This is Part 6 of a series on the anthropology of unregulated capitalism. It is the last post.

Part 1 set out the vocabulary. Markets are old. A market society is new. A market society treats land, labor, and money as commodities, and none of the three is a commodity. Karl Polanyi called them fictitious commodities. He argued that the fiction damages the people and the nature that the market depends on (Polanyi, 1944/2001).

Four posts followed that fiction through four cases. Part 2 followed the colonial drain, which moved the land and labor of colonized people into the industrial core. Part 3 examined delay on climate. Part 4 examined inequality and precarity. Part 5 examined the strain on democracies.

Polanyi made a second claim, and this post examines that claim. He argued that a society under market pressure protects itself. He called the pattern the double movement. Markets expand and commodify more of life. The people whose lives become commodities then organize to defend themselves.

Part 1 also named the weakness in the idea. The double movement accommodates almost any outcome after the event. Protection happened, or fascism happened, or nothing happened yet. Part 1 therefore set a standard for this post. A counter-movement claim must name a specific protection, name who organizes it, and state what counts as a failure. This post tries to meet that standard, and it reports two large problems with the claim first.

What Polanyi said

Polanyi described two organizing principles at work in nineteenth-century society. One was “the principle of economic liberalism,” which aimed at the extension of the self-regulating market. The other was “the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature” (Polanyi, 1944/2001, pp. 138-139).

He treated the second principle as a spontaneous reaction. Factory acts, public health law, central banking, and land regulation came from different parties and different classes. He argued that no single ideology explains them, because a society was defending its own substance.

The Polanyi scholarship divides on how far to press that reading. Rowan Alcock is a political economist. He argues that much recent writing misuses the term, because writers attach the label counter-movement to a left or right ideological movement. Polanyi described something non-ideological and spontaneous.

Alcock adds a second claim that matters more for this post. He reads Polanyi’s counter-movement as destructive to the self-regulating market and to the double movement itself. He connects that destruction to the rise of fascism (Alcock, 2025).

Geoff Goodwin is a political economist, and he replied to Alcock. He argues that Polanyi understood the counter-movement as both ideological and non-ideological. He supplies textual and historical support for several defensible readings (Goodwin, 2025).

I use the conservative version through this post. The double movement is a question to ask about a society under market pressure. It describes a pattern, and it explains no specific political event by itself.

The counter-movement that did happen

One large case supports Polanyi. Rich democracies built extensive protections between the 1880s and the 1970s.

John Ruggie was a political scientist. He named the postwar international settlement embedded liberalism. Governments accepted open trade, and they paired it with domestic protection against the disruption that open trade causes. He argued that the settlement rested on a fusion of state power and a shared social purpose. Power alone does not explain what the postwar rules contained (Ruggie, 1982).

Gøsta Esping-Andersen is a sociologist. He gave the domestic side of that settlement a measure. He called it de-commodification, which means the degree to which a welfare system lets a person live without selling their labor. He sorted the rich democracies into three groups by how much de-commodification their institutions supply (Esping-Andersen, 1990). His measure is the closest thing in the literature to a number for protection.

The settlement then ended after the 1970s. Mark Blyth is a political economist, and he explains both turns with one mechanism. Economic ideas are political tools. Labor used one set of ideas to embed liberalism in the 1930s. Business used a different set of ideas to reverse that after the 1970s (Blyth, 2002).

Blyth looks like a problem for Polanyi. Polanyi treated the counter-movement as spontaneous. Blyth shows organized actors with a worked-out program on both sides. Goodwin and Fred Block would answer that Polanyi’s word spontaneous means uncoordinated rather than unorganized. On that reading Blyth specifies the mechanism that Polanyi left vague.

I accept that answer, and I note that it costs Polanyi something. A theory that survives by loosening its central term predicts less than it seemed to predict.

One number shows the reversal inside a single institution. The union membership rate in the United States was 20.1 percent in 1983, which is the first year with comparable data. It was 10.0 percent in 2025, and 14.7 million workers were union members (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026). One of the main organizations of twentieth-century protection lost half its reach in about forty years.

The central claim and the strongest objection

The central claim of this post is that market expansion produces protection. The strongest published objection says that protection almost never arrives without catastrophe.

Walter Scheidel is a historian. He assembled the record of inequality from the Stone Age to the present. He argues that four forces compressed inequality across recorded history. He names them mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemic. Peaceful reform, in his account, rarely produced a large or lasting reduction (Scheidel, 2017).

That objection reaches further than any complaint about Polanyi’s vocabulary. It accepts that societies react to market damage. It denies that the reaction usually works. On Scheidel’s reading, the postwar settlement followed two world wars and a depression, and no spontaneous social reaction produced it.

Three published answers reduce the force of that objection. None of them removes it.

• Bas van Bavel and Marten Scheffer reviewed the same kind of evidence and reached a different result. A widening of wealth gaps followed most historical disasters. The wealth distribution and the institutions in place at the moment of the shock shaped the response (van Bavel & Scheffer, 2021). Their conclusion works against Scheidel and toward Polanyi, because institutions decide what a shock produces.
• Peter Lindert is an economic historian. He assembled the panel of social spending across many countries since the eighteenth century. He argues that the spread of the vote drove the long rise in social spending (Lindert, 2004). His evidence covers the exact thing that the double movement is about.
• Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith edited the archaeological measurements. Their contributors applied a consistent Gini measure to house-size distributions across 10,000 years. They report wide variation in inequality, and much of that variation has no war, revolution, collapse, or plague to explain it (Kohler & Smith, 2018).

Two historical cases also work against Scheidel directly. The British Factory Acts of 1833 and 1844 preceded any catastrophe. German social insurance law arrived between 1883 and 1889, before mass democracy and before any disaster.

The German case also works against Polanyi. E. P. Hennock is a historian, and he shows that the German laws were deliberate administrative work rather than a spontaneous reaction. He shows that officials such as Theodor Lohmann did more of that work than Bismarck did. He dates the decisive thinking to the 1840s (Hennock, 2007).

The German state built protection to defeat a workers’ movement and to preserve a hierarchy. Protection and emancipation are separate things, and this case shows the gap between them.

So Scheidel is answerable, and the answer is narrower than a reader might want. His case is strongest for large compressions of income and wealth. It is weakest for the growth of social spending and regulation, which is what the double movement is actually about. I hold his conclusion for the first and Lindert’s for the second.

That split is tidier than the evidence. Scheidel also credits total war with building the fiscal and administrative capacity that the postwar welfare state then used. If he is right about that, then his mechanism and Lindert’s franchise compete to explain the same social spending. I divide the evidence here, and the two accounts may instead overlap.

Three further objections

Colin Crouch is a sociologist. He supplies the objection from recent evidence. The 2008 financial crisis produced legislation, and the legislation did not hold. He argues that neoliberalism survived because it concerns the dominance of the large corporation in public life (Crouch, 2011).

The record fits his version. The United States passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010 (U.S. Congress, 2010a). It passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010 (U.S. Congress, 2010b). Both are protective measures in Polanyi’s sense.

Congress then raised the Dodd-Frank supervision thresholds in 2018, and the Affordable Care Act lost its individual mandate penalty in 2017. Protection arrived, and the firms it targeted narrowed it within a decade.

That correction matters for a claim earlier in this post. Beverly Silver and Giovanni Arrighi are sociologists. They compared market expansion under British hegemony with market expansion under United States hegemony. They found protection in both periods, and they found real differences in who organized it (Silver & Arrighi, 2003).

Their counter-movement is transnational and led by labor. Crouch’s missing counter-movement is national and regulatory. The two findings are about different things, and I keep both.

Wolfgang Streeck is a sociologist. He makes the harder version of Crouch’s point. He argues that capitalism is decaying without a successor, and that no social force now exists with the capacity to replace it (Streeck, 2016).

Nancy Fraser is a philosopher. She attacks the structure of the idea. She argues that Polanyi’s two-part scheme hides a third force, which is emancipation. Protection often defends a hierarchy along with a livelihood. The family wage defended male authority along with household income. She proposes a triple movement of marketization, social protection, and emancipation (Fraser, 2013).

Fraser’s objection changes the politics of the frame, and Alcock’s destructive reading sharpens it. A reader who wants protection to return should say which protection. Immigration restriction, tariffs, and the defense of a traditional household are all forms of social protection. Part 5 examined that outcome. Economic shocks raise far-right vote shares under some conditions, and the party system and the electoral rules decide whether they do.

Gareth Dale is a political economist. He argues that social scientists specify the double movement too loosely to do analytic work. He traces how social scientists stretched it to fit the neoliberal period (Dale, 2012).

Michael Burawoy is a sociologist, and he offers a repair. He argues that Polanyi lacked a theory of how a society organizes itself, and that Antonio Gramsci supplies the missing part (Burawoy, 2003). Fred Block and Margaret Somers are sociologists. They argue that market fundamentalism keeps returning because it works as a moral doctrine (Block & Somers, 2014).

The strongest case for the other side

This series indicts the period from about 1980 to now. That period also produced the largest fall in extreme poverty on record. No post in this series mentioned it until now, and that silence was a fault.

Branko Milanović is an economist. He argues that capitalism now runs alone because it outcompeted every rival system, and he examines its liberal-meritocratic and political variants (Milanović, 2019). His account is the published reply to Streeck. Streeck reads the absence of a successor as exhaustion. Milanović reads it as the result of competition.

Friedrich Hayek gave the sharpest version of the case for price-making markets. He argued that prices carry dispersed knowledge that no central body can collect, at any scale. Planners cannot assemble the local knowledge of time and place that a price signal transmits (Hayek, 1945). That argument is the direct reply to the storehouse and granary examples below, and it deserves a straight answer.

The honest position is narrow. The Inka storehouse system is the case his argument targets, and I cannot say how it gathered that knowledge without prices. The Qing case is different, and the reason appears below. That system bought grain on a commercial market, so it used price signals to collect the information. It kept the non-market step for distribution. One of my two counterexamples survives Hayek, and one does not.

Dani Rodrik is an economist, and he is the most difficult interlocutor here. He accepts a version of the Polanyian diagnosis and reaches a different conclusion. Economic shocks activate existing grievances and raise the political demand that a populist entrepreneur can supply (Rodrik, 2021). His remedy is national policy space.

Here is the concession that follows. The same decades produced the fastest reduction of extreme poverty and the fastest concentration of wealth in the historical record. Polanyi’s frame explains the second much better than the first.

A test with dates on it

Part 1 demanded a specific prediction. Here is one, and it is already running.

The European Union adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in June 2024. The text required large companies to identify and address human rights and environmental harm in their own operations and in their chains of activities. Its scope covered companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than 450 million euro in net turnover (European Union, 2024). That is a protective measure in Polanyi’s sense, because it limits how far a company can treat labor and land as priced inputs.

The rollback started within a year. The European Commission proposed a simplification package in February 2025. The Council gave final approval on 24 February 2026, and the amending directive entered into force on 18 March 2026. The threshold moved to 5,000 employees and 1.5 billion euro in net turnover. The date of application moved to 26 July 2029 (European Union, 2026; European Commission, 2026).

One fact about this case is stronger than the rollback account above suggests. The first application date was 26 July 2027. Directive (EU) 2025/794 of 14 April 2025 moved it to 26 July 2028 (European Union, 2025). The Omnibus I directive then moved it to 26 July 2029.

The directive therefore never bound a single company. The rollback arrived first, so it pre-empted the protection.

The case meets the standard Part 1 set. The protection is a named directive with a numeric scope. This post names organizations on both sides. Trade unions, human rights organizations, and environmental organizations pushed for the directive. Industry associations and several member state governments pushed for the rollback. Three markers now carry dates.

• Member states must put national law in place by 26 July 2028, which is one year before the directive applies to any company. A national threshold below 5,000 employees covers more companies and protects more workers. If several states lower a threshold below the European floor after March 2026, then protection reappears at the national level.
• The Commission must issue guidelines on the chain-of-activities duty by July 2027. Those guidelines can narrow or widen the duty inside the existing scope.
• Article 36 of the directive requires a Commission review by July 2031, and every five years after that. That review is the first legal opening for a change of scope, and the ordinary legislative procedure then takes about two years.

Here is the prediction. If the double movement describes something real, then at least three member states will lower a national threshold below 5,000 employees. They must do it between March 2026 and July 2028. A scope reversal at European level cannot arrive before about 2034, so I set that check at 2035.

One condition applies to that count, and it decides what the test measures. Several member states wrote due diligence law before the directive. France passed its loi de vigilance in 2017. That law reaches companies with 5,000 employees in France, or 10,000 worldwide (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2017). A law that was already there counts for nothing here. Only a threshold that a state lowers after March 2026 counts, because the test measures a reaction to the rollback.

I expect no such transposition and no reversal. Crouch’s account fits the last two years better than Polanyi’s does. My own frame predicts one thing here, and I expect the other.

What anthropology adds

The economics and the political science supply the record. Anthropology supplies one claim about that record, and the claim is narrow. Capitalism is a cultural arrangement rather than a natural state.

That claim has published opponents. Two of them follow. Scott Cook was an anthropologist, and he wrote the formalist attack on the substantivist position that Polanyi founded. He argued that the split between market and non-market societies is a false division imposed on the record (Cook, 1966).

Morris Silver is an economist, and he went after Polanyi’s own evidence. He argued that the ancient Near East had markets in consumer goods, land, labor, risk, and credit. Those are the cases Polanyi built the substantivist position on (Silver, 1983). Other scholars contested his reading of that evidence in the same journal.

What survives is smaller than the slogan. The institutional mix varies a great deal across societies, and many scholars document that variation. Chris Hann and Keith Hart are anthropologists, and they set out that record (Hann & Hart, 2011). Cook and Silver contest the strong claim that some large societies had no markets at all, and I do not rely on it.

Part 1 used the Andes as its clearest case, and that case needs a correction here. John Murra argued that the Inka core ran on labor obligation, state storehouses, and reciprocal claims rather than on price-making markets (Murra, 1980).

Frank Salomon later documented the mindaláes, who were professional long-distance traders in the northern Andes, and he argued that Quito held a marketplace (Salomon, 1986).

R. Alan Covey and Jordan Dalton are archaeologists, and their recent survey reports considerable variation across the empire. Specialized trading practices existed in Inka peripheral regions, and some of them continued under imperial rule (Covey & Dalton, 2025). The defensible claim concerns the core and the organizing principle rather than the whole empire.

The Chinese case needs a different correction. Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong are historians. They documented the Qing civilian granary system between 1650 and 1850, which held grain against famine across the empire (Will & Wong, 1991). The system bought and sold grain on a commercial market, and it used market purchase to fund non-market distribution. That is provision through commodification rather than provision without it.

The system also declined after about 1781, and the decline ran for seventy years.

Both cases still make one point against Polanyi. Neither system reacted to a preceding market expansion. Protection therefore does not require a market expansion to react against.

That point has a long literature, and this post did not discover it. E. P. Thompson was a historian, and he documented the moral economy of the eighteenth-century English crowd. People rioted to enforce a customary price for bread against market pricing, and they did so before a market society existed (Thompson, 1971).

So the practical form of the anthropological claim is this. If the arrangement was built, then its features are contingent rather than necessary. That inference is weaker than the one I wanted to draw. A built thing can still become hard to rebuild, because sunk infrastructure and coordination lock a society into a path.

Anthropology also warns against its own habits. Sherry Ortner is an anthropologist. She named the mood of recent work dark anthropology, which is ethnography trained on precarity, domination, and hardening inequality. She argued that the discipline needs an anthropology of the good alongside it (Ortner, 2016). Joel Robbins is an anthropologist, and he made the earlier version of that argument. He asked the discipline to study value, hope, and change instead of the suffering subject alone (Robbins, 2013).

Four bodies of work show what that looks like in practice.

• Nancy Postero is an anthropologist. She worked with Guaraní people in lowland Bolivia from 1994. She traced how neoliberal multiculturalism preceded an indigenous politics that then turned against neoliberalism (Postero, 2006).
• Anna Tsing is an anthropologist. She followed the matsutake mushroom commodity chain and described lives that continue inside what she calls capitalist ruins (Tsing, 2015).
• Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson wrote as J. K. Gibson-Graham, and they wrote as economic geographers rather than anthropologists. They documented cooperatives, household work, gift exchange, and other non-capitalist activity, and they argued that this activity is large (Gibson-Graham, 2006).
• Elinor Ostrom was a political scientist. She documented communities that govern shared resources through their own rules, in cases where standard theory predicts collapse (Ostrom, 1990).

Two limits belong on that list. All four describe activity at a small scale, and none of them shows that the activity holds at the scale of a national economy. Ostrom’s cases also work under conditions she specified, and those conditions include a defined resource, a defined group, and low-cost monitoring.

Loïc Wacquant is a sociologist, and Part 1 used his correction. The neoliberal state works harder instead of stepping back, and it applies laissez-faire at the top and discipline at the bottom (Wacquant, 2012). Tejaswini Ganti is an anthropologist. Her review of the word neoliberalism supplies the two senses that this series kept apart (Ganti, 2014).

What this post asserts and does not prove

Seven claims in this post need this treatment. The first four are the load-bearing ones.

• Market expansion causes protection. I do not show this. The 1880s to 1970s period is one large case. Scheidel argues that violence produced most of it, and Crouch reports the clearest recent failure of the pattern.
• A market society damages the people and the nature it depends on. This is the central claim of the whole series, and it appears above as an established fact. It is not established. Each of Parts 2 through 5 argued one part of it from evidence, and none of them closed the general case.
• Organized political action ended the twentieth-century settlement. Blyth argues this from case studies, and I follow him. No panel tests it.
• Neoliberalism survived 2008 because large corporations dominate public life. Crouch argues this, and I endorse it above. His evidence is a set of cases, and the endorsement is mine to defend.
• Falling union density weakened protection. I report the two numbers, and I do not show that one caused the other. Union density fell for several reasons, and they include trade, technology, sector composition, and labor law.
• Neoliberal multiculturalism produced an indigenous politics in Bolivia. That is a two-step causal chain from one ethnographic case.
• A modern economy could adopt a different arrangement. The evidence shows that other arrangements existed at other scales. It does not show that this one can change.

Four results would count against the frame. Each has a number and a date.

• Fewer than three member states set a national threshold below 5,000 employees after March 2026 and before July 2028. No scope reversal reaches adoption by 2035.
• Collective bargaining coverage in the OECD series falls through 2035 in every member country. No other organization takes up the protective function in any of them.
• The de-commodification scores that Esping-Andersen defined fall in all three regime types through 2035, with no country moving the other way.
• A large rise in market pressure produces no measurable rise in protective legislation across the OECD panel over a decade.

The second and third tests are hard to satisfy, and I state that openly. A universal negative is a weak test. The first test is the one that can settle inside five years, and it is the reason this post spent so long on one directive.

Honest limits

The anthropological critique settles less than a reader might want.

It does not settle the tradeoffs of regulation. A rule that protects a worker can raise the cost of hiring one. That question needs the empirical labor economics literature.

It does not settle the growth question. Whether a rich economy can maintain provision without growth is an open dispute in ecological economics.

It does not settle scale. The best anthropological evidence for alternatives comes from small groups and specific places, and this post does not show that it holds at national scale.

It supplies no program. This post names no platform, and the deliverable of the series is a frame for seeing.

Where the series ends

Markets are old, and a market society is a recent and contested invention. It treats land, labor, and money as commodities that they are not. The four case studies document damage in the colonial record, the climate record, the distribution of income, and the condition of democracies. Each case rests on its own evidence. None of them closed the general claim that the arrangement causes the damage, and the section above says so.

Polanyi argued that societies protect themselves against this. The record supports a weaker claim. Societies sometimes protect themselves. Organized people build the protection, catastrophe often precedes it, and the same firms it constrains can narrow it within a decade.

The useful part of the frame is the question. When a protection appears, the questions are who organized it and what it defends. When a protection disappears, the questions are the same. Fraser’s warning belongs with them, because protection and emancipation are separate things. The German insurance laws of the 1880s show how far apart they can be.

Anthropology supplies the last piece, and it is smaller than the discipline sometimes claims. A market society was built, so its features are contingent. The Qing granaries and a local cooperative show that provision took other forms under other conditions. The Inka storehouses show that too, and Hayek’s objection to that case stays open. Cook and Silver are right that this record does not divide cleanly into market and non-market worlds. To see the arrangement as an arrangement is the first step, and the steps after it are political work.

References

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