This article explores the Polanyi brothers’ publicly-stated views--and private debates--concerning the nature and origin of fascism and communism. In that connection, it examines their rival estimates of the Soviet regime.

Polanyi’s theory of spontaneous order is set in historical context, analyzed, and compared to Friedrich Hayek’s version.

Polanyi’s claim that a wholly tacit knowledge is possible is contested. Polanyi’s praise for the tacit, and his critique of the ideal of total explicitness, harbors a threat of Romanticism, which, in turn, may become a threat to the value of the explicit itself, and ultimately a political threat, something that Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy and political life manifested all too dramatically. Polanyians must not lose sight of the primacy of the explicit for personal existence, something that Polanyi’s work need not undermine, and indeed, that has the resources to affirm and support.