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09115_Field_TCGG T880.txt
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1996-04-10
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A market economy “can exist only in a market society.”
But to exist, a market society requires centuries of
transformation by Gutenberg technology; hence, the absurdity
in the present time of trying to institute market economies in
countries like Russia or Hungary, where feudal conditions
obtained until the twentieth century. It is possible to set up
modern production in such areas, but to create a market
economy that can handle what comes off the assembly lines
presupposes a long period of psychic transformation, which is
to say, a period of altering perception and sense ratios.
When a society is enclosed within a particular fixed sense
ratio, it is quite unable to envisage another state of affairs.
Thus, the advent of nationalism was quite unforeseen in the
Renaissance, although its causes arrived earlier. The Industrial
Revolution was well on the way in 1795, yet, as Polanyi points