In contrast to what we normally hear, market society did not come into being in Europe in the nineteenth century. Attempts were made, yes, to create a thorough-going market economy, but they failed. These attempts are well known to historians, they constitute a principal element of the economic and political history of the period. But astonishing asit may seem, neither economic nor social historians have ever systematically considered the question of whether these attempts had the desired effect. The guiding assumption of the age of laissez-faire was that completely unregulated trade equals competitive, self-regulating markets. This assumption still has a profound hold on us today. Hence the tendency to accept as self-evident that laissez-faire reform created a market system. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Attempts to create a market society did transform Europe in the early nineteenth century, of this there can be no doubt, but the results in no way resembled the image that inspired these attempts. Rather than speak of market society for the new social order that resulted, it would perhaps be better to speak of “market culture.”

The advantage of the word culture is that it at least raises the possibility of a disjuncture between perception and reality and forces us to interpret rather than blindly accept language used to describe or restructure social life. When a doctor administers a drug we say he is healing; when a medicine man recites his spell, we say it is his culture. Both have cultures, yes, but the doctor also has penicillin. In the nineteenth century certain medicine men saw a market society emerging and since then many have concurred.