Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in Law. In 1914, he helped found the Hungarian Radical Party and served as its secretary. Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest. Polanyi supported the republican government of Mihály Károlyi and its Social Democratic regime. The republic was short-lived, however, and when Béla Kun toppled the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic Polanyi left for Vienna. From 1924 to 1933 he was employed as a senior editor of the prestigious "Der Österreichische Volkswirt" ('The Austrian Economist') magazine. It was at this time that he first began criticizing the Austrian School of economists, who he felt created abstract models which lost sight of the organic, interrelated reality of economic processes. Polanyi himself was attracted to Fabianism and the works of G. D. H. Cole. It was also during this period that Polanyi grew interested in Christian socialism. He married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, of Polish-Hungarian background. Polanyi was asked to resign from "Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt" because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria. He left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what later became "The Great Transformation". However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College. The book was published in 1944, to great acclaim. In it, Polanyi described the enclosure process in England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century. Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation.". The lectures, The Passing of the 19th Century, The Trend Towards an Integrated Society, The Breakdown of the International System, Is America an Exception  and Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution, took place during the early stages of World War II. Polanyi participated in Bennington's Humanism Lecture Series (1941)  and The Bennington College Lecture Series (1943) where his topic was "Jean Jacques Rousseau: Or is a Free Society Possible?"