Is Welfare State the Rearguard of the Polanyi’s Counter Movement?

Abstract

After the Second World War, welfare states developed especially in the Western capitalist countries. In that regard, protectionist, interventionist policies became dominant and while the regulated market ousted the free market, the interventionist state replaced the laissez-faire state. According to Polanyi, counter-movement paved the way to the emergence of the welfare state. He defined counter-movement as a spontaneous societal reaction to the destructive effects of the self-regulating market on the society. In this paper, I aimed to argue whether the notion of “counter-movement” can explain the development of welfare state sufficiently on the basis of three discussions. Firstly, explaining the emergence of the welfare state as a result of the counter-movement ignores the importance of the social classes in this process because the counter-movement is not a class movement; this movement includes people from different economic and social strata. In this regard, I referred to the Social Democratic and Power Resource Theories. Secondly, while the counter-movement aims to protect the society from the destructive impact of the market system, the welfare state did not emerge for the protection of the society. Even if it provided important benefits to the working class, welfare state emerged in order to secure the capital accumulation in the long run. In this respect, I gave reference to the social control thesis and the crisis of crisis management thesis. Thirdly, while the objective of counter-movement is re-embedding the economy in order to protect society, the welfare state did not bring about a re-embedding of the economy.