Polanyi’s Double Movement and Capitalism Today
Richard Sandbrook ABSTRACT What is the most fruitful conceptualization of Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ in contemporary capitalist studies? For Polanyi, it is a conceptual device for explaining a particular historical sequence leading to the collapse of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s. For his current followers, the double movement is of broader and longer-term significance. Some conceive it as representing a continuous and inherent contradiction within capitalism that can only be resolved, and the economy embedded in society, with the end of capitalism. Others conceive of the double movement as representing an oscillating imbalance between the liberal movement and the countermovement of societal protection, with the former’s ascendancy impelling a disembedding tendency and the latter’s a re-embedding tendency. This article argues that the most fruitful approach is to treat the double movement as a two-phase conceptual model that has a real, though limited, heuristic value in understanding liberal-democratic capitalist development.
INTRODUCTION
For Karl Polanyi, writing in the 1940s, the ‘double movement’ was a conceptual device for explaining a particular historical sequence leading to the collapse of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s (Polanyi, 1944/2001). For his latter-day followers, the double movement is of broader and longerterm significance.1 Some of us conceive it as representing a continuous and inherent contradiction within capitalism that can only be resolved, and the This article evolved, as articles sometimes do, from a response to a study on the double movement by Geoff Goodwin (2018). We discussed that article both before and after it was published. As a participant at a BISA panel in mid-2019 that Geoff organized, I commended his 2018 article as an outstanding contribution in relating Polanyi’s double movement to the global South. My own interests, which had taken an activist turn in the face of the growing threats posed by global warming and nuclear weapons, shifted to the global North. Thus, my article has strayed far from its origins, with Geoff’s response now a critique of my contribution rather than a rebuttal of my critique. It’s been an interesting intellectual journey for both of us. 1. For a perceptive critique of the double movement, see Goodwin (2018). Goodwin’s critique clarifies and modifies some murky Polanyian concepts, such as the role of the state, commodification/decommodification and countermovement. I will not be reviewing these Development and Change 0(0): 1–29. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12699 © 2022 International Institute of Social Studies.