Full bibliography

Most people read Karl Polanyi today because his critique of laissez faire capitalism seems remarkably applicable to our neoliberal times. Although his late work on ancient and ‘archaic’ economies has enjoyed a consistent specialist readership, Polanyi is best known today for his 1944 magnum opus, The Great Transformation (henceforth GT). Covering a large sweep of mostly European history, the GT seeks to show that the attempt to create a ‘self-regulating market’ was a radical and recent departure from all preexisting economies; that this effort to ‘disembed’ the market from society required a great deal of state planning and force; and that the commodification of the ‘fictitious commodities’ land, labour and money was so socially destructive that it generated countermovements that demanded, and in some measure achieved, social protection. Polanyi termed this whole cycle of disembedding and re-embedding the market the ‘double movement’, and tried to show that it was the underlying cause of the great depression, fascism and two world wars. Given the relentless march of commodification in the neoliberal period and the variety of political responses this has generated (from both the left and far right), many people have been drawn to the idea that we are living through another double movement.