International inequality and the global crisis – Managing markets for sustainable growth

While in our view the concept of a self-regulating market was utopian, and its progress was stopped by the realistic self-protection of society, in their [liberal] view all protectionism was a mistake due to impatience, greed or shortsightedness, but for which, the market would have resolved its difficulties. The question of which of these two views is correct is perhaps the most important problem of recent social history, involving as it does no less than a decision on the claim of economic liberalism to be the basic organising principle in society. Karl Polanyi (1944: 148).