The traditional unity of a Christian society was giving place to a denial of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do for the conditions of their… - Karl Polanyi

In Polanyi’s view the fascist impulse — to protect society from the market by sacrificing human freedom — was universal, but local contingencies determined where fascist regimes were successful in taking power.

Mankind was in the grip, not of new motives, but of new mechanisms. Briefly, the strain sprang from the zone of the market; from there it spread to the political sphere, thus comprising the whole of society. But within the single nations the tension remained latent as long as world economy continued to function. Only when the last of its surviving institutions, the gold standard, dissolved was the stress within the nations finally released. Different as their responses to the new situation were, essentially they represented adjustments to the disappearance of the traditional world economy; when it disintegrated, market civilization itself was engulfed. This explains the almost unbelievable fact that a civilization was being disrupted by the blind action of soulless institutions the only purpose of which was the automatic increase of material welfare.

The countermove against economic liberalism and laissez-faire possessed all the unmistakable characteristics of a spontaneous reaction. At innumerable disconnected points it set in without any traceable links between the interests directly affected or any ideological conformity between them. Even in the settlement of one of the same problem as in the case of workmen's compensation, solutions switched over from individualistic to "collectivistic:' from liberal to antiliberal, from "laissez-faire" to interventionist forms without any change in the economic interest, the ideological influences or political forces in play, merely as a result of the increasing realization of the nature of the problem in question.