Polanyi’s The Great Transformation offers a foundational critique of market liberalism by arguing that the self-regulating market was never a natural or spontaneous order, but a historically constructed and politically enforced project. Its central claim is that nineteenth-century liberalism attempted to subordinate society to the market by treating labour, land and money as commodities, although none had been produced for sale: labour is human activity, land is nature, and money is a social institution. Polanyi calls these fictitious commodities, and his argument turns on the destructive consequences of organising social life around their market valuation. A society that allows wages, nature and credit to be governed solely by price mechanisms risks disintegrating its human, ecological and institutional foundations. For this reason, market expansion always generates a counter-movement of social protection, as workers, communities, businesses and states seek safeguards against insecurity, unemployment, environmental degradation and financial instability. This is Polanyi’s famous double movement: liberalisation pushes towards disembedding the economy from social relations, while society reacts by re-embedding markets within law, welfare, regulation and democratic control. The case of the gold standard illustrates this dynamic with particular force. Designed as an international mechanism of automatic adjustment, it imposed intolerable pressures on national populations by demanding deflation, wage reductions and social sacrifice in order to preserve monetary stability. Rather than producing peace and prosperity, it intensified protectionism, imperial rivalry and political crisis, ultimately contributing to the collapse of liberal civilisation between the First World War, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Polanyi’s enduring contribution is therefore to show that markets are always embedded in political and moral orders, and that freedom cannot mean liberation of the economy from society. In a complex society, genuine freedom requires institutions capable of protecting human beings and nature from being reduced to instruments of exchange.