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258 ] The Great Transformation
were let alone. Thus, nothing could be more normal than an economic
system consisting of markets and under the sole control of market
prices, and a human society based on such markets appeared, there-
fore, as the goal of all progress. Whatever the desirability or undesir-
ability of such a society on moral grounds, its practicability—this was
axiomatic—was grounded in the immutable characteristics of the
race.
Actually, as we now know, the behavior of man both in his primi-
tive state and right through the course of history has been almost the
opposite from that implied in this view. Frank H. Knight's "no spe-
cifically human motive is economic" applies not only to social life in
general, but even to economic life itself. The tendency to barter, on
which Adam Smith so confidently relied for his picture of primitive
man, is not a common tendency of the human being in his economic
activities, but a most infrequent one. Not only does the evidence of
modern anthropology give the lie to these rationalistic constructs, but
the history of trade and markets also has been completely different
from that assumed in the harmonistic teachings of nineteenth cen-
tury sociologists. Economic history reveals that the emergence of na-
tional markets was in no way the result of the gradual and spon-
taneous emancipation of the economic sphere from governmental
control. On the contrary, the market has been the outcome of a con-
scious and often violent intervention on the part of government
which imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic
ends. And the self-regulating market of the nineteenth century turns
out on closer inspection to be radically different from even its imme-
diate predecessor in that it relied for its regulation on economic self-
interest.
The congenital weakness of nineteenth-century society was not
that it was industrial but that it was a market society. Industrial civiliza-
tion will continue to exist when the Utopian experiment of a self-
regulating market will be no more than a memory.
Yet the shifting of industrial civilization onto a new nonmarketing
basis seems to many a task too desperate to contemplate. They fear an
institutional vacuum or, even worse, the loss of freedom. Need these
perils prevail?
Much of the massive suffering inseparable from a period of transi-
tion is already behind us. In the social and economic dislocation of
our age, in the tragic vicissitudes of the depression, fluctuations of
currency, mass unemployment, shiftings of social status, spectacular