Polanyi’s double movement explains market booms as triggering protective nationalist backlash

Evidence

Explanations of the paradox of converging global finance and neopopulism often follow the logic of what Karl Polanyi, the noted economic historian, described as “double movement.” In his pivotal work The Great Transformation, Polanyi (1944) cataloged the history of capitalism from 1830s England to its global crisis in the 1930s, proposing that the movement toward unabated marketization of the political sphere precipitates a counter-movement of protectionism and nationalism in response. The double movement both anticipated and sought to explain the rise of fascism and war (which was ongoing at the time of writing The Great Transformation). A committed social democrat, Polanyi sought to explain the dominance as well as the renewal of capitalist ideology in two key stages (movements) that are repeated historically: a “disembedding” of the economy from social life (followed, importantly, by the separation of economy from polity) through market deregulation and commodification, and the “(re)embedding” of markets within society, through government intervention, regulation, and decommodification. The disembedding movement occurs as money, labor, and land are treated “as if” they were commodities—what Polanyi terms “fictitious commodities”—thus making societies more vulnerable to the speculative fancies of capital. The re-embedding response is seen as a counter-movement, playing the crucial role of keeping market expansion “in check.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 259

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘double movement’ and ‘fictitious commodities’ — core conceptual terminology the reader needs to assess which explanation Komporozos-Athanasiou is arguing against.