Prior to the rise of modernity, Karl Polanyi argues, the economy was embedded in the social relations of man. Economic activity – the allocation of scarce resources across society – was no more than an aspect of social behavior, itself defined by the order according which men organized their relationships. With the rise of modernity, however, came the rise of market society – a community arranged not according to organic human relationships, but to the prerogative of the market order. Man’s institutions evolved to unearth the economy from beneath the order of society. Supported by such novel institutions, the economic order, now independent from a definitively human community, made man subordinate to the allocative mechanisms that were once subordinate to – and part of – his relations; the infrastructure of society, as it were, had supplanted the superstructure. Polanyi successfully recognizes the warped structure of modern society, driven not by human ends, but by an economic engine; yet, one is left asking: what of the individual who willingly performs this society? Polanyi, I argue, fails to give a sufficient account of the modern transformation of man into a being who willingly performs the market order. It is not the transformation of social institutions, but the transformation of man himself, that definitively marks the emergence of modern society. Any lesser metamorphosis – including the purely institutional evolution described by Polanyi – would be merely superficial.  [Article<