Forced Free Market

In The Quest for Community , Robert Nisbet – no wild-eyed lefty he – argues, following Karl Polyani, that ” Laissez faire . . . was brought into existence.  It was brought into existence by the planned destruction of old customs, associations, villages, and other securities, by the force of the State throwing the weight of its fast-developing administrative system in favor of the new economic elements of the population.”

He adds, “There is, indeed, a sense in which the so-called free market never existed at all save in the imaginations of the rationalists . . . . Most of the relative stability of nineteenth-century capitalism arose from the fact of the very incompleteness of the capitalist revolution,” an incompleteness that left much of the pre-capitalist order intact.