Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and for his book, The Great Transformation, which argued that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was not inevitable but contingent. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture; this view ran counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology, his theories became the foundation for the economic democracy movement.
His daughter, Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal. Polanyi was born into a Jewish family, his younger brother was Michael Polanyi, a philosopher, his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist. He was born in Vienna, at the time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his father, Mihály Pollacsek, was a railway entrepreneur. Mihály never is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. Mihály died in January 1905, an emotional shock to Karl, he commemorated the anniversary of Mihály's death throughout his life. Karl and Michael Polanyi's mother was Cecília Wohl; the name change to Polanyi was made by his siblings. Polanyi was well educated despite the ups and downs of his father's fortune, he immersed himself in Budapest's active intellectual and artistic scene. Polanyi founded the radical and influential Galileo Circle while at the University of Budapest, a club which would have far reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual thought.
During this time, he was engaged with other notable thinkers, such as György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, Karl Mannheim. Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in Law. In 1914, he helped served as its secretary. Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest. Polanyi supported the republican government of its Social Democratic regime; the republic was short-lived and when Béla Kun toppled the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic Polanyi left for Vienna. From 1924 to 1933 he was employed as a senior editor of the prestigious Der Österreichische Volkswirt magazine, it was at this time that he first began criticizing the Austrian School of economists, who he felt created abstract models which lost sight of the organic, interrelated reality of economic processes. Polanyi himself was attracted to the works of G. D. H. Cole, it was during this period that Polanyi grew interested in Christian socialism.
He married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, of Polish-Hungarian background. Polanyi was asked to resign from Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria, he left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what became The Great Transformation. However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College; the book was published to great acclaim. In it, Polanyi described the enclosure process in England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century. Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation.".
The lectures, The Passing of the 19th Century, The Trend Towards an Integrated Society, The Breakdown of the International System, Is America an Exception and Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution, took place during the early stages of World War II. Polanyi participated in Bennington's Humanism Lecture Series and The Bennington College Lecture Series where his topic was "Jean Jacques Rousseau: Or is a Free Society Possible?"After the war, Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University. However, his wife had a background as a former communist, which made gaining an entrance visa in the United States impossible; as a result, they moved to Canada, Polanyi commuted to New York City. In the early 1950s, Polanyi received a large grant from the Ford Foundation to study the economic systems of ancient empires. Having described the emergence of the modern economic system, Polanyi now sought to understand how "the economy" emerged as a distinct sphere in the distant past.
His seminar at Columbia drew several famous scholars and influenced a generation of teachers, resulting in the 1957 volume Trade and Markets in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he resided in Pickering, where he died in 1964. "Socialist Accounting"
Jan Tschichold was a calligrapher and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures, his direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He designed the much-admired typeface Sabon. Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, he was trained in calligraphy. In 1919, he began in the class of Hermann Delitzsch a study on the "Leipzig Academy of the arts". Due to his extraordinary achievements, he soon became a master pupil of the rector of Walter Tiemann – a font designer for the Gebr.-Klingspor foundry and was commissioned to his fellow students. At the same time, he received the first orders in the framework of the "Leipziger Messe" and made in 1923 as a typographic consultant to a printing company independently.
This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from all other noted typographers of the time, since they had trained in architecture or the fine arts. It may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks. Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar. After being introduced to important artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography, he became sympathetic to this attempt to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental way of working, but at the same time, felt it was important to find a simple and practical approach. He became one of the most important representatives of the "new typography" and in a famous special issue of'typographic communications' in 1925 with the title of "Elemental Typography", he put together the new approaches in the form of a thesis.
After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, all teaching posts were threatened for anyone, sympathetic to communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they both were denounced as "cultural Bolshevists". Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold's books were seized by the Gestapo "for the protection of the German people". After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933. Apart from two longer stays in England in 1937, 1947–1949, Tschichold lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. Jan Tschichold died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974. Tschichold had converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition.
He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement mentioned above). This book was a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemned all sans-serif, he favoured non-centered design, codified many other Modernist design rules. He advocated the use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter, made some of the first clear explanations of the effective use of different sizes and weights of type in order to and convey information; this book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany. Yet, despite his visits to England just before the war, only about four articles by Tschichold had been translated into English by 1945. Although Die neue Typographie remains a classic, Tschichold abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards as he moved back towards Classicism in print design, he condemned Die neue Typographie as too extreme.
He went so far as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic. Between 1947–1949 Tschichold lived in England where he oversaw the redesign of 500 paperbacks published by Penguin Books, leaving them with a standardized set of typographic rules, the Penguin Composition Rules. Although he gave Penguin's books a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages. In working for a firm that made inexpensive mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work — in cheap popular culture forms — that he had always pursued during his career, his abandonment of Modernist principles meant that though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style. Unimpressed by the use of realist or neo-grotesque typ
The Mulford T. Hunter House is a private residence located at 77 West Hancock Street in Michigan, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 22, 1994. Mulford Hunter was a captain of Great Lakes steamships, earning enough to become wealthy. In 1891, he purchased George W. Loomer House, acquired what was an empty lot next door, where this house now stands. According to the May 27, 1894 edition of the Detroit Free Press, he commissioned the firm of Donaldson & Meier to design this house, moved in that year. Hunter lived there with his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchild, afterward rented out the Loomer house; the ownership of both the Hunter House and the Loomer House passed from Hunter to his daughter, to his granddaughter Carolyn S. McGraw. In 1951, both houses were sold to Phila J. Draper and transformed into multi-unit apartment buildings, they continued to be operated as apartments through at least the 1990s, although under different ownership, but the exterior has not been changed.
The owner in the 1990s was Edward Black. This structure is one of the few remaining examples in the city of Detroit; the basement is built from large stones. The front façade is asymmetric, with a dominating bay window on one side and a one-story porch on the other; the porch features Ionic columns atop raised pedestals, the front door has an elliptical fanlight framed by a Syrian arch. Above the porch is an oval window, surrounded by decorative brickwork. Two dormers with leaded windows surmount the façade; the house is directly adjacent to the George W. Loomer House. Hill, Eric J. and John Gallagher. AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-3120-3