Wealth & Money Quote by Peter L. Berger

Berger’s “however” does a lot of quiet work. It signals he’s not offering a love letter to capitalism so much as carving out one narrow, pragmatic advantage: markets can create exit ramps. If your paycheck, your housing, your food, your status all flow through the state, dissent is not just risky, it’s logistically difficult. A market economy, in Berger’s telling, introduces alternative patrons and parallel institutions - employers, associations, churches, publishers, informal networks - that can keep a person afloat when the government turns punitive.

The key phrase is “some possibility.” Berger refuses the triumphalist claim that markets automatically equal freedom. He’s describing probability, not destiny: a structural loosening of the state’s grip, not its disappearance. That cautious framing matches a sociologist’s instinct to talk in terms of incentives and institutional arrangements rather than moral absolutes.

The subtext is Cold War lived experience filtered through social theory. Berger, shaped by Europe’s 20th-century catastrophes and American pluralism, is pushing back on the seductive idea that political liberation can be delivered by a single, all-coordinating apparatus. Centralized power, even when justified as benevolent, tends to demand monopoly control over livelihoods. Markets disrupt that monopoly - sometimes in messy, unequal ways - by scattering economic decision-making across many hands.

It’s also a warning to liberals and conservatives alike: the “escape” he’s defending isn’t comfort, it’s leverage. Freedom here looks less like heroic speech and more like the mundane ability to quit, relocate, affiliate, publish, hire, and survive without asking the state’s permission.