By the late 1930s, Polanyi, the polymath older brother of Karl, had turned away from his core specialty in chemistry to the social sciences. At the time of the WLC, he was shooting his Rockefeller Foundation-funded film on Unemployment and Money. He had also been to the Soviet Union on several occasions in the 1930s, where he had seen the alternative to the liberal way and formed his opinion on both the kind of society he believed in and science's role for that society.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 377