This article re-interprets and develops Polanyi’s substantive institutionalist analysis of capitalist market economies and the market society in the light of two more recent approaches to the same issues.[1] These are the Parisian ‘regulation school’ on contemporary capitalism and systems-theoretical accounts of the modern economy. All three regard the capitalist economy (or, for autopoietic systems theory, the market economy) as an operationally autonomous system that is nonetheless socially embedded and needful of complex forms of social regulation.