Contesting the hegemony of market ideology: Gramsci's 'good sense' and Polanyi's 'double movement'

Abstract

This article argues that the most fundamental challenge of globalization (both as a concept and as a sociopolitical process) lies in our need to reassess its bearing on the meaning and potential of democratic praxis. My purpose then is first to offer a critique of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of democratic theory, exposing how this form of market ideology is inherently antithetical to democratic principles. The second part of the article shows how two central themes in the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi may be usefully combined to produce a forceful counter-hegemonic model to contest the depoliticization, atomization and commodification endemic to neoliberal globalization. Whereas Polanyi demonstrated the repercussions of such domination in the economic lives of people, Gramsci was concerned to show the political domination that necessarily precipitated it. I argue that Polanyi's critique of the selfregulating market and his discernment of society's 'double movement', when bridged to Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony and his notion of 'good sense', supply vital components of a critical theorization of globalization as well as practical strategies of resistance to the anti-politics of market ideology. Ultimately, I submit that this critical integration of Polanyi and Gramsci into the globalization debates produces a much needed analytic strategy which maintains a primacy on political agency, critically specifies the national-international distinction, and makes a methodological virtue of radical democratic theory.