Whither the Counter-Movement? Hayek, Polanyi, and the Politics of No Alternative

This paper turns Karl Polanyi's concept of the "double movement" back on Polanyi and his intellectual contemporary, Friedrich Hayek, as a means to insight into the structural conditions of counter-movement in the second half of the 20th Century. After elaborating on the double movement concept, I contrast the trajectory of Polanyi and his greatest work, The Great Transformation, with that of Friedrich Hayek and his contemporaneous Road to Serfdom--treating each as protagonists in the movement/counter-movement system of relations that, for Polanyi, is the site of history's forward motion. Building on citation data, news articles, archival records and secondary sources, I argue that Polanyi's conditions of intellectual production--including a lack of economic allies in the capitalist West, professional instability, tenuous ties to academic economics, and a lifetime of financial insecurity--explain the ongoing quarantine of Transformation within the academic social sciences. These conditions of production contrast starkly with the Hayekian counterexample. Taken together, the analysis casts light on the ongoing hegemony of the "liberal creed" and the weakness of effective opposition: the trajectory of the two figures offers clues into how structures of intellectual production are linked to (or severed from) movement and counter-movement, offering insight into why, even in the face of financial crisis and significant public anger against the moneyed ranks of the financial sector, we continue to exist in a world of "no alternative".