Polanyi and Marx both saw capitalism as contradictory, but they located the contradiction differently. For Marx, the central conflict was between capital and labour, driven by exploitation and destined to produce revolution. Polanyi's double movement is not a class struggle per se but a society-wide reaction to the commodification of land, labour, and money. The countermovement can come from diverse actors—workers, landowners, even capitalists—united by a shared interest in social stability. Polanyi did not predict capitalism's inevitable collapse; he argued its survival depended on how the double movement resolved itself.

Polanyi identified land, labour, and money as fictitious commodities because they were not produced for sale on a market. Labour is human activity, land is nature, and money is a token of purchasing power. Treating them as commodities—subjecting them entirely to market pricing—destroys the social and ecological fabric. Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market is therefore impossible without devastating consequences: it requires treating human beings and the natural world as mere inputs. This insight underpins his claim that the market economy is not a natural order but a politically imposed and unsustainable one.

Polanyi was not an anti-market absolutist. He distinguished between markets as one form of economic integration among others—alongside reciprocity and redistribution—and a market society where markets dictate the terms of social life. He accepted that markets have a place, but he rejected the idea that they should be self-regulating and disembedded from social institutions. His critique targeted the utopian project of subordinating all of society to market logic, not the existence of exchange itself. This is a crucial distinction often lost in caricatures of his work as simply anti-capitalist.

The 'soft' reading holds that the countermovement can stabilise capitalism by re-embedding the economy, making a humane market society possible. The 'hard' reading insists the contradiction is irreconcilable: market society inevitably destroys itself, and the countermovement cannot permanently resolve the tension. Polanyi's text supports both interpretations, which is why scholars like Beverly Silver and Nancy Fraser continue to argue over whether he saw reform as viable. The ambiguity reflects his historical moment: he wrote as fascism and war demonstrated capitalism's catastrophic potential.

Polanyi's framework maps directly onto the neoliberal era. The post-1980s wave of deregulation, privatisation, and free trade represented a new 'movement' of market expansion. The countermovements—populist backlashes, environmental activism, and demands for labour protections—followed with striking regularity. Brexit, the rise of protectionist politics, and climate protests can all be read as Polanyian reactions to disembedded markets. His warning that unchecked market liberalism breeds authoritarianism rather than democracy is arguably more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1944.

Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek were intellectual adversaries, though they never directly debated. Both were Austro-Hungarian émigrés writing about capitalism's trajectory, but they reached opposite conclusions. Hayek saw the market as a spontaneous order essential to liberty; Polanyi saw it as a constructed and destructive utopia. Hayek blamed socialism for totalitarianism; Polanyi blamed market liberalism for fascism. Their clash encapsulates the twentieth-century divide between market fundamentalism and social democracy. Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944) and Polanyi's Great Transformation appeared in the same year—two opposing diagnoses of the same crisis.

When it was published in 1944, the book was overshadowed by Keynesian economics and the immediate postwar focus on reconstruction. Its interdisciplinary method—blending history, anthropology, and economics—fit poorly with the disciplinary boundaries of the time. Polanyi himself was a marginal academic figure, teaching at Bennington College and Columbia without a permanent professorship. Interest revived in the 1980s and 1990s as globalisation exposed the limits of self-regulating markets. Today it is a foundational text in economic sociology, political economy, and development studies.