Dis-embedding forces and associative counter-movements: Capitalism,state sovereignty and associations as political subjects

Abstract

The opposition between individual rights and state sovereignty, which continues to structure political and economic discussions today, is only in apparent contradiction, as they form the two poles of the dominant individual-state imaginary of social and political order. This is highlighted when contrasting it to the model of social order it has historically combatted, namely, the associative imaginary. The two display an antagonistic understanding of the role of intermediary bodies between the individual and the state: where the former empties the social and political space between the sovereign (nation-)state and the individual, the latter fills it with a plethora of associations. In reconstructing these two imaginaries and their continual conflict, we draw on Charles Taylor’s concept of modern social imaginaries and develops Karl Polanyi’s notion of the double movement to analyze the processes through which the individual has been dis-embedded and re-embedded in associative structures throughout modern history as well as in modern social theory and political thought.

Introduction

The overriding imaginary structuring contemporary political discussions remains that between the individual and the state. The binary between the individual and the state can be utilized to understand the great cleavages of 20th century politics (totalitarian statism vs individualist liberalism), to analyze the classic political ideologies emerging from the Industrial Revolution (liberalism’s safeguard of the individual against arbitrary state power, social democracy’s use of state power to redistribute wealth and conservatism’s insistence on the individual’s natural place in the national community), and to recount the political development of postwar Western democracies (from welfare state regulation to market-based competition) as well as economic policy (from Keynesian interventionism to neoliberal deregulation).

After decades of neoliberal entrenchment and the apparent victory of individual (property) rights at the expense of collectives and national sovereignty, in recent years the pendulum has seemingly swung in the opposite direction. With the CHIPS Act, Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in the United States and the European Green Deal in the European Union (EU), it seems that the state is ‘back in’. In the name of geopolitical security and political and economic sovereignty, state interference in the economy is on the rise with governments investing in infrastructure projects and manufacturing, increasingly focused on national or regional retention of jobs and industry (Lavery 2024; Riley & Brenner 2022).

While this in many ways constitutes a momentous change in economic and political governance, in this article, we argue that instead of being opposites in conflict with each other, the individual and the state are two poles in the same overriding imaginary structuring contemporary Western political and economic discussions. It is only on the surface, our argument goes, that the individual and the state are opposites. They are both essential elements of what we term the individual-state imaginary in which the socio-political order is imagined as devoid of intermediary bodies that mediate between the individual and the state. Behind their apparent antinomies, the individual and the state are each other’s condition of possibility. Another way to phrase this is that the opposition between state as a sphere of public power and market as a sphere of individual freedom, which structure modern political ideologies as the spectrum within which political positions can pendulate, is unified in the construction of a specific political and economic order. Research on neoliberalism within intellectual history, political theory and economic sociology (Bonefeld 2017; Mudge 2008; Slobodian 2018) have convincingly demonstrated that the 20th-century neoliberal project was never a simple critique of coercive state power vis-a-vis the free market as a sphere of individual self-determination, but of utilizing state power to create the free market. Despite this, many critiques of neoliberalism, and of contemporary capitalist configurations, remain embedded in the ‘individual-state’ imaginary, advocating more state intervention and control over the economy (Pistor 2019) or an increased representation of individuals in firms (Ferreras 2017). While we agree with many of these propositions, we also hold that they remain trapped in the individual-state imaginary, and that in order to truly democratize the economy (and the state), we need an associative framework.

Consequently, in this article, we highlight how – historically, politically, and conceptually – the construction of the autonomous, rights-bearing, and self-interested individual works in tandem with the development of state sovereignty, and how this could only be constituted through the forcible exclusion, both ideationally and materially, of associative structures. This becomes apparent when highlighting the imaginary of political, social, and economic order that the individual-state imaginary has continually combatted and excluded, namely, what we term the associative imaginary. A central part of the historical conflict between the individual-state and the associative imaginaries was the (forcible) removal of the individual from the social, communal, corporative, and associative bonds within which s/he operated, thereby constituting the political space as void of intermediary bodies and associative structures as political entities, that is, as autonomous sources of political authority and allegiance. In this article, we encapsulate this movement by applying Karl Polanyi’s notion of the double movement and the dis-embedding and re-embedding of the individual in associative structures to the two imaginaries (Polanyi 2001). To ‘liberate’ the individual to participate in market society, all former feudal, corporative, and associative structures had to be removed, both ideationally and materially. In short, intermediary bodies and associative structures were a hindrance to the twin core values of European enlightenment and market society (and the individual-state imaginary): individual freedom and property, and national or popular sovereignty. The individual-state imaginary is thereby only possible through the exclusion and delegitimization of the associative imaginary, as a result reducing the political and economic discussion to a binary pole between individual rights and state intervention. In his analysis of four different phases in the historical evolution of intermediary institutions – or what we call the associative imaginary – in modern Europe, Bob Jessop (2015: 30–33) begins with the 19th century, and the various attempts by both conservative and socialist movements to reestablish an associative order during capitalism’s disembedding processes – hereby constituting a ‘politico-ideological critique of liberal capitalism’ (p. 30). In Jessop’s (2015) historical reconstruction of the evolution of intermediary bodies, he consciously disregards the associative moments and arrangements ‘that preceded the modern state’ (p. 30). This article highlights how the emergence of liberal capitalism (and state sovereignty) was not only met by an associative counter-reaction, but was itself a dissolution of an earlier associative order. This is important, we hold, because the dominant individual-state imaginary naturalizes the individual and the state as the only political actors in a binary model, and that to overcome this way of thinking, we need an understanding of the association as a political subject, which the dominant imaginary has continually combatted and suppressed. The primary objective of this article is to show the co-constitution and necessary connection between the individual and the state in the individual-state imaginary by arguing that it could only come about by excluding the associative imaginary. In detail, our claim is that modern social theory and political thought as well as forms of political and social organization can be understood as a conflict between these two imaginaries of political and social order, which at their core display an antagonistic understanding of the role of intermediary bodies (associations, local communities, corporations, companies, guilds, etc.) operating between the individual and the state: On one hand, the individual-state imaginary, focusing on state- or national sovereignty, contract and individual natural rights, that seeks to establish the essential political relationship as being between the sovereign (nation-)state and the sovereign, rights-bearing, self-interested individual; and on the other hand, the associative imaginary in which the political space between the individual and the state is filled by a plethora of associations starting with the family and expanding into the professions, local communities, urban areas, cities, regions and federations. In the individual-state imaginary, a central prerequisite for the unmediated relation between the state and the individual is the delegitimization or dissolution of intermediary bodies or at least their effective depoliticization, resulting in an apolitical society and economy. In the associative imaginary, viewing the individual as separate from any associative structures is meaningless, and here not the individual, but the association, is the primary political subject and basic unit of the social order.

The reconstruction of these two different political imaginaries and the focus on the conceptualization of intermediary bodies and associations between the individual and the state also has a normative dimension. The dominant individual-state imaginary provides, on one hand, a limited understanding of democracy in which political will-formation takes place between individuals devoid of their communal, associative and class-based ties. The construction of the autonomous, rights-bearing individual thus goes hand in hand with the development of representative government, which at the time of its inception was rightly understood as an aristocratic form of government (Manin 1997; Urbinati 2006). The reconstruction of a competing associative imaginary therefore also entails, as we shall see, a conception of democracy based on popular self-governing associations rather than national representative bodies based on individual suffrage. In the economic sphere, on the other hand, the individual-state imaginary establishes the conditions for market society and the institution of wage labor, and the competing associative imaginary, hence, also provides an alternative organization for economic (re)production. The normative intervention of this article, hence, is to demonstrate that although the contemporary developments briefly discussed above point toward the reemergence of the state and expanded individual representation after decades of neoliberal hegemony, a more radical position would be to repoliticize intermediary bodies and associations as autonomous political subjects beyond the individual-state binary.

To reconstruct this history and to analyze the historical and conceptual interplay between the two social imaginaries, this article is structured in the following way: First, we provide our analytical starting point. To clarify what we mean by the individual-state and associative imaginaries, we draw on Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘modern social imaginaries’ (Taylor 2004), hereby allowing us to analyze how theory and ideology in interplay with practices, institutions, and conflicts shape coherent ‘worldviews’ on the basis of which specific theories and practices made sense. To explain the dynamics of conflict between these imaginaries, we use Karl Polanyi’s notion of the double movement between embedded and dis-embedded social relations (Polanyi 2001), hereby exploring the successive motions throughout modern European history by which the individual has continually been dis-embedded and re-embedded in associative structures, and the ideas that instigated, reflected and legitimized these transformations. Second, we explain in more detail what constitutes the dominant individual-state imaginary, and outline the alternative associative imaginary, as well as the gradual victory of the former at the behest of the latter. Third, we reconstruct two different counter-movements to the secession from the economy’s earlier associative boundaries and dominance of state sovereignty. Specifically, we focus on social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism as attempts to re-embed the individual in associative structures, as these two traditions are united in their critique of the dis-embedded social relations inherent in the individual-state imaginary, yet offer radically distinct visions of the role of associations in political and economic life. By singling out these two specific associative counter-movements, we are able to display the broad spectrum of counter-responses. Hereby we demonstrate the continual political struggle between embedding and dis-embedding forces, between individual-state and associative imaginaries of political and economic order. Fourth, and finally, we revisit the argument and conclude.

The double movement of imaginaries as analytical strategy

The following section clarifies how we understand and operationalize the notion of ‘imaginary’. ‘Imaginary’ signifies a general and overarching way of understanding the basic principles and normative foundations of how to organize a political society (Taylor 2004). The notion of imaginary is here used to encapsulate the relation between political, social and economic ideas, associative forms, and institutional and legal change. The section also explains how we utilize a Polanyian framework to analyze the dynamics between the two imaginaries of political and economic organization as a double movement between attempts to dis-embed and re-embed the individual from and in associative structures. Particularly, we wish to analyze the relation of the double movements between the dis-embedding and re-embedding of the individual in associative structures as expressed in what we term the individual-state and the associative imaginaries.

To Charles Taylor, a social imaginary is not primarily a set of ideas, but ‘what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’. (Taylor 2004: 2). It is the ‘common understanding’ of a society that ‘makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’. (Taylor 2004: 23). Although theory plays a key role in the functioning and dissemination of a social imaginary, it is at the same time widely diffused among the participants of a society, embedded in material structures, and making practices possible. They are the common, unproblematized, and naturalized conceptions of what a society is, what the role and status of individuals and institutions are, what the common objective of a society is and which normative principles it should engender. ¹ In this way, an imaginary always entails a theory of society, although such theory exists via practices, is expressed in law, and is embedded in institutions and material structures. We hold that the individual-state imaginary has, in the West, become the dominant and naturalized way of conceiving political and social organization, in which individuals (and their rights) have become the unquestioned and primary (if not sole) subjects of political action. It is of course difficult to analyze a ‘common’ understanding, but we will focus first on the theoretical and intellectual origins and underpinnings of the individual-state imaginary, as well as on how it was diffused into legal and institutional arrangements, in order to argue that this imaginary has become dominant.

To Taylor, the modern social imaginary (or more precisely, the Western modern social imaginary) is based on the natural law conception of individuals as the basis of political community, and the protection of their individual rights, for their mutual benefit. Taylor terms this development ‘the great disembedding’ in which society comes to be conceived as being made up of individuals, and it is an imaginary which gives ‘unprecedented primacy to the individual’ (Taylor 2004: 50). In this way, Taylor is a proponent of the individual-state imaginary as it posits the individual as the basic political subject, both the institutor of political community, and the ones that this community should primarily (if not solely) protect and foster. Taylor acknowledges that imaginaries often start out as social and political theories envisioned by intellectuals, which then ‘gradually infiltrates the social imaginary and transforms our social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004: 28). While we focus, first, on social and political theories, we are interested in how these conceptions about political and social organization structure society, particularly through legal measures.

However, in Taylor, there is no account of the power struggles that lead to one imaginary overtaking another and coming to be the dominant view. He explains that the modern social imaginary ‘comes to be the dominant view, pushing older theories of society and newer rivals to the margins of political life and discourse’. (Taylor 2004: 5). How it exactly ‘comes to be the dominant view’ through a ‘gradual infiltration’ overlooks the political struggles that are central to the change in political conceptions and institutions, that is, the power struggles in the transformations of political imaginaries and structures that we in turn wish to focus on. The dominance of the ‘modern social imaginary’ and what we term the individual-state imaginary, is, we argue, a political conflict and struggle which not only comes to replace, but actively and forcefully, rejects and omits another imaginary – the associative imaginary from existence.

To Jacques Ranciére, the given social order (what he calls ‘police’) is characterized by a ‘partition of the sensible’, a given (imaginary) distribution of reality, a ‘symbolic constitution of the social’ (Rancière 2010: 44) This symbolic constitution is always a specific count of those that are a part of the social, thereby excluding that part which has no part; that is, in this article, those bodies, subjects and organizational and legal forms that constitute the political order and count as legitimate political subjects, and those that do not (Rancière 1999: 28–29). This highlights that competing imaginaries are central to a political struggle over what should constitute the political space and what bodies should count as proper political and economic subjects. To Rancière, the given social (police-) order is constituted by the ‘exclusion of what “is not”’ (Rancière 2010: 44), in our case the associative imaginary and associations as political subjects. It is this struggle between inclusion and exclusion of associations that we wish to encapsulate through Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi analyzed the 19th-century economic liberalist attempt to build society on purely economic principles of the self-regulating market. (Block 2001: xxii). According to Polanyi, the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing social transformations were accompanied by an ideological justification in economic liberalism that endeavored to set up an autonomous, self-regulating market system (Polanyi 2001: 31–35). Such a ‘market society’ is characterized by ‘the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system’ (Polanyi 2001: 60). This means that society becomes subordinated to the logic of the market, which in turn requires that society and human beings are turned into commodities. This is what Polanyi refers to as the ‘dis-embedding’ of the economy from social relations. In this article, we utilize Polanyi’s notion of dis-embedding and re-embedding in order to show how the individual-state imaginary is conditioned upon the dis-embedding of the individual from the associative structures that dominated societal, political, and economic organization before the 19th century.

For Polanyi, the attempt to dis-embed the economy from society is always countered by a movement to re-embed the economy in society (Polanyi 2001: 79). This is what Polanyi terms the double movement between forces trying to free the economy from society and forces trying to protect and safeguard society from market forces (Polanyi 2001: 136). We use this notion to analyze how the individual-state imaginary’s emergence was countered by a series of movements that tried to re-embed the individual in associative structures and intermediary bodies. This means that we take Polanyi’s notions and use them heuristically to investigate social and political theory as well as legal documents and institutional arrangements with a focus on how the individual is imagined to be dis-embedded and re-embedded in associative structures in between the state and the market.

We argue that this dis-embedding/re-embedded dynamic which happens in relation to the economy with the emergence of market economy in 19th century is a subset of a larger process of associative disembedding/re-embedded, which is the foundation of state sovereignty, capitalism, and individual rights – in short, of political modernity as normally understood. We take inspiration in Nancy Fraser’s reading of Polanyi arguing that the emergence of a market economy in 19th-century Europe was ‘less about economic breakdown in the narrow sense than about disintegrated communities, destroyed livelihoods and despoiled nature. Its roots lay less in intra-economic contradictions than in a momentous shift in the place of economy vis-à-vis society’. (Fraser 2014: 543). It is this relation and shift between the economy and society, and the social theories that reflect it, that we wish to encapsulate by focusing on competing imaginaries of the role of associations in political and economic organization. According to Fraser and to the position we attempt to propose here, the Polanyian double movement is understood not as a dynamic between the market and the state, but a struggle between the role of associations in society and economy.

The process of dis-embedding the individual from associative ties was crucial for the emergence of market society and capitalism. ² To Marx, the free laborer – that is, Polanyi’s dis-embedded individual – selling his or her labor-power for a wage on the market, is necessary for the capitalist mode of production. However, the free laborer did not readily exist to walk into the factory, but this ‘immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the soil and ceased to be the slave or serf of another person’ (Marx 1981: 875). As Marx highlights,

these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Marx 1981: 875)

What we are interested in here is this (forcible) removal of the individual from associative and corporate structures, both ideationally and materially. As Marx and Engels state in the Communist Manifesto, wage labor rests on the competition between individualized laborers, and that this condition needs to be replaced by ‘the revolutionary combination, due to association’ (Marx & Engels 2017: 68). Marx and Engels believed that the capitalist mode of production would bring about this association by itself, however, here we are focused on how the emergence of capitalism was contingent upon individualizing the laborer and dissolving association, exactly because it was a ‘revolutionary combination’. Central here is that the spread of capitalism is contingent upon the dissolution of intermediary bodies, and that the reaction against capitalism is dependent upon their reassertion. In other words, we use the double movement between attempts to dis-embed and re-embed the individual in associative structures as the prism through which to understand both actual historical developments crucial to European modernity, that is, the emergence of capitalism and national sovereignty, as well as ideological conflicts between liberalism on one hand (i.e. an ideological position attempting to dis-embed the individual from associative ties), and various associative counter-movements on the other hand.

Two imaginaries of social and political order

In this section, we provide a reconstruction of the two imaginaries of political and social order – the individual-state and the associative imaginary – before we, in the next section, focus on their conflict around the French Revolution and the following decades. Comparatively more space is used on explaining the individual-state imaginary, as it constitutes the dominant imaginary that we seek to denaturalize. Also, it might be the most counter-intuitive to understand due to the opposition between individualism and statism in much political and economic discourse. It is important to once again stress that these two imaginaries are analytical tools that encapsulate a common understanding and thereby includes historical development, social theory, conceptions of political order and the political bodies and subjects inhabiting it. It is not to say that all the thinkers explored in the following share the same worldview, but as we will argue, they contribute to creating the overriding imaginaries explored here.

The political theorist Noberto Bobbio argues that two opposite approaches to the origin, foundation and legitimation of power exist in the history of political thought (Bobbio 1993: 1–25). The traditional approach is the Aristotelian approach, roughly similar to what we call the associative imaginary, in which the state is founded upon the natural evolution of associations starting from the family (or household) growing to villages and culminating with the ‘final association’ of the state (Aristotle 1981: 54). In short, the state is an association of associations, where a host of intermediary bodies make up the local, organic and concrete context for social life. This imaginary takes as its starting point that the natural condition of man is community, insofar as the family and other associations are indispensable for the existence of the individual. As such, the individual as an autonomous, independent and in that sense free being is for the associative imaginary a highly idealized, rationalistic, and ahistorical conception. This imaginary corresponded quite well to the actual political landscape in early modern Europe, where a host of intermediary bodies, corporate bodies and associations existed alongside, beneath or above the state. The state at this point in time was therefore only one source of political allegiance, but not exclusive. ‘Above’ the state, the Church and the Holy Roman Empire embodied universal political allegiance, just as ‘beneath’ the state, the city, town, province, or guild made up the concrete space of social life and political and economic practice. The modern state emerges in process Saskia Sassen has termed ‘assembling the national’, that is, by disassembling the sub-national (the family, the city, and intermediary bodies in general) and the supra-national (the Church, the empire) (Sassen 2008). The nation-state was constituted as the only legitimate claimant to political authority, delegitimizing all other associative forms as political entities and positing the essential political relationship as being that between the (nation-)state and the individual. It was necessary for its emergence, therefore, to do away with the political autonomy of intermediary bodies and the associative imaginary.

The associative imaginary proved itself highly resistant and influential for almost two millennia, until it was fundamentally challenged in the 17th century, both theoretically and politically. Theoretically, the individual-state imaginary is epitomized in the image of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (Neocleous 2003: 1). Political power is here neither founded upon the family nor upon different associations, but on the voluntary choices, consent, and covenant of the individual(s). Associations and intermediary bodies play no role in the foundation, legitimation, and reproduction of the state, but are conceived as a threat to its absolute sovereignty.

The grand historical context for Hobbes’ theoretical intervention, and the emergence of the individual-state imaginary, was the centralization of state power in Europe, as absolute monarchs aimed to dissolve the patchwork of intermediary bodies both secular and religious, which had co-existed in medieval political organization and in the renaissance city-state culture. This transformation is indicative of a larger shift in the conception of political space, and a movement from localized place to the abstract, modern space of the territorial, sovereign state (Epstein 2021: 105–106). Charlotte Epstein demonstrates the transformation from the conception of liberty from ‘a set of localized, collective liberties that belonged to a communal corpus’, primarily the medieval corporation, to ‘a liberty that attached instead to the individual, via his or her body’. (Epstein 2021: 106). These localized liberties (in the plural), she argues, were tied to an Aristotelian conception of space, and these collective bodies were exactly not experienced as abstract entities, but as a ‘tangible, lived thing’ (Epstein 2021: 106).

In the individual-state imaginary, intermediary bodies play no role either before, during or after the creation of sovereign power, with the state being an undivided, all-mighty body unchallenged by any entity (Neocleous 2003: 1–2). In this imaginary, all intermediary bodies represent a threat to the unity, cohesion, and indivisibility of sovereignty. Inherent in this way of thinking is a fear of factions, of division and quarrel, which always threatens to undermine peace and stability, why Hobbes characterizes competing bodies politic within the state as ‘wormes in the entrayles of a Naturall man’ (Hobbes 1996: 230). Hobbes is in many ways the quintessential thinker of political modernity, because he challenges the feudal and corporate privileges, and hence the associative imaginary in its premodern edition, prevalent in his time in favor of the individual natural rights of (formally) equal individuals.

Although most political thinkers after Hobbes reject his model of absolute state sovereignty, many – especially the contract theorists and the liberal tradition – accept the individual as the basic constituent of political authority. It is the rights-bearing, free and voluntary actions of the individual, which constitutes the political order. And obviously, for many of the thinkers in this tradition, the absolutist state was a threat to these rights. But so were the intermediary bodies (guilds, towns, trading companies) which had inherent rights, privileges, and monopolies, and thereby were seen as a hindrance to individual freedom and equality. This is a tendency that can be observed in thinkers such as the Levelers, the Diggers, John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and James Madison (Anderson 2017).

To Rousseau, the great proponent of popular sovereignty and influence on the French Revolution, the essential political relationship is also one between the individual and the state – or rather between the individual (will) and the general will (Rousseau 1997: 51). To Rousseau, faction is one of the primary dangers of the state, because sovereignty is and must be indivisible: ‘For either the will is general, or it is not; it is either the will of the body of the people, or that of only a part’. (Rousseau 1997: 58). If it is only the will of a part, that will create factions, and ‘when factions arise, small associations at the expense of the large association, the will of each one of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the State’ and it is therefore absolutely crucial that ‘every Citizen state only his own opinion’. (Rousseau 1997: 60). All associations – or intermediary bodies – are always at risk of dividing the general will of the state. They risk becoming a faction, a rivaling part, which acts as a state within the state, and therefore the political relationship, the prime political subject, must be the individual and his (or her) personal, own opinion and will. Whereas Hobbes and Rousseau provide contrasting notions of sovereignty – absolute and monarchical vis-a-vis popular – they share the same overarching worldview regarding the illegitimacy of intermediary bodies and the construction of a binary political space consisting only of the individual and the state.

While Hobbes and Rousseau are undoubtedly relevant for the individual-state imaginary when it comes to the emergence of the nation-state, it is admittedly more unclear how this relates to the emergence of capitalism. As mentioned briefly above, the same line of argument can be found in John Locke, who is perhaps more clearly an intellectual precursor of liberalism and capitalism. While Locke was very critical of the Hobbesian ideal of absolute rule, the basic binary between the state and the (property-owning) individual remains. To Locke, the aim of subjecting oneself to government is the preservation of ‘Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property’ (Locke 2013: 350), which was incompatible with absolute rule. Property, and the acquisition of (individual) property, was a natural right, which the state was instituted to protect. While Locke stresses that there are subordinate communities in a state or political society, he is adamant in stressing that the state is its own particular kind of society, distinct from other associations. Even though political society resembles these, it is qualitatively different so that when the state is instituted there can be no (political) obedience or subjection to ‘any Domestick Subordinate Power’ (Locke 2013: 356). When instituted, the state monopolizes the claim to political subjection and allegiance. This is very much necessary in order to secure the existence of the state and political society, exactly so that it can secure the property of the individuals.

Depoliticizing associations and dis-embedding individuals

Whereas the section above presented the individual-state imaginary as it has been formulated theoretically by various political thinkers, this section demonstrates the material underpinnings of this this imaginary and its very real social, political, and economic consequences during and after the French Revolution – how it, with Taylor’s vocabulary, naturalized certain ideas and practices as the natural horizon of expectation. While actual political developments were not in total synchronicity throughout 19th-century Europe, the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath is the inception and exemplary of a larger historical trend of victorious dis-embedding forces (the emergence of nation-states, popular sovereignty and market economy) that reorganize local communities, territorial spaces and social relationships; hence the reason of engaging with this pivotal historical period in order to show the Polanyian double movement in action. There are of course limitations to this approach, focusing on France, and to some degree England. However, as we are mostly concerned with the emergence of the nation-state and capitalism, we have focused on the places where these developments first and most strongly occurred. We also argue that they as a result led the way for other (Western) developments and especially the French Revolution and Declaration of the Rights of Man continues to stand as the exemplar of enlightenment principles, being reproduced for instance in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. As argued by Eric Hobsbawn (1962) in the introduction to The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, although these developments started in France and England, ‘it is not unreasonable to regard this dual revolution – the rather more political French and the industrial (British) revolution – not so much as something which belongs to the history of these two countries which were its chief carriers and symbols, but as the twin crater of a rather larger regional volcano’ (p. 14).

One of the many sparks igniting the French Revolution – arguably the symbolic founding moment of modern politics – was the coming together of the General Estates (an intermediary body) after more than a century and a half without a meeting. Moreover, the events in Paris from 1789 and the following years were influenced by a host of intermediary bodies – politicized electoral sections, neighborhood assemblies, clubs, corporate guilds, and communes. Yet, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789, contains no articles on freedom of association or assembly. Instead, the Declaration is inhabited by the two actors familiar to the individual-state imaginary discussed above: the individual imbued with natural rights and the state (or the people) imbued with absolute sovereignty. The rights of the individual are those of liberty, property, security, and resistance to domination (article 2), equality before the law (article 7), due process (article 9), freedom of conscience and religion (article 10) and freedom of speech and press (article 10). The sacrosanct status of private property is reiterated in the final article 17. Moreover, article 3 empties the political space between individual and state/people/nation, which Hobbes and Rousseau argued theoretically: ‘The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body [corps] nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation’ (Declaration of the Rights of Man 1789: art. 3). As such, intermediary bodies are depoliticized and deprived of their autonomous status and independent claim to represent sections within society and are consequently removed from the political space. As article 3 of the Declaration clearly states, law is an expression of the General Will and intermediary bodies are per definition particularistic in nature. As such, the Declaration inaugurated a new political and social imaginary in which private property and individual rights are absolutely central, and in which associations no longer have independent political agency (Tomba 2019: 58). Two years later, in 1791, the National Assembly engraved the Declaration’s lofty principles in ordinary law, as the assembly dissolved all corporate bodies by law, hereby making the gathering of professionals, artisans and workers outright illegal (Rimlinger 1977: 211–12; Tomba 2019: 59–60). The dissolution of guilds and other corporations and associations was championed by Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier (giving the law its name), who was worried about the increase in strikes, labor protests and radical workers’ meetings during the first half of 1791. In motivating the bill, Le Chapelier argued that

There are no longer corporations in the state, there is no longer anything but the particular interest of each individual, and the general interest. It is permitted to no one to inspire an intermediary interest in citizens, to separate them from the public interest by a spirit of corporation. (Le Chapelier cited in Tomba 2019: 59 – italics added)

The statement is striking: As a radicalization of the Declaration two years earlier, the political space was only to consist of individuals and the state (i.e. ‘general interest’ or ‘public interest’). The first article of the Chapelier Law made it forbidden to reestablish ‘corporations of citizens of the same trade and profession’, as the dissolution of such bodies was ‘one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution’ (Chapelier Law 1791: art. 1). Article 2 further depoliticized corporate bodies by forbidding every attempt of popular gatherings to acquire organizational form and competence:

Citizens of the same trade or profession, entrepreneurs, those who have shops, workers and craftsmen of whatever art, may not, when they find themselves together, name a president, secretary or syndic, keep registers, make decrees or decisions, or form regulations on their supposed common interests. (Chapelier Law 1791: art. 2)

Finally, article 4 made it clear that it was ‘against the principles of liberty and the Constitution’ that ‘citizens attached to the same professions, arts and trades make decisions or created agreements between themselves which would lead them to refuse, or only make available at a set price, their industry or their work’, insofar as every such agreement was ‘declared unconstitutional and detrimental to liberty and to the Declaration of Human Rights, and null and void’ (Chapelier Law 1791: art. 4). Hence, the great Revolution, which inaugurated the discourse on the inalienable rights of man and popular sovereignty did so at the expense of the freedom of assembly and association for specific groups, namely, workers, producers, artisans, and small shopkeepers. ‘This extreme position’, according to one historian, ‘was justified on the grounds that under the regime of liberty, no intermediary bodies between the state and the individual were to be recognized, and no interest existed except those of the individual and the state’ (Rimlinger 1977: 212 – italics added). In other words, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Chapelier Law reveal some of the core commitments of modern social theory and its imaginary of politics and social organization. First, political rights are exclusively individual rights, as group rights based on occupation, profession or interest obstruct the harmonious compatibility between individual rights and public interest. As already argued, this distinctively modern political order – as opposed to the pre-modern political order of overlapping spheres of actors, entities, political power, and legitimacy – was supposed to only be inhabited by individuals and the state/nation. As phrased by William H. Sewell, the Chapelier Law made it clear that ‘no intermediary body could stand between the individual – now armed with his natural rights – and the nation – now the guarantor of natural rights’ (Sewell 1980: 91). Second, the Declaration and Chapelier Law make the right to private property and a free market economy more fundamental for the rights of man, more important for the wellbeing of society and more protected by the state, than the freedom of association and assembly.

While we have here taken revolutionary France as the exemplary form of this development, it was not the only place to dissolve and forbid intermediary bodies and corporate orders. In Britain, so-called Combination Acts were ratified in 1799 and 1800, which prohibited workers to assemble, form unions and bargain collectively for wages and working conditions, just as guilds were legally abolished in 1835. ³ In the language of the act, it was exactly necessary to ‘prevent unlawful combinations of workers’, and to ensure that ‘all contracts, covenants and agreements whatsoever [. . .] for obtaining an advantage of wages [. . .] or for lessening or altering their or any of their usual hours or nine of working, or for decreasing the quantity of work [. . .] or for preventing or hindering any person or persons from employing whomsoever he, she, or they shall think proper to employ [. . .] or for controlling or anyway affecting any person or persons carrying on any manufacture, trade or business, in the conduct or management thereof, shall be [. . .] illegal, null and void [. . .]’. (Combination Act 1800).

In the first decades of the 19th century, similar legislation was introduced in Belgium, many Germany states (those under French control, Prussia following in the latter half of the century), the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, which in sum sought to dis-embed the market from the corporate structures in which economic activities had been embedded, hereby constructing what one commentator has called a ‘flat space between the individual and the state’ (Solari 2010: 89; see also Kjaer 2015: 19; for the development, see Black 2003: 167–181).

Associations strike back: 19th-century responses to free enterprise

Following the Polanyian double movement as an analytical strategy, the last section demonstrated how the inception of modern politics (the emergence of nation-states, popular sovereignty, and capitalism) around the French Revolution is simultaneously a political and ideological victory for dis-embedding forces. But as stressed by Polanyi, dis-embedding movements are always countered by re-embedding forces. Hence the dominance of the individual-state imaginary is only temporary and is immediately challenged politically and ideologically. In fact, much of 19th-century social and political theory can be read as a critical reaction to the dissolution of corporate bodies and the introduction of a free market. To illustrate this, in this section we discuss two such political re-embedding attempts situated at each end of the ideological spectrum, namely, social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism. The ambition of this section is to demonstrate the continual political struggle between dis-embedding and re-embedding forces, between two overarching imaginaries of political, economic, and societal order – the individual-state and the associative imaginaries. Different positions could surely have been picked out, but social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism are chosen because despite being ideologically opponents, they are united in their stark opposition to dis-embedded social relationships, modes of production and political structures. This, we argue, shows the breath of the 19th-century counter-movement to laissez-faire as well as the usefulness of the ‘imaginary’-approach insofar as contrasting political positions can partake in the same overarching imaginary – in this case the re-politicization of intermediary bodies. Whereas social Catholic corporatism could be called a reactionary response to the dis-embedding of the individual and the economy after the French Revolution, insofar as it sought to re-create the hierarchy of pre-modern associative structures, the socialist communalist response could be regarded as a progressive response to the spread of laissez-faire liberalism in the 19th century, insofar as it stressed the conflictual character of a modern politics released from older and oppressive social hierarchies (Wiarda 1997: 100–101). Similar to a central insight of Marx’ historical materialism, where the developments in each historical period are necessary for the future realization of communism, we might say that the relation between the associative responses to the individual-state imaginary is characterized by a similar dialectic. Whereas the reactionary response of social Catholic corporatism seeks to return to pre-modern conceptions of community in which individuality is repressed for the sake of the family and the wider social order, the progressive response of socialist associationalism seeks to incorporate the achievements of liberalism, as the individual partakes in associational life with the ambition of the mutual development of herself and the democratic association of which she is a part. Here we see an attempt to unite individual freedom with associational life, as well as incorporating associations into the state. Hence, the two associative responses differ in whether the developments of modernity are to be rejected or radically democratized and socialized. Although these differences are indeed stark, the two opposing ideological positions are united in their rejection of the liberal dis-embedding of the individual. Or as argued by Bob Jessop, in short, ‘corporatism first arose in the modern era as a politico-ideological critique of liberal capitalism’ (Jessop 2015: 30).

Social Catholic corporatism

The ideas of social catholic corporatism were ratified by Pope Leo XIII in the so-called Rerum Novarum from 1891, which sought to establish a system of corporatist representation consisting of harmonious collaboration between organized labor, organized capital and the state. Before the papal ratification, a debate among catholic thinkers took place during the 19th century on the specifics of such a system (for a reconstruction of this debate, see Solari 2010).

Although internally diverse, social catholic corporatism as a whole was a reaction to the degrading situation of workers in Europe during the first half of the 19th century (Solari 2010: 90). As the dis-embedding of economic activity from earlier associative structures had created a relatively unregulated market for labor and goods, the ‘social question’ – the question of mass poverty and conditions of life in general for the wage-earning masses – was extraordinarily pressing. Social catholic thinkers were thus critical of the newly established individualism and the pervasive social disorder, which the transition to laissez-faire capitalism and the dis-embedding of the individual had caused. The remedy to the ‘social question’ for social catholic corporatism was to create a host of self-regulating vocational and professional corporations through which a de-commodification of labor could take place. The political values that ought to imbue these vocational and professional corporations would be internal patronage (internal hierarchical relations between leading bureaucrats and the working masses), external harmonious collaboration (peaceful cooperation between capitalists and workers, as in the ideal typical image of the pre-capitalist guilds) and societal organicism (an organic view of society in which various groups perform different tasks as part of a well-functioning whole). In the words of one scholar, for social Catholicism ‘the direct relationship between the individual and the state was severely criticized in favor of the primacy of intermediary bodies able to produce an organic society’ (Solari 2010: 94). In sum, such intermediary bodies would be a kind of paternalistic and conservative trade unionism, devoted to class harmony (or simply ignoring the concept of class). As pointed out by Jessop, these ideas – ‘inspired, in part, by medieval guilds and estate representation’ – were essentially ‘utopian’, as ‘organic corporativism [. . .] could not halt the rise of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism that was mediated through anarchic market forces’ (Jessop 2015: 30). In short, the dis-embedding forces of state sovereignty, individualism and capitalism, the dissolution of corporate orders across the European continent and the ever-increasing industrial revolution made a return to a hierarchical and quasi-guild-based order suggested by social Catholicism both unattractive and impossible. While the ideological opposite of social Catholic corporatism – what we here call socialist associationalism – disagreed with most of the central principles of this doctrine, socialists also criticized liberal capitalism for its individualizing and dis-embedding effects, and they agreed with their catholic and conservative counterparts that the introduction of associative and communal structures in many parts of social, political, and economic life was the central remedy.

Socialist associationalism

The socialist tradition of the 19th century encompassing such different strains as utopian socialism, the writings of Marx, anarchism, social democracy, and trade unionism is obviously too complex to give due justice here. Instead, this section presents a 19th-century ideological contrast to social Catholic corporatism, insofar as what we call socialist associationalism stresses internal self-management and equality (internal egalitarian relations between members of associations and corporations), external conflict (fundamentally antagonistic relations between capitalists and workers), individual autonomy (the individual enters associational life deliberately) and societal class division (a conflictual view of society in which various groups clash and confront each other due to their different economic and political interests). While positioned at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, socialist associationalism shares with social Catholic corporatism the ambition to re-embed economic activity as well as the individual in associative structures. Like social Catholic corporatism, socialist associationalism seeks to re-occupy and re-politicize the space between the individual and the state, which forces of state sovereignty, individualism and capitalism had sought to empty. In general, there were (at least) two expressions of socialist associationalism, namely, the emergence of trade unions, which in many countries happened relatively shortly after the legal dissolution of guilds, and the Paris Commune, which became a leading inspiration of the radical left in the late 19th century and inspired the European council movements in the early 20th century (Ross 2016). Here, we focus on the latter as the most radical vision of a new associative order. Briefly, however, the spread of trade unions in Europe happened in tandem with the legal dissolution of the guild system and the introduction of the free market. In Britain, where the guild system was dissolved in the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, the unions emerged most forcefully in the 1830s. In France, where corporate orders were abolished by the Chapelier Law in 1793, unions began to spread only in the 1870s, as the legal restrictions on workers’ associations were lifted in 1864 and 1868; and in Germany, unions emerged as soon as the otherwise exceptionally strong guild system was dissolved in 1869 (Black 2003: 170–172). However, as argued by Black, ‘one way or another, guild ideals were being melted down and recast in the mould of modern socialism’ (Black 2003: 170). Reformulated in the Polanyian framework, the trade unions of the 19th century sought to re-embed economic activity into new associative and corporate ties, structures, and spaces. When viewed through the Polanyian lens, what happened in most European countries – that is, the legal dissolution of the guilds, the introduction of free markets and following emergence of trade unions – can be seen as the ‘double movement’ in action, as clashes between principles of individual competition versus social cooperation.

Whereas the unions functioned primarily as protective associations, which were to secure workers from the most harmful consequences of market society, another part of the 19th-century socialist imaginary stressed the reorganization of society along associative lines. With the Paris Commune of 1871 and the inspiration, it exercised over the early 20th-century council movements, we find a modern, socialist expression of the associative imaginary. Although the Paris Commune existed only for 72 days, we can see – through the Commune’s institutional structures – the attempt to politicize associations and to re-embed the now autonomous and ‘liberated’ individual into associative structures, as well as embedding associations in a more general, even global, structure. The Commune was made up of three levels of political authority and decision-making. The Communal Council was the Commune’s central power; the arrondissements of Paris functioned as relatively self-governing, territorial units, which sent delegates under imperative mandate to the Communal Council; and finally, a plurality of clubs, societies, associations, and councils influenced the neighborhood assemblies of each arrondissement. The relations between these levels of political power, territorial space and popular activity were not governed by representation in the individualist ‘one man, one vote’-modality, but instead via imperative mandate and instant recall through which the local assemblies and clubs retained the power to instruct their delegates, recall them and elect new ones if needed. The plurality of powers co-existing within the Commune and the practice of imperative mandate, which regulated the relationship between these powers, disclose further differences between the individual-state and the associative imaginary. First, the Commune re-embedded the Parisian citizens into associative forms of living, producing and governing, thereby re-occupying the political space between the individual and the state with a multiplicity of associations. Through its ‘spirit of association’, the Commune challenged ‘the framework of the modern state’ by practicing a form of politics ‘organized through groups and associations, not in terms of individuals called upon every few years’ (Tomba 2019: 83). As such, a new form of individuality was sought created in which the individual – now liberated from the traditional ties of community – enhanced her interests through the medium of collective organization. Second, by dispensing with a form of political rule merely relying on ‘individuals called upon every few years’, the imperative mandate also attempts to dispense with the fiction of the unity of the nation/the people. As the local assemblies of the Parisian neighborhoods exercised their imperative mandate, each delegate in the Communal Council represented the political will of that concrete and distinct neighborhood. As such, imperative mandate was a way to uphold the concreteness and plurality of local associative life. In contrast, elected representatives in modern parliamentary democracies simultaneously represent no-one (due to the free nature of their mandate) and everyone (as they represent the nation or the people as such). Whereas the true sovereign in parliamentary democracy – ‘the people’ – only exercises its sovereignty on election day, at which they willingly alienate their political power to their representatives, the Commune, through the practice of imperative mandate and the plurality of local associations, required continual participation by its citizenry in order to retain political power in local, popular associations and assemblies.

Although formulated in a different vocabulary, Marx’ (1871) famous analysis of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France can be made consistent with our analysis of the clash between two imaginaries, the way both state sovereignty and capitalism had depoliticizing effects on intermediary bodies as well as how a post-capitalist order would be fundamentally association-based. Marx regarded the expected political function of the Commune to be an association-based politicization of society against the state and capital, facilitated by a concrete constellation of political associations that were fundamentally diverging from what we call the state-individual imaginary. As Marx (1996) famously wrote, ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state apparatus and wield it for its own purposes’ (p. 181), because this apparatus equals a depoliticized associative order. Crucially for Marx, the Commune repoliticized associations and reembedded workers in associative ties of multiple kind. ‘The very existence of the Commune’, according to Marx, ‘involved as a matter of course, local municipal liberty [. . .] It supplied the republic with the basis of real democratic institutions’ (Marx 1996: 186–7). In this way, the Paris Commune was a model of a post-state, post-capitalist associative order to be generally followed, as not only in Paris, but from the ‘great industrial centers of France’ to the ‘smallest country hamlet . . . the old centralised government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers’ (Marx 1996: 185). Marx (1996) imagined a Commune as harbinger of national-associative order, where ‘rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the national delegation in Paris’ (p. 185). What is pivotal for our purposes, is that not only was the Paris Commune in Marx’ evaluation an associative alternative to the state, but an association-based alternative to capitalism, insofar as the Commune’s ‘true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor’ (Marx 1996: 187). According to Marx, the Commune was the political form at last discovered for the emancipation of labor, that is, the emancipation from capitalism is mediated by political form – or by an associative order, as we have called it.

To be clear, although socialist associationalism, here in the form of the Paris Commune, can be seen as a reaction to the individual-state imaginary, and as itself entailing a strong critique of the state, it is not an outright rejection of institutionalized forms of public power, which we deem necessary for any modern conception of politics. According to Nicos Poulantzas (1978), the state apparatus (the state as an expression of certain class interests) can be distinguished from the state functions (i.e. legislation, executive functions, courts, the army, the police and so on). While socialist associationalism criticizes the state as an expression of class interests, in the way that the state in modern individual-state imaginary depoliticizes intermediary bodies and market actors in its search for monopoly of public power, it aspires to politicize and democratize the state functions by bringing them under the democratic control of the associatively organized people. This view of state functions or public power in socialist associationalism is expressed by Marx throughout his analysis of the Paris Commune, as the army, the police and the bureaucracy ought to be under the control of people organized associatively. Hereby, according to Marx, the state as an institution separate from society and the citizenry would cease to exist, but the state functions would be performed democratically by the associatively organized people.

As such, the trade unions and the imaginary of the Paris Commune constitute an ideological tension within 19th-century communalist socialism, insofar as the trade unions – along with the Social Democratic parties emerging in Europe at roughly the same time – functioned as protective institutions seeking to redeem market society of its worst hardships, whereas the Paris Commune and its imaginary sought to re-imagine and re-cast the political order on associative grounds, hereby posing a modern exponent of a full-fledged associative imaginary of political community. Moreover, although the contrasts between social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism cannot be overstated, they share the conviction that the consequences of market society, the dissolution of corporate orders, the prohibition of workers’ associations and the consequent dis-embedment of the individual from associative structures can only be tamed, controlled, and transcended by new forms of associative relationships.

In general, and in an even wider perspective, much 19th-century political and social thought could be included under the heading of ‘associations strike back’. Founders of modern sociology like Tönnies, Simmel and Durkheim all had a keen eye for the enormous transformations in social life, which capitalism (and its related processes of industrialization, urbanization, and individualization) created. As did the tradition of English pluralism and guild socialism with representatives like FW Maitland, JN Figgis, GDH Cole, HJ Laski, some of whom were very inspired by Otto von Gierke and his Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht written between 1868–1913. In sum, exponents from across the ideological spectrum – from conservatives, who longed for the tightly knitted communities of past, over liberals like JS Mill, who saw the economic and moral rationality of cooperative production to socialists ranging from to moderates to radicals – were critical of the individual-state binary, the dis-embedment of the individual of associative life and capitalist, political subjectivity of individual self-interest. Moreover, all these different strains of thought and political practice believed that a flourishing associative life, operating in between the individual and state, was the chief remedy to the devastating effects of market society and an individual dis-embedded from associative and corporate structures.

Conclusion

While the two imaginaries of political, economic, and social order reconstructed in this article are theoretical constructs, which have never existed in pure forms, a general shift from the embedded, associative imaginary to the dis-embedded, individual-state imaginary occurred with the modern revolutions, their charters of individual rights, the advent of capitalism, the nation-state, and the parliamentary interpretation of popular sovereignty. An imaginary which, despite numerous counter-movements, remains the dominant form.

The two imaginaries are fundamentally incompatible: One offers a political anthropology that rests on individual subjects, competing with one another in a zero-sum game by following their exogenously given self-interests completely dis-embedded from ties to family, neighborhood, association, and community. The other rests on a political anthropology in which the individual is an associative being embedded in social relations and community structures, which fosters cooperation, mutuality, and shared interest (as well as potentially social control, hierarchy, inequality, and lack of mobility). The first imaginary conceptualizes the political order as essentially binary, consisting of, on one hand, rights-holding individuals pursuing their self-interest and, on the other, the state/people/nation expressing the public interest or the common good. In the individual-state imaginary, group interests, group identities and group rights are prime evils, as they either corrupt the common good by distorting it toward powerful special interests or by violating the autonomy of the individual by placing it under crude and involuntary forms of majoritarian rule.

The political space of the associative imaginary, in contrast, is not binary, but involves a multiplicity of self-governing and co-governing associations, which in different ways lay claim to the loyalty of individuals. In this imaginary of political and economic order, associative forms such as craft guilds, corporate organs, producers’ cooperatives, revolutionary clubs, popular societies, workers’ councils, neighborhood assemblies and territorial communes make up the local, natural, and organic surroundings through which individuals live, co-work and co-govern.

This article’s ambition has been to analyze the multifaceted ways in which these two imaginaries of political and social organization have developed historically, disagreed conceptually, and clashed politically. To elucidate the relationship between them, we have utilized Karl Polanyi’s notion of the double movement between dis-embedding social forces and re-embedding counter-movements, and through this prism, we have historicized and denaturalized the dominant binary between individualism and state sovereignty. We have aimed to show that both individualism and state sovereignty are co-constitutive and, in Polanyi’s vocabulary, dis-embedding forces that continually combat all forms of intermediary bodies in order to clear the political space between the individual and the state. The apparent conflict between individual rights and state intervention prevalent in much political discourse today is symptomatic of the political and conceptual victory of the individual-state imaginary over the associative one. To exemplify this, we have analyzed two ideologically rivaling instances of the associative counter-movements in social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism, arguing that, despite their fundamental differences, they can be understood as an answer to the same problem, namely, the dis-embedding of individuals from associative structures.

While we end our reconstruction of the conflict between the two imaginaries with these 19th-century counter-movements to market society, the usage of Polanyi’s double movement as a strategy to analyze the development of competing social imaginaries and conflicts between dis-embedding forces and the associative counter-movements they initiate can be extended well into the 20th century and beyond. While we can only hint at the possible results of such an analysis, it could be argued that social Catholic corporatism and socialist associationalism are important because they, in some respects, represent the precursors of two of the 20th century’s most central associative counter-movements, namely, fascist corporatism and welfare state neo-corporativism. ⁴ The early-mid 20th century attempts to bridle the forces of market society by re-embedding the individual in associative and corporate structures were again in the late 1970s met by another dis-embedding movement in neoliberalism, where deregulation and market-based privatization have functioned to further dis-embed the individual. In line with Polanyi’s argument that market society attempts to structure society at large in accordance with the modes of interaction on the market, the emergence of the competition state across Western democracies has sought to introduce the market principle of competition in almost all domains of public policy. As such, the notion of the double-movement with regards to associative structures can be used as an analytical strategy to elucidate the multifaceted developments of capitalism in different contexts with a focus on the varied associative counter-movements that attempted to bridle the spread of market society. No model of analysis can capture all reactions of the development of capitalism, and neither can the Polanyian-inspired approach provided here. While the rise of populism, for example, across Western liberal democracies can arguably be seen as a reaction to the disembedding effects of globalization and neoliberalism, populism entails no distinct associative response, and cannot be seen as a re-embedding associative counter-movement, as we have developed the concept. Within the analytical vocabulary developed here, though, we might say that the populist reactions to the disembedding effects of globalization and neoliberalism stays well within the individual-state imaginary that causes the dissatisfaction of populist movements in the first place. By hoping to make the ‘nation’ or the ‘people’ great again by reasserting national parliamentary sovereignty, populist movements allude to the same macrosubjects and national institutions that have dominated the individual-state imaginary since the French Revolution. With the notion of imaginary – that is, the beliefs, principles, practices and institutions, which make up the ‘natural’ and ‘self-evident’ way of imagining the social order and the individual’s place herein – our central ambition has been to show the continual development and conflict between the individual-state and associative imaginary, hereby suggesting that the primary conflict between the individual and the state that informs so much of contemporary political and economic discourse is predicated on the supersession and delegitimization of an entirely different, associative imaginary. The dominance of the individual-state imaginary was, and is, founded on the exclusion of another way of thinking associations, and thereby excludes them as political subjects that have a role and voice in the political and economic order. We hold that the understanding of most contemporary political, economic and social phenomena – also much of that which is trying to criticize contemporary capitalism – remains trapped within the individual-state binary, and as such help to naturalize them, and thereby also aid in hiding the model that it has (successfully) combatted: a model of associative politics in which not the individual, but the association, is the primary political subject.