption of the very principles of factual evidence, involving a wholesale shift of the usual presumptions which underlie the process of fact-finding. It is only when our sense of reality has already been gravely impaired by such a shift, that we become receptive to downright clumsy falsifications.
* * *
This process of fashioning public facts in the interests of the state will naturally receive support from a scholarship conceived as a political weapon. . .
In every modern country, national prejudice tends to obfuscate the establishment of public facts of political interest. In a free society this tendency is counteracted by the rivalry of opinions, which will maintain a universe of public facts so long as people can mutually trust each other to observe a proper level of factuality in drawing their conclusions from contradictory arguments. The elite of a modern revolutionary party is trained, on the contrary, to exercise its political bias to the utmost. “Its members’ whole education,” writes Hannah Arendt, “is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and fiction. Their superiority consists in the ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.”2 Such dynamism, backed up by terror, would suffice by itself to loosen the roots of reality of all officially alleged facts, and to separate revolutionary opinion by a logical gap from that of their opponents. Yet this propaganda would remain comparatively ineffectual, but for the parallel effects of terror and secrecy, in creating situations which lend colour to every conceivable suspicion. This is where facts relevant to politics cease to exist, in the sense that one can only choose between either accepting no facts or accepting some at one’s pleasure on manifestly insufficient evidence.3
*These excerpts are from the Encounter (a CCF-subsidized journal) version (pp. 14-16) of “The Magic of Marxism” (v. 7 Dec. 1956, pp. 5-17). But see also Polanyi’s (1) “The Magic of Marxism” (especially pp. 213-214 and 232), Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 12 (June 1956), pp. 211-214, 232; (2) “The Magic of Marxism” and “The Next Stage of History” (especially pp. 12-17), Special Supplement of Bulletin of the Committee on Science and Freedom (Congress of Cultural Freedom), November, 1956, pp. 3-24 [Polanyi chaired this CCF committee]; (3) PK (published June 1958), 239-243 [Torchbook edition] which for the most part follows the Encounter version and includes most of the above comments. But PK, 227-245, including the PK section titled “The Magic of Marxism” (227-233), is primarily material drawn from the several versions of “The Magic of Marxism” material. It seems likely that PK’s “Conviviality” (PK, 203-245) was written in late 1956. A January 21, 1957 letter to Edward Shils thanks him for his review and discussion of “Conviviality” with Polanyi in Polanyi’s recent trip to the US (E. Shils Papers, Michael Polanyi Folder, Box 4). Interestingly, in his PK section titled “The Magic of Marxism,” Polanyi indicates in a footnote that “The view that a free society is one accepting the service of truth and justice, and that totalitarianism is the outcome (by inversion) of a scepticism denying intrinsic force to the ideas of truth and justice, was first outlined in my Science, Faith and Society (1946)” [PK, 233, n1]. Although some ideas about “moral inversion” and “totalitarianism” (see, for example, LL, 1951, p. 106-107) appear earlier, Polanyi’s ideas about “moral inversion,” “totalitarism,” and “fact-finding” and “public facts” (which should be linked with earlier accounts of “public liberty”) seem to be developed further in Polanyi’s work in the mid-fifties Cold War programs of the CCF and particularly in response to the events surrounding the Hungarian Revolution (October and November, 1956).There is also a German version of “The Magic of Marxism” published after PK in Der Monat, 11 (13), Dec. 1958, pp. 3-15, another CCF-subsidized journal.↩︎
1We know, of course, that even people whose conceptions of the nature of things otherwise coincide, may be fundamentally divided in respect to the reality of certain facts. Antagonists on either side of a great scientific controversy do not accept the same facts as real and significant. A society believing in magic, witchcraft, and oracles will agree on a whole system of facts which modern men regard as fictitious. Similar logical gaps could be found between standards of factuality prevailing in different periods of European history. But I will keep here to the effects of contemporary political dynamics on the accrediting of matters of fact.↩︎
2Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time (Secker and Warburg, 1951).[Polanyi reviewed Arendt’s 1951 book The Burden of Our Time (later re-titled and published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism) the same year it was published (Time and Tide, 25 August 1951, 801–802). Arendt as well as Czeslaw Milosz were lecturers on totalitarianism brought to Manchester in 1952; Polanyi used his Rockefeller grant to fund this (Scott and Moleski, 2005, 219)]↩︎
3George Orwell, in 1984, said already that belief in reality is a subversive principle under totalitarianism. [1984 was published in 1949. Perhaps 1984 got Polanyi’s attention not only because of its insight into what Polanyi called “totalitarianism” (which Polanyi had been writing about himself by this time) but also because Polanyi contended, more generally, that “belief in reality” is the key to science and society. This is reasonably clear by 1946 in SFS (see Ch 1, “Science and Reality” [pp. 21-41]) as well as later in the 1967 essay with the same title “Science and Reality” [BJPS 18, pp. 177-196] which Polanyi links to his 1946 chapter. In the late forties as he prepares for his Gifford Lectures, Polanyi worked seriously to explore the literature of cultural anthropology and his serious interest in Evans-Pritchard and the Azande begins and this is manifested in articles like “Scientific Beliefs” (1950) and (in 1951) Gifford Lecture, Series I, Lecture 8, “The Doubting of Implicit Beliefs (precis) which is re-cycled in 1952 as “The Stability of Beliefs”[BJPS 3, pp. 217-232] which later substantially re-appears in PK. Polanyi’s interest in the link between“belief and reality” not only led him to develop his philosophical account of science and society in terms of personal knowledge; it also led him to spell out the dangers of scientism, which he believed succored the powerful modern cultural force/process called “moral inversion” and led to the development of modern “totalitarianism.”]↩︎