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

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).

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.