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. Mans
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.
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