Polanyi's Double Movement and Capitalism Today

ABSTRACT What is the most fruitful conceptualization of Karl Polanyi's ‘double movement’ in contemporary capitalist studies? For Polanyi, it is a conceptual device for explaining a particular historical sequence leading to the collapse of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s. For his current followers, the double movement is of broader and longer‐term significance. Some conceive it as representing a continuous and inherent contradiction within capitalism that can only be resolved, and the economy embedded in society, with the end of capitalism. Others conceive of the double movement as representing an oscillating imbalance between the liberal movement and the countermovement of societal protection, with the former's ascendancy impelling a disembedding tendency and the latter's a re‐embedding tendency. This article argues that the most fruitful approach is to treat the double movement as a two‐phase conceptual model that has a real, though limited, heuristic value in understanding liberal‐democratic capitalist development.