Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T17:03:07.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ignorance, denial, internalisation, and transcendence: a post-structural perspective on Polanyi's double movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2012

CHRISTOPHER HOLMES
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I suggest what an engagement between post-structuralism and the work of Karl Polanyi might look like. I do this by presenting a reading of Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ as a form of problematisation through binary opposition. I suggest that the central opposition that the double movement depicts – between economy and society as reflected in processes of marketisation and social protection – presents itself in such a way that the problems emanating from the opposition can only be solved through its transcendence. On one hand, the terms of transcendence are limited by the terms of the opposition. On the other hand, since transcendence is never reached, the double movement problematisation stabilises the existence of a lacuna between the lived experience of market society and the discursive field of that market society. As such, the form of the problematisation places a double-limit upon the ways in which ‘solutions’ can be presented. I present this thesis in relation to two instances of double movement discussed by Polanyi in his book, The Great Transformation. I then apply the argument to invocations of the economy-society opposition in contemporary political economic discourse, where it remains as ubiquitous as ever.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 273 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century’, Foreign Affairs, 28:3 (1950), p. 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Related specifically to political economy, see de Goede, M., ‘International Political Economy and the Promises of Poststructuralism’, in de Goede, (ed.), International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 4, 17, 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Amin, A., and Palan, R., ‘Towards a non-rationalist international political economy’, Review of International Political Economy, 8:4 (2001), pp. 561CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 A. Amin and R. Palan, ‘Towards a non-rationalist international political economy’, pp. 561; M. de Goede, ‘Intenational Political Economy’, p. 4; J. Wullweber and C. Scherrer, ‘Post-modern’, pp. 12, 19.

4 See Derrida, J., Of Grammatology (B-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [orig. pub. 1967]), pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

5 Ibid. Throughout.

6 Howarth, D., Discourse (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), p. 37Google Scholar.

7 One important example is Foucault, Michel's, Madness and Civilization (London: Routledge, 2001 [orig. pub. 1967])Google Scholar which charts the history of how society deals with those deemed insane but, in so doing, helps us to simultaneously chart changing ideas about what constitutes sanity, rational behaviour and, ultimately, society itself. Post-colonial scholars have similarly sought to deconstruct the way in which ‘the West’ is constructed against ‘the East’, the classic example of course being, Said, Edward's Orientalism (New York: Doubleday, 2003 [orig. pub. 1978])Google Scholar, although for an interesting critique of that intervention, see Malik, K., ‘Universalism and difference in discourses of race’, Review of International Studies, 26 (2000), pp. 155–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elsewhere, a great variety of post-structuralists have used the binary opposition form – often ‘self’ and ‘other’ – to highlight the plight of various sectors of society in terms of how they are marginalised through binary oppositional discourses (see M. de Goede, ‘Intenational Political Economy’, p. 17).

8 Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

9 See Cochran, M., ‘Postmodernism, ethics and international political theory’, Review of International Studies, 21, p. 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Shapiro, M. J., ‘Sovereignty and Exchange in the Orders of Modernity’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 16:4 (1991), pp. 447–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 467.

12 Ibid., p. 464.

13 On related themes, see Balibar, E., ‘At the borders of Europe’, Makeworlds, 4 (2004)Google Scholar; and Inayatullah, N. and Blaney, D. L., ‘Realizing Sovereignty’, Review of International Studies, 21 (1995), pp. 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Strange, S., ‘International Economics and International Relations: A case of mutual neglect’, International Affairs, 46:2, pp. 304–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Although this is probably the most significant aspect of her legacy, it is obviously this is not the limit of Strange's conceptual input into the discipline. As de Goede has discussed, Strange had a strong sense of the importance of ideas and information in the constitution of political economic reality. See de Goede, M., ‘Beyond economism in international political economy’, Review of International Studies, 29:1 (2003), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 For example, Strange, S., States and Markets (2nd edn, New York: Continuum, 1994)Google Scholar and Schwartz, H. M., States versus Markets (3rd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 M. de Goede, ‘Beyond economism’, p. 79.

18 A. Amin and R. Palan, ‘Towards a non-rationalist international political economy’, p. 567.

19 T. Lemke, ‘Foucault, Governmentality and Critique’. Paper presented at the Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Amherst, MA, USA (21 September 2000), p. 6.

20 Ibid., p. 7.

21 Brassett, J., Rethel, L., and Watson, M., ‘The Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis: The Economics, Politics and Ethics of Response’, New Political Economy, 15:1 (2010), pp. 1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Holmes, C. and Brassett, J., ‘International Political Economy and the Question of Ethics’, Review of International Political Economy, 17:3 (2010), pp. 425–53Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. 427.

24 M. Foucault, ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’, Interview conducted by Paul Rabinow in May 1984, transcript available at: {http://foucault.info/foucault/interview.html}.

25 Ibid.

26 See the following texts for various examples of this increased recognition: Dale, G., Karl Polanyi (Cambridge, UK: Polity)Google Scholar; Holmes, C. ‘Problems and opportunities in Polanyian analysis today’, Economy and Society (2012, in press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 One important exception is Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's 1999 article on Polanyi, which comments on the extent to which Polanyi's thesis challenges the idea of dividing human motivations into ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ categories. Inayatullah, N. and Blaney, D. L., ‘Towards An Ethnographic Understanding of Karl Polanyi's Double Critique of Capitalism’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 28:2 (1999), pp. 311–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Fred Block has suggested that this tendency was reinforced by Polanyi's experience of the ‘highly polarized (capitalism versus socialism) discourse of the Cold War’. See Block, F., ‘Karl Polanyi and the writing of the great transformation’, Theory and Society, 32:3 (2003) p. 299CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Whilst agreeing with that diagnosis, this article obviously regards that form of conceptualisation as much more profound and epistemologically significant both in Polanyi's work and in political economic thought generally.

29 M. Shapiro, ‘Sovereignty’, see also M. de Goede, ‘Beyond economism’, p. 91.

30 Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [orig. pub. 1944])Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 187.

32 See, for example, Ibid. p. 76.

33 Ibid. p. 201.

34 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 79, see also Mendell, M. and Salée, D. (eds), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Humphreys, S. C., ‘History, Economics and Anthropology: The Work of Karl Polanyi’, History and Theory, 8:2 (1969), pp. 165–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beinefeld, M., ‘Karl Polanyi and the Contradictions of the 1980s’, in Mendell, M. and Salée, D. (eds), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi (1991), p. 7Google Scholar.

36 See various contributions to Hettne, B. (ed.), International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder (London: Zed, 1995)Google Scholar; Helleiner, E., ‘Great transformations: A Polanyian perspective on the contemporary financial order’, Studies in Political Economy, 48 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, latterly, Hettne, B., ‘Re-Reading Polanyi: Towards a Second Great Transformation?’, in McRobbie, Kenneth and Levitt, Kari (eds), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of the Great Transformation (Montreal Black Rose, 2006), pp. 60–72Google Scholar; Caporaso, J. A. and Tarrow, S., ‘Polanyi in Brussels: Supranational Institutions and the Transnational Embedding of Markets’, International Organization, 63:4 (2009), pp. 593–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Ruggie, J., ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, 36:2 (1982), pp. 379–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 See various contributions to Bernstein, S. F. and Pauly, L. W. (eds), Global Liberalism and Political Order (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

39 Lacher, H., ‘The Politics of the Market: Re-Reading Karl Polanyi’, Global Society, 13:3 (1999), pp. 313–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Dale, G., ‘Social Democracy, Embeddedness and Decommodification: On the Conceptual Innovations and Intellectual Affiliations of Karl Polanyi’, New Political Economy (2010), p. 22Google Scholar.

41 In addition to Polanyiological articles already mentioned, key interventions include Block, F. and Somers, M., ‘Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi’, in Skocpol, T. (ed.), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1984), pp. 47–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burawoy, M., ‘For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’, Politics & Society, 31:2 (2003), pp. 193–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chaloupek, G. K., ‘The Austrian Debate on Economic Calculation in a Socialist Economy’, History of Political Economy, 22:4 (1990), pp. 659–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 On discourse as stabilisation, see V. S. Peterson, ‘Getting Real: The necessity of critical poststructuralism in global political economy’, in M de Goede (ed.), ‘Intenational Political Economy’, p. 120.

43 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 65.

44 Ibid., pp. 65–6.

45 Ibid., pp. 67–70.

46 Ibid., p. 71.

47 Ibid., pp. 71–2.

48 Ibid., p. 72.

49 Ibid., p. 74.

50 Ibid., p. 82.

51 Ibid., p. 84.

52 Ibid., p. 85.

53 Ibid., pp. 85–6.

54 Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, Paul, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 95Google Scholar.

55 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 120.

56 Townsend, J., Dissertation on the Poor Laws (London: Ridgways, 1817 [orig. pub. 1786])Google Scholar.

57 Ibid.

58 Block, F. and Somers, M., ‘In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law’, Politics & Society, 31:2, p. 313Google Scholar.

59 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 298.

60 F. Block and M. Somers, ‘Speenhamland’, p. 291.

61 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 298.

62 Ibid., pp. 147–8.

63 Ibid., pp. 151, 220.

64 Ibid., p. 151.

65 Dale, G., ‘Social Democracy, Embeddedness and Decommodification: On the Conceptual Innovations and Intellectual Affiliations of Karl Polanyi’, New Political Economy, 15:3 (2010), p. 378CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Rotstein, A., ‘The market, mind and rationality. From Vienna to Paris and back’, Revue européenne des sciences socials, XLIV:134 (2006), p. 261Google Scholar.

67 Polanyi, K., Primitive, archaic and modern economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston: Beascon, 1971), p. 70Google Scholar.

68 See N. Inayatullah and D. Blaney, ‘Towards An Ethnographic Understanding’ for commentary on this theme in Polanyi's work.

69 Polanyi, The Great Transforamtion, p. 239.

70 Ibid., p. 226, chap. 20.

71 Ibid., p. 205.

72 Ibid., p. 26.

73 See also F. Block, ‘Karl Polanyi’, pp. 288–9.

74 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 141.

75 Ibid., p. 228.

76 Ibid. p. 21.

77 Ibid., p. 190.

78 Ibid., p. 221.

79 This theme has been partially explored in the Polanyian literature. Highlights include Stanfield, R., ‘The dichotomized state’, Journal of Economic Issues, 25:3 (1991), pp. 765–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar and various contributions to M. Mendell and D. Salée (eds), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi. Others have extended similar forms of analysis towards supranational governing organisations, including Harmes, A., ‘Institutional Investors and Polanyi's Double Movement: a model of contemporary currency crises’, Review of International Political Economy, 8:3 (2001), pp. 389–437CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘The World Bank or Polanyi: Markets, Poverty and Social Well-being in Latin America’, New Political Economy, 7:2 (2002), pp. 199–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Colin Crouch, for example, observes the growth in discourses of corporate social responsibility in Crouch, C., ‘Privatised Keynesianism: An unacknowledged policy regime’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 11 (2009), pp. 382–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 G. Daly, ‘The political economy of (im)possibility’, in M. de Goede (ed.), ‘Intenational Political Economy’, pp. 178.

82 Ibid.

83 Blair, A., ‘The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century’, in Chadwick, A. and Heffernan, R. (eds), The New Labour Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 28Google Scholar.

84 Daly (‘[Im]possibility’, p. 178.) draws on another telling quote from Blair: ‘there is “no left or right in economic policy, only good and bad”’.

85 Freeden, M., ‘The ideology of New Labour’, in Chadwick, A. and Heffernan, R. (eds), New Labour (2003), pp. 47Google Scholar.

86 Gamble, A. and Wright, A., ‘Introduction’, in Gamble, A. and Wright, A. (eds), Restating the State? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 3Google Scholar.

87 Kay, J., ‘The state and the market’, in Gamble, A. and Wright, A. (eds), Restating (2004), p. 74Google Scholar.

88 Robison, R., The Neo-Liberal Revolution: Forging the Market State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

89 Levy, J. D. (ed.), The state after statism: New state activities in the age of liberalization (London: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

90 Bernstein, S., The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Holmberg, J. and Sandbrook, R., ‘Sustainable Development: what is to be done?’, in Holmberg, J. (ed.), Policies for a Small Planet (London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 25Google Scholar.

92 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 193.

93 Sandor, R. L., Bettelheim, E. C., and Swingland, I. R., ‘An overview of a free-market approach to climate change and conservation’, Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 360 (2002), p. 1607CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

94 Dales, J. H., ‘Land, water and ownership’, The Canadian Journal of Economics, 1:4 (1968), pp. 791–804CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 E. Engelen, I. Erturk, J. Froud, A. Leaver, and K. Williams, ‘Financial innovation: frame, conjuncture and bricolage’, paper delivered at the ‘Political Economy of the Sub-Prime Crisis’ Conference, University of Warwick (October 2008).

96 Holmes, C., ‘Seeking alpha or creating beta? Charting the rise of hedge fund-based financial ecosystems’, New Political Economy, 14:4 (2009), pp. 431–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 In a recent presentation, Claus Thomasberger suggested, in a related vein that ‘neo-liberalism has learnt about the conflict between capitalism and democracy’, presentation delivered at ‘The world between crisis and change’ conference, CNAM, Paris (16 February 2012).

98 G. Daly, ‘[Im]possibility’, p. 187.

99 See Baum, G., Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

100 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, pp. 267–8.

101 In a related vein, Fred Block notes a psycho-analytic element to Polanyi's invocation of the Speenhamland episode: ‘he sought to describe the historical trauma in loving and graphic detail precisely so that its impact on actual human beings could finally be transcended’. ‘Karl Polanyi’, p. 292.

102 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 278.

103 M. Mendell and D. Salée (eds), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi, p. viii.

104 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.

105 Dale, Karl Polanyi, pp. 9, 34.

106 In relation to Polanyi, Inayatullah and Blaney speak of finding institutions that are capable of supporting ‘mixed’ social institutions (‘Towards An Ethnographic Understanding’, p. 313). On the pages of this journal, authors have wrestled with similar themes in other contexts. For example, in the wake of earlier post-structural forays into IR, Molly Cochran speculated on the possibility of a ‘post-modern ethics’ that detached itself from dichotomous conceptualisations on one hand and universalist notions of progress and rationality on the other. M. Cochran, ‘Postmodernism, ethics and international political theory’. More recently, in discussing the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Papais argues that, ‘[u]nlike the Hegelian narrative of … achieving reconciliation, Levinas suggests a journey towards ‘a pluralism that does not merge into a unity’. Papais, V., ‘Self and Other in Critical International Theory: Assimilation, Incommensurability and the Paradox of Critique’, Review of International Studies, 37:1 (2011), p. 128Google Scholar.

107 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 267.