Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence

Evidence

Polanyi concluded that “a market economy can only exist in a market society,” which must be created through “highly artificial stimulants administered to the body social.” This happened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through what Polanyi calls a double movement; first, a profound institutional reorganization made markets (in particular in labor, land, and finance) into social realities, turning “all transactions … into money transactions”; second, over time, a countermovement of compensatory mechanisms emerged to control market relations and make them socially livable. Key developments were the regulation of labor, land markets, and the financial sector. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 364

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ — market creation followed by compensating social control — a conceptual framework the book will map onto data colonialism.
• XREF: connects to: Markets are political projects, not natural outcomes of state removal — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 266; States make markets as much as markets determine states — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 266; Locke naturalized market creation as inevitable to defend his class’s property project — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 281 (+17 more)

Broader Connections

• The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered #corroborates (0.97) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1852
• Markets are constructed artifacts requiring sustained political maintenance, not spontaneous phenomena. #corroborates (0.95) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 773
• Hayekian neoliberalism requires active rule-design to insulate markets from politics #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 360
• The media economy is a political construction, not a natural market #exemplifies (0.78) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 62
• The social market economy was a political tool, not a closed economic theory. #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 554
• Expansionist competition among empires required political and police restraint, not market self-regulation #exemplifies (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 347