It was men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of civilization . . . It does not matter whether men in the past did submit from beliefs which some now regard as superstition . . . The refusal to yield to forces which we neither understand nor can recognize as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism. It is incomplete because it fails to comprehend that co-ordination of the multifarious individual efforts in a complex society must take account of facts no individual can completely survey. And it also fails to see that . . . the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 227