The most recent global financial crisis reminded the current generation of the lessons that their grandparents had learned in the Great Depression: t… - Karl Polanyi

The step which makes isolated markets into a market economy, regulated markets into a self-regulating market, is indeed crucial. The nineteenth century-whether hailing the fact as the apex of civilization or deploring it as a cancerous growth-naively imagined that such a development was the natural outcome of the spreading of markets. It was not realized that the gearing of markets into a self-regulating system of tremendous power was not the result of any inherent tendency of markets toward excrescence, but rather the effect of highly artificial stimulants administered to the body social in order to meet a situation which was created by the no less artificial phenomenon of the machine.

Of all the basic principles governing the development of early economic institutions, the need for the maintenance of communal solidarity deserves pride of place. Domestic and foreign relations are in stark contrast: solidarity here, enmity there, rule the day. "They" are the objects of hostility, depradation, and enslavement, "we" belong together and our communal life is governed by the principles of reciprocity, redistribution, and the exchange of equivalents.

Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich is against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of vio¬lence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierce¬ness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its over¬burdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.