Markets are political projects, not natural outcomes of state removal

Evidence

But from the start this liberal view of “the state versus the market” rested upon a misunderstanding: markets naturally appear when you remove the state from the equation. However, as Karl Polanyi noted at the end of World War II, there is nothing natural about markets. Turning people into wage laborers, securing the private ownership of land, even inventing capital and preserving its monetary form are all deeply political projects that involve courts, regulation, enforcement, bureaucracy, and all the rest. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds the Polanyian critique that markets require state construction, central to the anti-austerity argument.
• XREF: Polanyi’s ‘The Great Transformation’ is the standard precursor here; connects to Mattei’s state-construction thesis. — connects to: Markets are constructed artifacts requiring sustained political maintenance, not spontaneous phenomena. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 773; Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 364; The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1852 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Markets are constructed artifacts requiring sustained political maintenance, not spontaneous phenomena. #corroborates (0.95) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 773
• Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence #corroborates (0.93) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 364
• The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered #corroborates (0.88) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1852
• Wartime state intervention exposed market arrangements as political choices, not natural facts #exemplifies (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 34
• Neoliberalism endorses wide state action to construct markets, not laissez-faire. #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 431
• Private property under capitalism was constructed by state institutions, not spontaneously #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 69