This leads up to our thesis which still remains to be proven: that the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to… - Karl Polanyi

The pitfalls of the market system were not readily apparent. To realize this clearly we must distinguish between the various vicissitudes to which the laboring people were exposed in England since the coming of the machine: first, those of the Speenhamland period, 1795 to 1834; second, the hardships caused by the Poor Law Reform, in the decade following 1834; third, the deleterious effects of a competitive labor market after 1834, until in the 1870s the recognition of the trade unions offered sufficient protection. Chronologically, Speenhamland antedated market economy; the decade of the Poor Law Reform Act was a transition to that economy. The last period-overlapping the former-was that of market economy proper.
The three periods differed sharply. Speenhamland was designed to prevent the proletarianization of the common people, or at least to slow it down. The outcome was merely the pauperization of the masses, who almost lost their human shape in the process.

The standard use of money is vital to the staple finance that accompanies large-scale storage economies. No assessment and collection of taxes, no budgeting and balancing of manorial households, no rational accountancy comprising a variety of goods is possible without a standard. Since it is not the number of things but their values that are here subjected to arithmetic, this operation requires the setting of rates relating the various staples to one another. Such figures, representing rates, are in effect available in most archaic societies. Whether by virtue of custom, statute, or proclamation, fixed equivalents designate the rate at which the necessities of life can be mutually substituted, one for another. It is only when prices develop in markets (i.e., relatively late) that money as a standard can be taken for granted, as it is today.

Such economic solipsism, as it might well be called, was indeed an outstanding feature of the market mentality. Economic action, it was deemed, was "natural" to men and was, therefore, self-explanatory.