"With an exquisite sense of timing this remarkable collection of uniformly excellent essays by a dazzling array of social scientists, historians, and epidemiologists arrives after an almost 70-year long wait for a contemporary sequel to Karl Polanyi's paradigm-changing critique of the 'standard of living' axiom that higher wages are enough to improve the well-being of a society torn apart by unfettered laissez-faire policies. Just as Polanyi demonstrated that the societal health of a people depends on market-embedding institutional arrangements and a cultural ethic of solidarity, so too Successful Societies represents nothing less than a paradigm-shifting challenge to prevailing market models of what counts as societal success and why some achieve this more than others. Deploying an enormous range of empirical data, the inspiration of thinkers from Amartya Sen to Pierre Bourdieu, and a newly humanized understanding of societal success, the volume is also an urgently needed normative manifesto for the indispensability of egalitarian and inclusive 'social imaginaries' in tandem with institutional foundations for democratic participation." -Margaret Somers, University of Michigan.