This essay proposes a reflection, as erudite as it is acute, 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, as a collective identity and as an autonomous forum to judge value. Paolo Prodi shows that the mercantile system, contrary to what is usually thought, 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 the law to contract, the market has entered a profound metamorphosis whose contours we barely glimpse. A lucid book that offers thoughtful keys to glimpse the direction of the coming decades.