Markets are the ambivalent gods of our societies. Powerful and fickle, they become subject to our collective hopes and fears. Some believe that they will deliver us from evil by reconciling us with our rivals and fostering in-novation. To others, they will forever corrupt nature, spread inequality, and alienate us from our communities. True to this ambiguity, markets var-iously appear as omnipotent information processors, evolving ecologies, or physical places in our collective imagination.1 Social scientists describe them as emerging from networks of social relations, fields of power posi-tions, ecosystems of competition, or diffuse configurations of material ob-jects, ideas, and human beings.2Diverse as these conceptions and theories of market creation may be, they share one assumption. Regardless of the mechanism that may create and organize the market, its global order is emergent.3 The distinctive fea-ture of the invisible hand, that secularized deity, is its invisibility. Whatever coordination it provides results from a myriad of decentral decisions that follow stochastic principles. For all our efforts to steer, regulate, and con-struct markets, for all the ways in which markets are embedded in other in-stitutions of modern societies, market order is emergent.This assumption is so central that it shows up in practically all theories of market creation.4 As much as economics and sociology may disagree, they are aligned in the fundamental assumption that there is no global plan to the order of markets. Whether we search for the origin of markets in polit-ical struggles over institutions, the decisions of rational individuals, or the configurations of social networks, emergence is always assumed. It orga-nizes the very nexus of contrasting concepts that give meaning to the term market. For example, we frequently distinguish between markets and firms along the lines of this assumption: the market begins where the planning ca-pacities of the firm end.5 Similarly, we think of regulation as deliberate in-tervention into open- ended processes of exchange.