For example, it is useful to note that, although these two terms are names associated with economic systems, they are associated with a whole range of social and cultural systems as well. Specific kinds of cultures exhibit to greater or lesser degrees and in one form or another economic systems that express (or fail to express, depending on the political structures involved) the ideals of those cultures. In The Livelihood of Man, Polanyi takes the whole of economistic (his word) thought to task for viewing the whole of society through a filter of the market. He calls this, indeed, an "economistic fallacy" of historiography and philosophy, and he develops a kind of deconstructionist approach to political, social, economic, and other categories of history, naming what he sees as fundamental to an analysis of political economy by also naming what others have mistakenly seen as fundamental:
Realistic thinkers vainly spelled out the distinction between the economy in general and its market forms; time and again the distinction was obliterated by the economistic Zeitgeist. These thinkers emphasized the substantive meaning of economic. They identified the economy with industry rather than business; with technology rather than ceremonialism; with means of production rather than titles to property; with productive capital rather than finance; with capital goods rather than capital--in short, with the economic substance rather than its marketing form and terminology (Polanyi 6).
Gradually, politics, sociology, and even psychology were seen in market- and economy-related terms, and in western societies as a whole, there came to be an "identity of market and society . . . and the picture of inner man and society induced by life in a market economy necessarily followed from the essential structure of a human community organized through the market" (Polanyi 10). Thus it is that Milton Friedman extols the virtues of free capitalism as ...