Santhi Hejeebu and Deirdre McCloskey's rebuttal to Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation begs several important questions. Yes, commerce can be found throughout human history—but is that the same as saying that people have been equally capitalistic at all times? If not, then how did modern capitalism come into being? Hejeebu and McCloskey portray capitalism as having evolved gradually, indeed quite naturally, rather than being a contingent product of politics. Not inconsistently, Hejeebu and McCloskey radically distinguish between what people “think” and what (...) they “do"—that is, between their ideas and their actions. This distinction, too, suggests that human action is ahistorically capitalistic—whatever human agents at different times and places might think. (shrink)

Mark Blyth's rebuttal to our constructive critique of Polanyi “blithely” takes for granted the accuracy of Polanyi's now‐outdated historiography of capitalism—by means of a loose, overly expansive definition of capitalism that question‐beggingly equates it with modernity. Blyth emphasizes the need to view markets as “socially embedded,” with which we agree—but he appears not to take account of the individual self‐interest that is thus embedded. Similarly, he asserts a priori the role of ideas in history, in parallel to the economists he (...) condemns (unfairly) for reading ideas out of history a priori. All of this poorly serves the cause of extracting Polanyi's welcome emphasis on social embeddedness and on the empirical from the ideological and methodological certitudes and errors in which The Great Transformation placed them. (shrink)