Polanyi's 1944 account of the collapse of the gold standard regime, and the international economic openness required and facilitated by that regime, implicates the primacy of market forces. Although economic integration was not, in and of itself, detrimental to the functioning of democratic societies, economic integration without an accompanying system of social protection was doomed to failure. Leaders gave priority to the maintenance of external balance over all other goals, but their publics ultimately rejected the notion that currency values were the penultimate policy achievement. If the gold standard's rules – coupled with the evolving domestic political ambitions of governments – sowed the seeds of its demise, can the same be said for contemporary financial globalization? To what extent are Polanyi's criticisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relevant today?