Summary:

Gunnar Heinsohn gives an account of the controversy between the "substantivist" Polanyi school and the "formalist" neoclassical protagonists of an eternal and universal market prevailing in economic anthropology. While the "substantivists" were on the right track in demonstrating that the market and the underlying assumption of the homo oeconomicus cannot be found in all forms of human organisations, they could not identify the societal structure that makes market exchange effective: the institution of property.