While Polanyi's description of the economic disorder caused by the self-regulating market still has great resonance, his prediction of that same market's denouement seems precipitous, at least with the benefit of hindsight. For at the onset of the twenty-first century, we find that stable currencies, the fight against inflation, and the unfettered mobility of capital have once again come to be seen as “the touchstones of rationality in politics” throughout the world. Yet Polanyi's analysis contains within it an insight that is still of great value: his concept of the “double movement” as the motor of institutional change.

Polanyi argued, contrary to conventional economic wisdom, that markets were neither neutral in their distributionary effects nor natural in their origins. In particular, Polanyi saw labor as “embedded” in a series of quite “natural” social relationships that made the construction of market institutions and impersonal exchange extremely difficult.