The Polanyi-Stanfield Contribution: Reembedded Globalization

This essay describes and interprets J. Ron Stanfield’s analysis of Karl Polanyi. Stanfield has helped to clarify Polanyi’s “double-movement” thesis by arguing that the double movement of self-regulating market forces and the protective response is essentially about freedom versus security. These insights provide an analysis that takes Polanyi into the twenty-first century by developing a theory of “reembedded globalization.” This is not something that Polanyi experienced before his death in 1964. Corporate globalization and the escalation of free-market rhetoric have led to a new round of disembedding since the 1970s, and this is evident by both the top-down, corporate globalization of privatization, deregulation, and marketization, as well as, by the challenges to it from the “movement of movements” coalescing around the World Social Forum. The most conspicuous evidence of this neo-protective response and its challenge to corporate-driven market forces is that between the security needs of the world’s globalization victims and the freedom of transnational corporations to make profits anywhere and in any way throughout the world. Understanding the clash in this way suggests that for humanity to save itself, it must struggle to reembed globalization and put security ahead of unbridled freedom. Reembedding globalization requires asserting democratic security ahead of the economic freedom of big business.