ABSTRACT
The disembedding of markets, as it evolved in the nineteenth century, can be interpreted (following Polanyi) as a manifestation of the overwhelming social and political success of the liberal market narrative. The expected as well as the unintended consequences of that success require close attention. On the one hand, the potential of markets and money expanded significantly, but on the other hand, new social antagonisms and corresponding political counter-movements arose. This chapter takes up the distinction between four dimensions of disembedding that were first discussed in Chapter 2, and gives a stylised historical description of the long-term developments in each of these dimensions. The globalisation of markets, the commodification of social relationships, the expansion of the scope of material and immaterial objects to be bought with money, and the enlargement of the time horizons underlying economic transactions are considered. As it turns out, disembedding had never been a straightforward process, but a contradictory one, depending on social and institutional conditions outside the market while at the same time undermining them. The aim here is to reconstruct Polanyi’s double-movement theorem in a sociologically more informed and balanced way that is free from problematic ‘anthropological’ presuppositions.
