This essay offers a reflection, as erudite as it is insightful, on the genesis of the market in the West, that space that, between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, established itself in Europe as a subject, a collective identity, and an autonomous forum for judging the value of commodities. Paolo Prodi shows that the mercantile system, contrary to popular belief, historically represented a unitary whole that gave rise to the affirmation of the rule of law, democracy, and social and economic freedoms, to the point that democracy cannot survive without the market, nor the market without political democracy. However, in the era of globalization, when economic power demands a new "à la carte" law that reduces law to a contract, the market has entered into a profound metamorphosis whose contours we are barely catching a glimpse of. A lucid book that offers thoughtful clues for gazing at the direction of the coming decades.