Michael Polanyi and the Treason of the Intellectuals

In the years after the Second World War, Michael Polanyi emerged as a philosopher of the first rank. His major work, Personal Knowledge (1958), was a brilliant tour de force that managed to steer a course between the Scylla of a critical philosophy that insists upon completely objective epistemological criteria and the Charybdis of a subjectivism that denies the possibility of surmounting caprice. By demonstrating the viability of a personal knowledge that was neither wholly objective nor arbitrary, Polanyi helped to clear paths of thought and existence previously obstructed. Although this philosophic achievement deserves comprehensive examination, my present intention is more modest; I should like to call attention to Polanyi's lifelong concern with the question of moral and intellectual responsibility and to his thoughtful and devastating indictment of the treason of the intellectuals.