The critical response to economic liberalism offered by Polanyi is that social catastrophe is primarily a cultural rather than an economic phenomenon. ...

The economic process may ... supply the vehicle of destruction ... but the immediate cause of undoing is not for that reason economic: it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which social existence is embodied. The result is loss of self-respect and standards, whether the unit is a people or class, whether the process springs from so-called 'culture conflict' or from a change in the position of a class within the confines of a society. -M. Polanyi (1968)

(Barry Smart, Economy, Culture and Society (2003), 30-31)