Polanyi meets Bolsonaro

Reactionary politics and the double movement in twenty-first-century Brazil

Bibliographic Data

ID2356019
AuthorsP Evans (0000-0001-5601-5656, University of California Berkeley, USA; Watson Institute, Brown University, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume35
Issue6
Pages674-690
Publication date2020-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0268-5809 • E-ISSN: 1461-7242
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0268580920934264
OpenAlexW3093601552
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited26

Twenty-first-century Brazil's political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil's Workers' Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi's vision of the 'double movement,' in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical springboard for reflecting on these political transitions. Trying to understand the movement for social protection leads to examining ebbs and flows in the momentum of mobilization. Trying to understand how market dominance leads to reaction brings us back to Polanyi's advocacy of 'crass materialism' as a lens for looking at reaction, and from there to consideration of how the structural power of capital undercuts efforts at social protection and opens the door to reaction

Countermovement · Democracy · Embeddedness · Materialism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Economic Theory and Policy · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America · Social and Political Issues

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