“The congenital weakness of nineteenth-century society was not that it was industrial but that it was a market society. Industrial civilization will continue to exist when the Utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory.”
Polanyi emphasizes the distinction between the market prior and after the great transformation that saw the amalgamation of national interests with the market. Hence coining the term ‘Market Society’ to describe how the economic approaches have undergone drastic changes. Rather than the market that existed prior which was based on redistribution and reciprocity in a communal sphere, it transformed into a state influenced self-regulating market. Thus the statement points out the root of the market structure that came with the industrial revolution as not industrialism but rather a ‘market society’. In that, the government combined its state interests with the free market to create a new and different structure. Therefore, he stresses the weakness of this market structure that will fail and the previous social tendencies will continue to thrive.
“The root of all evil, the liberal insists, was precisely this interference with the freedom of employment, trade, and currencies practiced by the various schools of social, national, and monopolistic protectionism since the third quarter of the nineteenth century.”
Further accentuating the main theme of political influence on the market, Polanyi breaks down the specifics of this transformation. He views the current market system from a political standpoint since it was indeed invented by the government to regulate the market. His explanation stresses that the concept of the free market did not occur naturally as the economy shifted but it was an imposed phenomenon. Polanyi highlights the weakness of the self-regulating market by showing its short-term concepts that favor monopolism.
“Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.”
The statement alludes to the cost of the self-regulating market that promised the accumulation of wealth but relatively created a huge class division. Accordingly, using the Speenhamland laws as his argument on the impact the market system had on the lower class. Through the laws, the lower class intended to mitigate the poverty crisis that arose due to the great transformation. The class division was further brought on by landowners renting out to the lower classes since they could not afford their own properties. The nationalized market created a great rift between the rich and the poor which still haunts the modern economy.
