Polanyi's 1941 essay used Köhler's 'dynamic order,' not 'spontaneous order' — the exact phrase debuts in his 1948 essay

michael-polanyiwolfgang-kohlerspontaneous-orderdynamic-orderpriority-of-discoveryhistory-of-ideasgestalt-psychology

Struan Jacobs's textual survey of Michael Polanyi's 1941–1951 writings distinguishes concept-priority from phrase-priority within Polanyi's own corpus. In "The Growth of Thought in Society" (Economica, November 1941), Polanyi applied "spontaneous" only as a modifier — "spontaneous ordering," "spontaneously arising order," "spontaneously attained order," "spontaneous mutual adjustment" — while preferring the terms "dynamic order," "dynamic system," and "dynamic forms of organization," vocabulary he had borrowed and adapted from the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Jacobs states plainly that in that essay Polanyi "never used the locution 'spontaneous order' as such." The fixed two-word phrase appears only later: Polanyi "began explicitly using the term 'spontaneous order' in 'The Span of Central Direction' (1948, reprinted 1951), contrasting order of this kind against 'corporate order'" (Jacobs 1997, pp. 15, 18 — the "never used the locution" passage sits on p. 15, the 1948-debut passage on p. 18).

Polanyi's own 1951 retrospective explains the switch: "They have been called systems of 'dynamic order' by Kohler, whose designation I followed in an earlier writing; but I think it will be simpler to refer to them as systems of spontaneous order" (The Logic of Liberty, 1951, p. 154, as quoted in Bladel 2005, p. 24). Jacobs reports the same borrowing in paraphrase — Polanyi "had taken Köhler's name 'dynamic order' and modified its meaning to suit his own needs" (Jacobs 1997, p. 17) — but does not quote the sentence. (The retrospective sentence therefore reaches this note through Bladel's quotation alone, corroborated by Jacobs's independent paraphrase, not a direct read of Polanyi's page this session.)

The upshot sharpens what "Polanyi's 1948 priority" actually means: it is priority for the exact phrase, not for the underlying idea, which Polanyi himself dated to his 1941 essay under Köhler's borrowed vocabulary. This is the genealogy behind claim-polanyi-published-spontaneous-order-1948-predating-hayeks-own-use, and it is exactly the distinction on which the priority dispute turns once a competing earliest-print claim for Wilhelm Röpke enters.