The recent boom in scholarship concerned with Polanyi’s ideas creates the impression of a major thinker whose ideas have been examined in their minute details. That is far from the reality. In fact, there are still no more than a handful of monographs on Polanyi’s life and ideas.^{Footnote 1} Furthermore, until the early 1980s, Polanyi’s influence in the social sciences was limited to his studies in comparative economic history, economic anthropology, and the classics. Fittingly for the eventful life and unorthodox career of a true original such as Karl Polanyi, the widespread influence of his magnum opus, The Great Transformation, did not materialize until the 2000s. These two factors, the paucity of authoritative analyses on Polanyi and the belated scholarly attention to The Great Transformation, have impeded Polanyi’s influence in mainstream sociology. As such, while Polanyi is a common reference point in the study of markets, few sociological studies explore the rich potential of Polanyi’s thought. The Power of Market Fundamentalism is an attempt to fill this gap. This book combines several previously published essays—all of them substantially revised—with three original chapters. By packaging these essays into an original synthesis, Block and Somers investigate the seductive appeal of free-market doctrines and the dynamics of the Polanyian double movement since the end of World War II. The result is a timely and welcome contribution to Polanyi scholarship for at least two reasons. First, Block and Somers provide an insightful analysis and incisive critique of the tyranny of market fundamentalism. Second, the authors offer the outline of a Polanyi-inspired sociology on the market society and its contradictions.

In contrast to its current status as a landmark in the social sciences, The Great Transformation (TGT hereafter) had a limited impact after its publication. In fact, Polanyi’s main influence in the decades following TGT emerged from his work on pre-modern economies, which generated significant scholarly debate in economic anthropology, economic history, and classical studies.^{Footnote 2} However, despite the intensity of these debates, the influence of Polanyian scholarship was not commensurate with the scope and theoretical ambition of TGT. That was to change gradually in the 1980s, most likely due to the momentous transformations that occurred in the world economy during the 1970s. Befitting the fecundity of Polanyi’s work and the cross-disciplinary nature of TGT, Polanyi became an explicit reference point in international political economy, comparative-historical sociology, economic sociology, and economic history.^{Footnote 3} However, almost all of these creative uses of Polanyi’s ideas relied on only one aspect of his work, ignoring the rest of Polanyi’s rich scholarship. Meticulous analyses of Polanyi’s life and thought began to appear only in the 1990s. The secondary literature on Polanyi received a major boost from the republication of TGT in 2001. The 2007-2008 crisis, which highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of neoliberalism, further contributed to the substantial growth of interest in Polanyi’s ideas. Two issues recur in this increasingly sophisticated body of literature. The first issue has to do with the meanings of and interconnections between key Polanyian concepts such as self-regulating market, fictitious commodities, embeddedness, and double movement. The second issue is concerned with the application of Polanyi’s ideas to the study of contemporary capitalism and markets. The scholars working on these two issues find a common source of inspiration in Polanyi for studying neoliberalism, economic globalization, and contradictions of market society. Yet, the field is characterized by divergent interpretations and the absence of a shared research agenda.

In this context, The Power of Market Fundamentalism comes as a bold theoretical statement articulating a particular research agenda on the place of the economy in society. The theoretical apparatus of Block and Somers’s book rests on three interrelated propositions. First, markets are a necessary peril in complex societies. They are necessary because markets embody individual choice in societies with a complex organization. They are perilous because they subject all aspects of social life, includingş human beings, to the brutal mechanisms of commodification and fluctuating prices. Second, markets are always and everywhere embedded. Polanyi’s idea of embeddedness has been at the center of an ongoing cross-disciplinary debate in recent years.^{Footnote 4} Instead of being mired in sterile debates revolving around the embeddedness-disembeddedness dichotomy, Block and Somers employ the notion of always-embeddedness to underline the utopian nature of the self-regulating market as an idea. This implies, in turn, that the ideological project to “free” markets is actually an exercise in fundamentalism with dystopian consequences.^{Footnote 5} For Block and Somers, the rebirth of liberalism from its ashes since the early 1970s is best characterized as a project to re-regulate markets––to re-embed them in an institutional framework that favors the myopic interests of the business sector. Third, the seductive power of market fundamentalism hinges upon the promised land of civic and social life without politics. This, the authors suggest, is the most pernicious aspect of market fundamentalism as a system of beliefs.

Block and Somers lay out multiple themes through this tripartite foundation, each one of these themes corresponding to one of the substantive chapters in the book. The substantive chapters are united by the double movement thesis. Thus, Chapter 2 proposes that the economy is an instituted process. It delves into the ideas that underlie Polanyi’s methodologically holistic analysis of economy and society. The authors outline the distinction between formal and substantive meanings of the term “economic” and how this distinction leads Polanyi to recognize the institutional nature of economic activities and processes. Such a theoretical standpoint posits that the economic is “embedded and enmeshed” in social institutions ranging from the family to the state. Chapter 3 revisits the notion of embeddedness and advances the idea of always-embedded economy—“that market societies must construct elaborate rules and institutional structures to limit the individual pursuit of gain and risk degenerating into a Hobbesian war of all against all” (2014, p. 94). This proposition, originally published in 2003, is not universally accepted.^{Footnote 6} However, critics often miss the fact that the idea of an always-embedded economy provides a plausible resolution to some of the contradictions in Polanyi’s work. By rejecting the thesis that the economy has become autonomous and is the determining factor in market societies, Block and Somers emphasize the utopian and destructive nature of the self-regulation idea that is the cornerstone of market fundamentalism (2014, pp. 79-80).

The corollaries of the concept of the always-embedded economy are explored first in Chapter 4, one of the essays written expressly for this book. In that chapter, the authors examine the seductive appeal of the autonomous economy. Here, Block and Somers advance one of the most insightful arguments of their book. The ideas of self-regulation and the free markets are utopian, they argue, because the economy is always embedded. There is no escape from the reality that political power and the state are the core building blocks of markets, precisely because fictitious commodities—land, labor, and money—are embedded in social relations through state action in these economies. Yet, the political realm is messy and conflict-ridden. Block and Somers show that the appeal of free-market ideas is rooted in the vision of an autonomous, natural social order that eliminates the messiness of the political realm. However, because markets are politically embedded, this “dream of eliminating the need for political power or government” is ultimately a dangerous utopia (2014, pp. 101, 108-113).

Chapter 5 offers substantiation to Block and Somers’s claim regarding the political embeddedness of markets by probing into the Speenhamland Act and its consequences—a period of British history that Polanyi himself analyzed in detail in TGT. Block and Somers’s analysis of Speenhamland, first published in 2003, is a landmark contribution to Polanyi scholarship for two reasons. First, it revises Polanyi’s account of Speenhamland in a significant manner, while agreeing with him on the importance of the Speenhamland episode for the development of classical political economy. Second, it provides a compelling account of how state policies and power were determining factors in the creation of a modern labor market in England during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 6 continues the theme of embeddedness by examining how markets, labor markets in particular, are ideationally embedded. Here, Block and Somers present an innovative thesis on the power of free-market ideas by studying how these ideas gained “epistemic privilege” over two centuries of welfare debate (2014, p. 156). Their explanation of the free-market ideas’ epistemic privilege centers on three ideational causal mechanisms: theoretical realism, conversion narrative, and social naturalism. Theoretical realism is a claim on the epistemological priority of theory over empirical observations (2014, pp. 169-170). Conversion narrative is a particular discursive strategy that aims to “change perceptions of reality” through causal stories that contrast periods of crisis with an imagined harmonious past (2014, p. 171).

Social naturalism, both an ontological and epistemological stance, is the most important of these three causal mechanisms. Its underlying idea is the depiction of society as a biological entity that obeys the laws of nature (2014, p. 166). Block and Somers argue that such a portrayal establishes a mapping between the market and nature. The logical conclusion of such a mapping is the claim that the market, like nature, has its own dynamics that tend toward equilibrium when left to its own devices. Any interference with the market, free-market doctrines assert, results in a perversion of the natural order. Social naturalism is a key tenet of market fundamentalism because it underlies a dogmatic denial of the political bases of the market as a social order. It is this utopian belief in the separation between politics and markets that Block and Somers demolish through their empirical analyses of the political embeddedness of markets (Chapters 5, 6, and 7).

Taken together, Chapters 2 to 7 have a consistent focus on the double movement thesis—the “long-term contestation” between market fundamentalism and social movements that defend the collective aspect of social existence by “establishing institutional protections” against market domination (2014, p. 220). In the final chapter of the book, Block and Somers outline a Polanyian public philosophy by linking the double movement thesis to the notion of “the reality of society”. This seemingly cryptic idea serves two functions in Polanyi’s thought. On the one hand, it draws attention to the ontological character of society “as comprising multiple social institutions and dense networks of social relationships” (2014, p. 226). On the other hand, it underscores an epistemological and methodological commitment to knowledge based on the recognition of “the interdependence of persons and institutions” (2014, pp. 227-28). The upshot of all this is that the penchant of orthodox economics for deductive theorizing based on methodological individualism and simplistic axioms amounts to a denial of the reality of society.

The greatest achievement of The Power of Market Fundamentalism lies in erecting a conceptual scaffolding capable of answering fundamental questions on markets in modern capitalist societies. The substantive analyses in this book illustrate the fruitfulness of this theoretical apparatus in guiding empirical research. Furthermore, Block and Somers’s book brims with positive propositions on the governance of markets—propositions that are animated by strong moral and political convictions. This combination of big questions, sound analysis, and moral-political philosophy results in an illuminating direction for a Polanyian sociology.

This particular Polanyian sociology may generate criticism. While Block and Somers offer an insightful account of the inherent tensions in market societies, their analysis does not examine the dynamics of production and capitalist accumulation. This silence is notable for a book that aims to explain major historical transformations since the end of World War II. However, it is not an omission. Block (2012, p. 271) recently issued a call for a reconsideration of “the analytic value of capitalism as a concept”.^{Footnote 7} He further argued that, compared to the concept of capitalism, Polanyi’s notion of market society offers more analytic leverage in understanding “dynamics within both national societies and the global economy” (2012, p. 283). While this is a thought-provoking suggestion, it also faces serious criticism.^{Footnote 8} For instance, Hung (2012, p. 310), while agreeing on the power and analytic value of a Polanyian approach to market society, contends that “[i]t is at best counterproductive to throw away the concept of capitalism altogether”. It is not difficult to imagine that The Power of Market Fundamentalism will be subject to similar scholarly criticism.

However, such debates should not obscure the insights of this impressive book. After all, Block and Somers do not assert that their outline of a Polanyian sociology is the only way to understand markets in modern societies. Nor do they suggest that their theoretical framework is the only possible expansion of Polanyi’s ideas. In fact, the authors are remarkably reflective about the scope of their own interpretation and vision of a Polanyian sociology. The complexity, richness, and depth of Polanyi’s ideas lend his intellectual work to multiple interpretations. That Block and Somers develop a promising agenda for a Polanyian sociology without insisting on a particular interpretation is a testament to the unique strength of their work. Theirs is an important book in that it demonstrates a coherent and fruitful sociological framework that builds on—but is not limited by—Polanyi’s ideas. Block and Somers deploy this framework to make sense of a fundamental transformation of the place of the economy in society, a Polanyian project par excellence. As such, The Power of Market Fundamentalism is a brilliant and generative book that is likely to occupy a central role in Polanyi-inspired research for years to come.