"Fred Block and Margaret Somers have performed a signal service by providing, on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of The Great Transformation, a detailed reconstruction and assessment of its arguments, bringing out the distinctive contribution made by Polanyi, and explaining why his work has exerted such influence on so much work in political economy in the last fifty years. Polanyi offered one of the most important theoretical and methodological analyses of social democracy, providing a critique not only of free market liberalism but also of Marxism, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned because of its fatalism and economism. He was one of the first to argue that free market liberalism and Marxism shared the same assumption that the economy was the most significant force shaping modern society. Both were also utopian because they believed in the possibility of a world without politics, the withering away of the state. [...] Block and Somers identify three key propositions in his thought. The first is that markets are necessary and important institutions, but if they are left unregulated they threaten human freedom and the collective good. [...] The second proposition is that the market is not an autonomous and separate entity, and cannot therefore be ‘freed’ from the state. It is always embedded in specific political, legal and cultural arrangements. [...] The third proposition Polanyi advanced was that the reason free market ideology was so effective and so seductive was precisely because it appeared to promise a society free of politics and free of conflict, or at the very least to substantially reduce the role of politics in civil and social life. [...] Block and Somers devote considerable space to analysing the return of what they term, following George Soros, ‘marketfundamentalism’, using Polanyi’s framework to understand its character. [...] One of his abiding beliefs was that if democracies failed to control the malign effects of markets, particularly the growth of insecurity and inequality, then people would flock to the populist right to find the security they craved. [...] Polanyi resolutely opposed utopian thinking on right and left, arguing that freedoms and rights could only be sustained through politics and law, and that economics should be balanced in public policy by socio-cultural and historical knowledge. These are all insights with great relevance for understanding and analysing our contemporary political and economic malaise, and Block and Somers provide a lucid and insightful account of how they inform Polanyi’s distinctive form of political economy."

"From Marx’s standpoint, society is no more than the site of the hostile confrontation between the conflicting economic interests of two historically variable groups – freemen and slaves in antiquity, lords and serfs under feudalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat under capitalism. [...] For Polanyi, 'society' is a complex reality constituted by relatively autonomous sets of diverse institutional arrangements, varying widely in time and space, some of which address concerns of no immediate economic significance. They generate and validate similarities and contrasts between individuals and between groups that may override - or any rate frame and constrain, rather than masking or justifying - the relations regarding their economic interests and the resulting collective identities. Block and Somers’ entire book can be considered as a sustained exploration and elaboration of this key motif in Polanyi’s thinking, the so-called ‘embedding’ of the economic aspect of the social process within a pre-existent, more complex matrix. [...] Block and Somers’s title has another distinctive component - 'The Power of Market Fundamentalism'. This announces their forceful contribution to an ancient theme of social analysis, conventionally phrased as 'the role of ideas in history'. They argue that certain bodies of ideas not only are passionately held and proclaimed, not only constitute for those sharing them a cherished component of collective identity, but can make a decisive difference to critical aspects of social reality."

"Karl Polanyi is far less well known than the big three of economics: Marx, Keynes, and Hayek. But Polanyi’s ideas are distinct. [...] In The Power of Market Fundamentalism (hereafter TPMF) Fred Block and Margaret Somers revive Polanyi to analyze the free market’s origins and staying power. [...] Block and Somers’s unique contribution is to argue that these public narratives about the economy are key drivers of regulatory policy. [...] But their argument does not completely satisfy. Why are free market ideas so durable if they are so obviously wrong and destructive? [...] Because they focus exclusively on culture and ideas, capitalism - our system of private property relations, which produces antagonistic interests by pitting the survival needs of different groups against each other on the market - is barely mentioned in TPMF. Following Polanyi himself, at the least the Polanyi of The Great Transformation, they instead rely on the 'market society.' But market society does not work as a substitute for capitalism; as they show, modern political economies are more complex than simple free markets. Their concept is only concerned with exchange. But this is far too limited. How economic activity is linked to domination and exploitation is left unclear. And while TPMF convincingly demonstrates that the economy and politics are mutually constitutive, it doesn’t give any insight into the relationship between economic power and political power. [...] This is not just a matter of emphasis on cultural processes rather than economic interests. It points to a crucial difference between TPMF and accounts of the rise of neoliberalism that emphasize class antagonisms. [...] TPMF is a thorough critique of free market ideas, but discarding capitalism makes its depiction of markets themselves unclear. [...] By ignoring their constituent parts, they spare capitalist markets a full critique."