Debt Abides: A Prolegomena for Any Future Chapter 11

This article presents information related to market transactions. As a mode of organization, markets are so pervasive in our own lives that it may be hard to think just how novel and contingent (in geologic time) they may be. It was economist Karl Polanyi who sought to isolate a juncture in this process of "becoming a market", the point at which the idea of the market transaction becomes not just a tool or an instrument, but a central organizing principle of social life. But it is not clear that even Polanyi would have been able to conceive a later stage, a stage in which the market becomes not merely a tool of the firm or an expression of sovereignty, but a substitute for the firm and for sovereignty itself.