Re-embedding Polanyi’s double movement thesis – the non-ideological and destructive countermovement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that scholarship on Polanyi’s double movement thesis has been disembedded from the arguments laid out by Polanyi in The Great Transformation. Much scholarship claims ideologically left- or right-wing movements to be examples of Polanyi’s countermovement. This article will demonstrate this is a misreading through a detailed examination of Polanyi’s magnus opus. It will demonstrate that Polanyi not only does not regard ideological movements as part of the countermovement concept but he ridicules this understanding as the ‘myth of the antiliberal collectivist conspiracy’. After dissecting the double movement dynamic this article will use the findings to intervene in the Goodwin-Sandbrook debate arguing for a non-ideological reading of the countermovement, in which the countermovement is ultimately destructive to the self-regulating market and the double movement itself. This break-down gives space to the transcendental ideological movements, fascism and socialism, to actualize their ideology.