ANTINOMIES OF THE ‘DOUBLE MOVEMENT’: From Polanyi to the Polanyi debate

Double movement constitutes the conceptual heart of Karl Polanyi’s history of market society. This chapter will begin by discussing the concept of double movement in Polanyi’s oeuvre, alongside other concepts such as ‘fictitious commodities’, ‘economistic fallacy’, ‘embeddedness’, and ‘disembeddedness’. In Section “Double Movement: An Overview”, I will show that despite its centrality, the concept of double movement has proved to be a major bone of contention among Polanyian scholars. In particular, the question as to what ‘disembeddedness’ is, how the markets can be ‘tamed’ and what the processes of taming really entail has led to widely differing interpretations of what is meant by ‘double movement’. In Section “Double Movement Reconsidered: Anatomy of the Polanyi Debate”, I will conclude by providing a summary as well as briefly discussing the broader implications of the Polanyi debate.