A question that runs through much of Michael Polanyi's writing is: "Why did we destroy Europe"" Why did the nineteenth century with its reforming zeal, with its immensely high ambitions for the improvement of the human condition produce a modern age of unparalleled destructiveness? As Richard L. Gelwick points out in chapter 1 of The Way of Discovery (1977), for Polanyi the answer lies in the fusion of the moral intensity of the great reformers with a false notion of scientific objectivity. Marxism, for example, claims scientific objectivity for its theories: disagreement with it is thus a deviation from "objective" scientific truth. But the driving force behind Marxism is moral and reforming zeal. This coupling of a submerged moral zeal with objectivism is for Polanyi the dynamism which produced the Marxist and fascist revolutions of the twentieth century. The coupling lends a quasi-scientific authority to the cruelty and oppressiveness of...