The science called 'economics' is based on an initial act of
abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of
practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social
order in which all human practice is immersed. This immersion,
some aspects or effects of which one finds in Karl Polanyi's notion of
'embeddedness', obliges us (even when, for the purposes of
increasing knowledge, we are forced to treat it otherwise) to
conceive every practice, beginning with the practice which presents
itself, most obviously and in the strictest sense, as 'economic', as a
'total social fact' in Marcel Mauss's sense.