Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was born in Vienna on October 25 of Hungarian parents and became a leading economic historian of the twentieth century. His understanding of the Industrial Revolution as dependent on a disembedding of the economy from the broader culture offers an important perspective on globalization and suggestive insights relevant to relationships between science, technology, and ethics. After studies in Budapest, work as a lawyer, radical political activity, service in World War I where he was imprisoned on the Eastern front, and postwar convalescence and work as a journalist, he immigrated first to Great Britain (1933) and then to the United States and Canada (1940s), where he taught first at Bennington College and then at Columbia University. Because of past involvement with Marxist radicalism, his wife, Ilona Duczynska, was denied the right to live in the United States and Polanyi was forced to live in Canada and commute...