The Embedding Tendency Is Immanent to the Disembedding One

Abstract: This paper follows the steps of those scholars who find merits in Polanyi’s work which provides an alternative critique of capitalism to the established Marxists and Gramscian routes. However, unlike the existing scholarship which expediently uses Polanyi’s concepts in order to justify their normative position, this research attempts to recuperate a critical interpretation of Polanyi that goes beyond the mere attempt of pluralising his scholarship. My intervention in the ongoing debate on embeddedness aims to put forward a latent formulation present in Polanyi’s work which acknowledges that the embedding tendency is immanent to the disembedding one. Postulating the matter in terms of tendency avoids the conceptual contradiction between his portrayal of nineteenth century England as disembedded and his thesis about the always embedded market economy. I propose a new take on a widespread practice of recourse to Polanyi that largely focuses on the fixed notion of dis/embeddedness. Instead, I advocate a Polanyian perspective that will abandon the terminological fight over qualifying the socioeconomic conditions as embedded or disembedded and will instead exploit the analytical potential of the principles of improvement and habitation and their disruptive dialectical interaction.

Polanyi’s double-movement thesis has been up for grabs lately. The uncanny resemblance between laissez-faire capitalism and the current neoliberal predicament resulted in a frequent recourse to Polanyi’s (1944) famous double-movement thesis. My current research follows the steps of those scholars who find merits in Polanyi’s work. However, unlike the existing scholarship which expediently uses Polanyi’s concepts in order to justify their normative position, this research attempts to recuperate a critical interpretation of Polanyi that goes beyond the mere attempt of pluralising his scholarship. The objective of this research is to introduce a novel Polanyian approach which is capable of generating valuable political economy insights. By simply finding brute analogies between Polanyi’s period of inquiry and the recent capitalist developments, scholars have misunderstood the novelty of the latter. On the contrary, this project makes a conceptual intervention that warns against the widespread practice of conflating embeddedness with any quasi-decommodifying measures. Only by re-envisioning Polanyi’s historically specific work, we can stay true to his critical analysis. This project goes beyond Polanyi’s modernist legacy by engaging critically both with his concepts and the changing empirical reality.

My intervention in the ongoing debates on Polanyi’s legacy is five-fold. First, the paper deals with the question of dis/embeddedness. Given the lack of consensus on the concepts of dis/embeddedness whose analytical and normative dimensions are intertwined, I advocate the redefinition of the concepts of dis/embeddedness in terms of tendencies that avoids their representation as all-or-nothing phenomena. Postulating the matter in terms of tendency avoids the conceptual contradiction between Polanyi’s portrayal of nineteenth century England as disembedded economy and his thesis about the always embedded market economy. I propose a new take on a widespread practice of recourse to Polanyi that largely focuses on the fixed notion of dis/embeddedness.

Second, I argue that the biggest merit in Polanyi’s analysis rests in his invention of the two principles of improvement and habitation rather than dis/embeddedness which he rarely used in his writings. Polanyi introduced the principle of improvement to mark the deliberate spreading of the market form and the actualisation of the idea of the self-regulating market; whereas the principle of habitation stands for the subsequent measures aimed at dealing with the social and environmental dislocations caused by the extension of the market. The two principles animate the dis/embedding tendencies which have been significantly redefined from the time Polanyi was writing. It is the interaction of the two principles that determines social change.

Third, I re-introduce the concept of a rate of change, a key Polanyian innovation that embodies the synergy between the improvement and the habitation principles, whose contingent interaction produced the laissez-faire capitalism. While increasing number of scholars neglect to account for the rate of change and make solely a reference to the double-movement, I argue against imputing the existence of a double-movement whenever we observe the existence of some re-embedding moments. The successful manipulation of the rate of change allows society to acclimatise to the changes in the mode of production, thus preventing the total annihilation of society. Nonetheless, although the rate of change temporarily secures the habitation of society, it prevents the inception of a synthesis that is capable of overcoming the contradictions between the marketization/protection binary.  

Fourth, I argue that Polanyians need to reclaim the concept of new-constitutionalism from the Canadian Gramscians. Although generally attributed to Stephen Gill, the concept of new-constitutionalism was introduced by Polanyi to denote those policy measures, such as the Gold Standard, that insulated the economy not from top-down meddling from the Crown as was the case during seventeenth century England, but from bottom-up democratic pressure. This concept is particularly relevant when trying to make sense of the increasing depoliticisation of the decision-making process which is the most insidious actualisation of the idea of the self-regulating market.

Finally, I re-introduce Polanyi’s criticism of neoclassical economics for its sole preoccupation with the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Instead, Polanyi proposed a turn towards the concept of provisioning, which is not a matter of nature, but culture. This forgotten dimension of Polanyi’s work is pertinent nowadays when the economising market rationality has substituted any other ethical and political concerns in the decision-making processes. The paper is divided in five parts each reflecting the above five interventions on dis/embeddedness, improvement vs. habitation, the rate of change, new-constitutionalism and provisioning aimed at re-envisioning Polanyi’s historically specific work.