As such dissatisfactions intensify, social order becomes more problematic and the danger increases that political leaders will seek to divert discont… - Karl Polanyi

the neoliberal utopia of a borderless and peaceful globe requires that millions of ordinary people throughout the world have the flexibility to tolerate — perhaps as often as every five or ten years — a prolonged spell in which they must survive on half or less of what they previously earned. Polanyi believes that to expect that kind of flexibility is both morally wrong and deeply unrealistic. To him it is inevitable that people will mobilize to protect themselves from these economic shocks.

It is usually not realized that random acts of barter would not, by themselves, produce prices unless a market pattern were in existence that made the bartering intent of the persons effective. In this sense, barter is very much like reciprocity and redistribution. The principle of behavior, in order to become effective, requires the presence of some institutional structure. The market pattern is never traceable to the mere desire of individuals to "truck, barter, and exchange." Its origins come from other directions, as we shall see.

For Polanyi the deepest flaw in market liberalism is that it subordinates human purposes to the logic of an impersonal market mechanism.