Bladel (2005) conjectures Polanyi dropped Köhler's 'dynamic order' for 'spontaneous order' after the 1947 Mont Pèlerin meeting — explicitly a suspicion, not a documented mechanism

michael-polanyijohn-bladelwilhelm-ropkefriedrich-hayekmont-pelerin-societyspontaneous-orderdynamic-orderpriority-of-discoveryhistory-of-ideas

In "Against Polanyi-Centrism" (John P. Bladel, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 8:4, 2005, p. 24), Bladel offers a specific historical hypothesis for why Michael Polanyi abandoned Wolfgang Köhler's borrowed label "dynamic order" in favour of "spontaneous order" in his 1948 and 1951 writings (claim-polanyi-1941-used-kohlers-dynamic-order-exact-phrase-debuts-1948): "I suspect that Polanyi made the terminological change … because he had attended the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 and everyone there—especially the triumvirate of Hayek, Röpke, and Mises—was talking about the spontaneous nature of the free market economy and liberal social institutions."

If true, the hypothesis would make Polanyi's 1948 phrase not an independent coinage but a late adoption of vocabulary Röpke and Hayek had already been using for roughly a decade, picked up through shared attendance at the Society's founding meeting — the same shared-circle milieu catalogued in claim-popper-attended-mont-pelerin-1947-after-objecting-to-hayeks-exclusionary-format. It is the hypothesised connective tissue beneath the whole priority cluster mapped in moc-the-coinage-had-no-single-coiner.

[unverified-mechanism — Bladel flags this as his own inference, not a documented fact: "I suspect," "it is hard to say whether or not." He cites no correspondence, diary, or statement from Polanyi confirming that the exposure caused the switch. He separately quotes a real Polanyi–Hayek letter (19 Feb. 1963, Hoover Institution, Hayek Archives, Box 43, No. 35) but on an unrelated topic — Polanyi's "Republic of Science," not this terminological question.] The claim this note records is therefore the existence and hedged status of Bladel's conjecture, which is capture-verified; the causal link itself remains undemonstrated and this note stays seedling accordingly.