As a way into this complex topic, we consider social knowledge forms in the North America and Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is a special reason for this comparison. One of the most powerful challenges to economics’ detachment from the social world was made by the historian Karl Polanyi. In the 1940s, Polanyi rethought how market societies came into existence. The advent of industrial machinery changed everything, requiring long-distance markets to supply the parts that kept machinery moving and sufficient customers to buy what machines produced. Since markets are oriented to exchange for gain regardless of scale, the expansion of national markets across every sector of life severely damaged local social relations; far from being natural, human life organized exclusively around markets proved almost unlivable in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England, the first economy to industrialize, as older ways of organizing resources (for example, the family workplace and the local market) were pulled apart.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 363