If The Great Transformation will be remembered for anything a century from now, it will be as the definitive refutation of the great liberal myth of the market. By this I refer to the assumption that “self-regulating markets”, as Polanyi calls them, are in some sense natural: that markets will always arise of their own accord as long as governments don't prevent it, just as they inevitably did in Europe once civil society was freed from the stifling effects of feudalism. Polanyi examined the very time and place when this myth first emerged – Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and demonstrated that no such “self-regulating market” could ever have emerged without elaborate government intervention to begin with, and none could survive without continual government support.

Polanyi's insight is clearly as relevant as ever. The free-market ideology that Polanyi felt was gone forever in the 1940s has returned with a vengeance – returned to reap a terrible vengeance, in fact, on the most vulnerable people of the earth. Yet at the same time our intellectual landscape has shifted. Grand sweeping theory in the Polanyian tradition has fallen largely out of favor, at least among what passes as the intellectual opposition to neoliberalism. Yet economists – at least, the most sophisticated of them – often appear more than happy to incorporate many of Polanyi's insights.