Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the last two decades a rich and diverse body of literature has emerged which uses the ‘double movement’ to analyse social, political and economic change in the global South. The main aims of this article are to expand the boundaries of this scholarship and improve our understanding of how to use the concept to analyse capitalist development in the region. It seeks to achieve this by explaining and extending the original formulation of the double movement, creating a dialogue between scholars who follow alternative readings of the concept, and proposing a revised formulation which builds on the existing literature while moving in new directions. The article concludes by signposting potentially fruitful areas of Polanyian analysis.

Highlights

  • Karl Polanyi has become a key reference point in debates over social, political and economic change in the global South

  • The Alternative Perspective: The Hard Reading of the Double Movement. Viewing this transition through the lens of the hard reading offers a different interpretation of events.29. Or explicitly, these authors question the degree of decommodification that occurred in the decades before neoliberal reform and see the double movement as a contradiction hardwired into market capitalism

  • The double movement has cast a longer shadow than Karl Polanyi anticipated

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Karl Polanyi has become a key reference point in debates over social, political and economic change in the global South. The book, first published in 1944, traces the evolution of liberal capitalism from its birth in England to its global-scale collapse in the early 1930s During this period, Polanyi (1944/2001) famously contended that industrialized capitalist economies experienced a ‘double movement’: as markets expanded, countermovements emerged to limit their reach and influence. I will argue that while the first reading of the double movement is insightful, the second formulation of the concept offers a better overarching framework to analyse market capitalism. This reading is not fully specified in the existing scholarship and requires elaboration. I will explain his theorization of this process, showing how the double movement connects with other concepts Polanyi elaborated in his published and unpublished materials. The section attempts to clarify elements of the double movement and proposes new extensions to the concept

Disembedding the Economy
Countering Commodification
From Protectionism to Decommodification
Double Movement as Dialectic Process
Defensive and Offensive Countermovements
Routes out of the Double Movement
Countermovement Activity and Impact
Rethinking the Double Movement
Conceptual Clarification
EXPANDING THE FRONTIERS OF POLANYIAN ANALYSIS
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