Fascism and the enduring problem of the liberal individual in Polanyi

This application of Polanyi to the question of fascism’s resurgence provides an important corrective to mainstream liberal explanations (e.g., Albright 2018), inviting the reader to “look up rather than down” (Lim 2021) by tying fascism’s significance to the functioning of the capitalist system rather than to the personalities of fascist politicians or their degree of mass support. The merits of this notwithstanding, I argue that current Polanyian treatments have neglected to engage with a core aspect of Polanyi’s theory, which is that fascism, at its roots, is a fundamentally anti-individualist ideology that aims to address a moral and social crisis of the individual subject in liberal capitalism. Omitting this risks obfuscating what makes fascism distinctive as well as why its ideas have retained their appeal.