In 1944, Karl Polanyi described the double movement that had marked the history of capitalism since the first industrial revolution: the movement to disembed markets from social control and the movement to rein them back in. Polanyi argued that trade liberalization was spurred onward by a utopian idea, usually brandished in bad faith: that market regulation is the principal fetter to collective prosperity. The idea, in other words, suggested that unregulated markets would end poverty and that, if given free rein, free trade would (in the long run) resolve the chronic dislocation, inequality, and vulnerability that have marked capitalist history from its inception. Polanyi also demonstrated that market liberalization was produced only with robust and concerted state intervention, while the contrary movement (for social control over markets) was largely spontaneous. Today, state intervention in favor of free markets is everywhere in evidence: from support for stringent laws on intellectual property rights to fiscal subsidies for faith-based initiatives, from opening the Arctic for oil drilling to the promotion of new international trade agreements.

This issue of Public Culture tracks and theorizes some dimensions of this process. Editorials by Craig Calhoun and by Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo set the stage, with pointed discussions of the privatization of risk (so painfully exposed by Hurricane Katrina) and of the consolidation of a corporate-controlled simulacrum of civil society in contemporary Latin America. These opening interventions are supplemented by the first installment in Public Culture’s new translations project: Michel Feher’s “The Saudi Mirror,� translated from the French journal Vacarme.

The translations project is an expression of this journal’s interest in bringing together multiple poles of knowledge and criticism and pursuing illuminating and relevant interventions for our public. In this issue, Public Culture has chosen a piece from a sustained discussion of humanitarian interventions and nongovernmental politics that has been unfolding in the pages of Vacarme. Michel Feher provides us with a critical inspection of the United States’ growing reliance on evangelical groups as an arm of foreign policy and international humanitarian intervention. By holding current U.S. policy up to its Saudi precedent, he exposes the risks involved in identifying national interests with the interests of religious groups.

The “Translation� section is followed by another dedicated to the genealogies and politics of secularism. Convened by Saba Mahmood, these pieces by Charles Taylor, Colin Jager, and Mahmood herself unsettle dominant narratives of the secular, exploring the politics of religion and of religious sentiment in liberal regimes. Taken together, the essays question the contours of secularism by inspecting its uncertain moorings in individualist subjectivities and its equally equivocal position in the haughty elevation of the West as a category of identity and as a pretext for political intervention. The essays thus provide a critical perspective on the current politicization of religion.

This issue’s final section is composed of three independently submitted explorations of historicities in neoliberal transitions. The section is preceded by a visual essay, “Camping in the Third Space,â€? a work by Laura Junka that presents readers and viewers with the tentative and provisional—but also stubborn and quotidian—ways in which contemporary polarities are undone. Polarization is performed in its every iteration; Junka’s visual essay underlines the importance of iterating what she calls a “Third Space.â€?

“Neoliberal Historicities� brings together three essays, by Dominic Boyer, Katherine Gordy, and Luis Cárcamo-Huechante. They are, each of them, explorations of key sites or, more precisely, of key chronotopes: Chile’s adoption of freemarket reform under Pinochet; Cuba’s special period management of relocation in the world economy; and postunification Germany’s politics of nostalgia.

Luis Cárcamo-Huechante provides a close study of the way in which neoliberal intervention and reform was performed into existence at and through a televised Milton Friedman lecture in Santiago, Chile. Cárcamo-Huechante underscores the contradictory relationship between neoliberal ideas and the Pinochet regime, and he reveals how a radically new spatiotemporal frame for the nation, for its public, and for its intellectuals was audaciously brought into play.

Katherine Gordy inspects dialectical images in popular responses to dollarization and capitalist consumption in so-called special period Cuba. Gordy explores the ways in which capitalist markets and commodities are framed and the ways in which they are discursively encompassed and circumscribed, both in official special period discourse and in various popular formulations. The essay also explores the ways in which commodification subverts these alternative frames, introducing the sort of tension between encompassment and subversion that is a core quality of the dialectical image.

Finally, Dominic Boyer explores and reveals the central importance of the framing of collective expectations in his close discussion of nostalgia in contemporary Germany. Boyer’s inquiry is directed at a perplexing characteristic of liberal transition: namely, how expectations of an open and free future are quickly drowned in floods of nostalgia, or Ostalgie, as it has developed in Germany. The essay exposes a key arena in the language of transitions that is a characteristic of contemporary history: the politics of the future.

In their close attention to the contested temporal framing of liberal transitions, these essays are a rich and useful contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of capitalism’s double movement in relation to society.