ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the origins and the novelty of Polanyi’s visual method. It explores connections with Norman Angell’s The Money Game: How to Play it: A New Instrument of Economic Education (1928), the economic apparatuses of James D. Mooney, president of General Motors Overseas, and Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE. Although a few commonalities can be found between these visual methods and Polanyi’s, the latter has taken a unique road fitting more to the content of Polanyi’s economics than to the contemporary conventions of visualizing social matters. The chapter shows that Polanyi’s visual method was similarly innovative as the ideas constituting his postmodern economics, and ends by sketching some overarching traits of Polanyi’s visualizations present both in his early work in physical chemistry and his later contributions to economics. Visual representations of economic matters were severely downplayed compared to verbal representations in the histories of economics. Readdressing this ‘invisible visibility’ might not only direct scholarly attention to tools which had the potential to become a ‘protean device’ to economics but eventually failed to do so (e.g. film projector), but could also foster further inquiries into the less studied visual histories of economics.
