The step which makes isolated markets into a market economy, regulated markets into a self-regulating market, is indeed crucial. The nineteenth centu… - Karl Polanyi

The economy as an instituted process of interaction serving the satisfaction of material wants forms a vital part of every human community. Without an economy in this sense, no society could exist for any length of time.

The true significance of the tormenting problem of poverty now stood revealed: economic society was subject to laws which were not human laws. The rift between Adam Smith and Townsend had broadened into a chasm; a dichotomy appeared which marked the birth of nineteenth-century consciousness. From this time onward naturalism haunted the science of man, and the reintegration of society into the human world became the persistently sought aim of the evolution of social thought. Marxian economics-in this line of argument was an essentially unsuccessful attempt to achieve that aim, a failure due to Marx's too close adherence to Ricardo and the traditions of liberal economics.

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.