This article aims to complicate the economic and political terrain on which debates within Polanyi Studies take place, arguing that imprecise terminology and an ossified set of Cold War concepts erect dubious and simplistic dichotomies (e.g., liberal/conservative, markets/planning, freedom/totalitarianism, etc.) that are not up to the task of appropriately navigating contemporary political economy. The essay accomplishes this task by offering counterexamples to status quo assumptions in Polanyi Studies as well as by suggesting more nuanced avenues for future Polanyian exploration.

John Rawls’s political liberalism is supported and better understood via Michael Polanyi’s tacit and emergent structures. Rawls claims the political is “freestanding” and “neutral” relative to comprehensive moral doctrines and metaphysical assumptions. Polanyian critics of Rawls empha­size the personal nature of our political commitments and Polanyi’s metaphysical realism. They also claim tacit knowing makes Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” impossible. However, as an emergent social order, political liberalism is a joint comprehension of a plurality of competing traditions that operates as an upper-level control in a dual control system; it supports yet constrains individuals in traditions so they may mutually flourish under its umbrella. Emergent levels have their own rules of organization and hence possess a rationality that can function independently and neutrally relative to its subsidiaries and so is freestanding, as Rawls claims. Still, since this level is constituted by overlapping consensus and is not a modus vivendi, there is indeed personal commitment to political values, as Polanyi affirms. This continuity makes it difficult to disambiguate one’s comprehensive ethical understanding from one’s political understanding. But, as with counterfactual hypotheses in science, Polanyi could endorse the artifice of the veil. By occluding politically irrelevant facts we better access this shared level, and tacit convictions about political justice become explicit.

Veil of ignorance theories suggest that an appraiser can be (i) completely (focally) aware of and (ii) completely ignorant about the appraisal she is making. This paper argues that Michael Polanyi rejected both of these premises and that he was developing an antithesis to the veil of ignorance model in his concept of tacit knowing. Rather counterintuitively, the latter concept did not refer to one but three kinds of appraisal: making a knowledge claim, making an aesthetic evaluation, and making a moral judgement. This paper shows how the Polanyian concept of tacit knowing clashes with the veil of ignorance model in the case of this third kind of appraisal, making a moral judgement. The first part of the paper portrays how Polanyi’s Budapest years might have influenced his discovery of the tacit. The second part explores the evolution of the tacit knowing concept and identifies four stages in his relevant thought based on how he approached the tacit. The third part explains how the Polanyian concept of tacit knowing might be interpreted as a philosophical razor that is antithetical to the veil of ignorance model. The paper concludes by going into details about this antithetical relation and, by doing so, sharpening the razor.

This essay makes use of a variety of archival materials in the Michael Polanyi Papers to show that Polanyi’s comment linking his account of “indwelling” and Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” (in his 1964 “Preface to the Torchbook Edition” of Personal Knowledge) was a carefully considered, thoughtful philosophical claim. Materials from both before and after the writing of this Torchbook Preface make clear that Polanyi was seriously exploring connections between his emerging epistemic account and ideas developed by Heidegger as well as other modern thinkers who in the sixties often were dubbed “existentialists.”