On either side of the World Financial Crisis of 2008, two of Britain’s leading economic commentators each published an article titled “The Failure of Market Failure.” The economist John Kay went first, arguing in August 2007 that invocation of market failure to legitimize state intervention “concedes too much to market fundamentalists.” By accepting the notion that markets can be complete and efficient – that it is imaginable that markets succeed in delivering a social optimum on their own – center-left politicians implicitly accept the methodological individualism and narrow definition of rationality of neoclassical economics. In so doing, they ignore the fact that interventions at systemic scale, such as Britain’s National Health Service, could only be established and maintained by collective action in response to motives (such as compassion and solidarity) not reducible to individual, material incentives.

Some fifteen months later, as the financial crisis paralyzed the market economy, the journalist Will Hutton and his collaborator Philippe Schneider published an article under the same title and began with a similar critique: