Broadly, the proposition holds that all economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organized either on the princi… - Karl Polanyi

One simple recognition, from which all attempts at clarification of the place of the economy in society must start, is the fact that the term economic, as commonly used to describe a type of human activity, is a compound of two meanings. These have separate roots, independent of one another. It is not difficult to identify them, even though a number of broadly synonymous words are available for each. The first meaning, the formal, springs from the logical character of the means-ends relationship, as in economizing or economical; from this meaning springs the scarcity definition of economic. The second, the substantive meaning, points to the elemental fact that human beings, like all other living thins, cannot exist for any length of time without a physical environment that sustains them; this is the origin of the substantive definition of economic. The two meanings, the formal and the substantive, have nothing in common.
The current concept of economic is, then, a compound of two meanings. While hardly anyone would seriously deny this fact, its implications for the social sciences (always excepting economics) are rarely touched upon. Whenever sociology, anthropology, or history deals with matters pertaining to human livelihood, the term economic is taken for granted. It is employed loosely, relying for a frame of reference now on its scarcity connotation, now on its substantive connotation, thus oscillating between two unrelated poles of meaning.

In effect, by far the greater part of trade flowed in such dispositional channels, while a much smaller part continued to proceed on transactional lines. Numerous devices ensured that no merging of the two should ensue.
Both equivalencies, which made gainless transactions possible, and rules of law, which organized riskless dispositions into a trading system, were a result of the dominance of redistributive forms of integration. But these did not operate in the ways of tyrannical administrative bureaucracy, as assumed by historians in the past. The absence, or at least the very subordinate role, of markets did not imply ponderous administrative methods tightly held in the hands of a central bureaucracy. On the contrary, gainless transactions and regulated dispositions, as legitimized by law, opened up, as we have seen, a sphere of personal freedom formerly unknown in the economic life of man.

For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself.
That system developed in leaps and bounds; it engulfed space and time, and by creating bank money it produced a dynamic hitherto unknown. By the time it reached its maximum extent, around 1914, every part of the globe, all its inhabitants and yet unborn generations, physical persons as well as huge fictitious bodies called corporations, were comprised in it. A new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career, only this time the movement was on a purely material level.
Yet simultaneously a countermovement was on foot. This was more than the usual defensive behavior of a society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.