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The Logic of Liberty

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A chemist and member of a family renowned for its learning in several disciplines, Michael Polanyi experienced first-hand the horrors of totalitarian government and worldwide war. Consequently there is a singular weight to Polanyi's challenge to advocates of centrally planned scientific inquiry or the centrally planned implementation of scientific discovery. He argued that organizations—or governments—based solely on the methods of science threaten to foreclose a full human knowledge of the mysteries of existence and therefore pose a direct threat not only to academic freedom but to social and political liberty. The very triumphs of science in the modern era, Polanyi believed, at least affect and sometimes threaten liberty: "Our discovery and acceptance of scientific knowledge is a commitment to certain beliefs which we hold, but which others may refuse to share." This fateful interrelationship between science and liberty in our time is given supreme and elegant reflection in The Logic of Liberty.Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was an internationally renowned scientist, philosopher, Personal Knowledge andThe Tacit Dimension.Stuart D. Warner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Roosevelt University, Chicago.

Author: Polanyi M
Publisher: LIBERTY FUND
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780865971837
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 1998

Michael Polanyi (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistryeconomics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.

His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kineticsx-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. He pioneered the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in 1921, and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals and other materials in 1934. He emigrated to Germany, in 1926 becoming a chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils won the Nobel Prize, as well as one of his children. In 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society.

The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences include the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order and his rejection of a value neutral conception of liberty. They were developed in the context of his opposition to central planning.

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