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Supposedly NeoPolanyian analyses of market society however embargo exactly this
prolepsis. This comparative sociology studies socio-organisational systems whose
terms of socialisation would always salvage some level of reciprocity and
redistribution, yet would nevertheless argue that ‘market exchange ... makes sense as
an abstract concept only if it is perceived as a finished transaction taking place
between as many actors as possible who are unaffected by other kinds of established
social relations’(Mingione 1991:3). To this effect, markets are not exactly social
structures. In fact, markets-as-invariants are the decisive explanatory category when
these sociologists analyse perturbations to the foregoing patterns of socialisation and
the terms of change in the overall degree of reciprocity and redistribution within a
society. Market is no longer open to such perturbations or change but it is itself the
crater of social causality. In other words, market concept alone rebuffs the otherwise
theoretical undecidability of thoroughly gratuitous historical and social circumstances.
3.3 Boyer on Capitalism
Non-institutionalist theories(foremostly Marshallian partial equilibrium, Walrasian
general equilibrium, and Chicago paradigm of economics) espouse that a theory of
market economy is enough for the analysis of the form and social consequences of
capitalism as an economic system(Boyer 1996b:38). However there is utmost double
entendre with both practical and later more analytical or even formalistic
understandings of the concept –market. It touches upon either the sectoral patterns of
demand(or the aggregate effective demand for economy at large), or a non-coercive
but competitive coordination mechanism in which commodities ultimately sell at
invariable prices, or even a plenary system of demands for commodity as well as
labour and capital markets via whose terms economic units cavort. ‘Truly existing
institutions are implicitly compared with the ideal of a society co-ordinated by a series
of pure and perfect markets upon which no single individual has any influence but is
free to choose’(Boyer 1996b:96-98). Foremostly Boyer would excoriate the
redundant prevarications in and later the analytical looseness of the concept of market
in these theories of capitalism qua market economy. For a solitary commodity,
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