Moral Views of Market Society

  • First, economists still endorse the doux commerce thesis and generally emphasize the positive effect of market institutions on civil society, politics, and culture. “the liberal dream”
  • Second, public intellectuals and critics from various disciplines continue to critique the market. “commodified nightmare.”
  • Finally, economic sociologists have leaned toward Hirschman’s third cate-gory: markets as relatively feeble compared to culture and society.
  • Go beyond: indirect relationship.
  1. Civilizing

  • Complex relation

    • Economic theory is built on assumptions whose implicit moral content can be drawn out in detail.

    • Different virtues:

      • Doux-commerce: honest behavior, civility, and cooperation Hayek: cooperation with no one in charge international view: “a civilized nation has to be a trading nation.” “The pure, abstract, and anonymous common sense of the market situation is routinely transformed into an actual social relation as people seek to reduce the problems posed by information asymmetries and opportunism. "

      • Freedom of political and cultural life Hayek and Friedman: the political and economic freedom are inseparable.

        • Free markets allow needs and desires to be satisfied and therefore help make people happy. Consumer sovereignty is another political freedom.
        • Competitive economic arrangements are the best defense of arbitrary interference by the state and against the concentration of economic power.

      • Economic growth as a condition for human progress, Markets liberate creativity and innovation

  1. Destructive markets

  • Envy and Wants, instead of virtue

    • Veblen: people consume goods to impress others. “It transforms the canons of ethics, aesthetic taste, and the sense of devotion by replacing them with a general respect for wealth and pecuniary expense.”

    • Schor, The Overspent American: anxiety over the constant ratcheting of lifestyles, looming indebtedness, and the social and ecological costs of goods ought to generate a potent political critique of consumption.

    • Two mechanisms of social critique of affluence

      • The competitive instinct <– individuals unconsciously positioning themselves vis-a-vis others through their lifestyles. Tastes produce anxiety.
      • Acknowledgment that our wants and tastes are not simply internally driven.

  • Coercion and exclusion, instead of cooperation

    • Sandel: market exchange is based on severe inequality and thus not involuntary.
    • Ackerman & Heizerling, Anderson: Market is only one mode of valuing things
    • Marx: alienation and commodity fetishism. The reformation of traditional social relations. Bourdieu. Egyptian cases: Elyachar 2005; Mitchell 2002.
    • Polanyi: the moral issue and poor relief.

  • Market Populism, instead of freedom

    • Frank: during the economic expansion of the 1990s, Friedmanite ideas of market liberalism and anti-elitism about culture were fused with the new economy to promote the argument that free markets are fundamentally democratic.

  • Copyright, instead of creativity

    • Adorno & Horkheimer: the production of culture is organized in an industrial manner and follows the logic of profit rather than aesthetics.
    • Jameson: the free trade of goods and ideas leads to standardization in cultural practices on a world scale.
    • A world with highly restrictive property rights on cultural goods might well come to have the kind of atrophied culture envisaged by the Frankfurt school.
  1. Feeble Markets: shackles and blessings

Different from the above two, it believes that markets are not such powerful institutions after all. Markets are embedded in, entangled with, or otherwise dependent on other parts of society.

  • Realist View: capitalism thrives in certain cultures, whereas other cultures remain stuck.

    • Weber: the relationship between every world religion and its economic ethics.
    • Hamilton: different path into capitalism.
    • Greif: how different expectations to others’ actions in each cultural context leads to different paths of economic development.

  • Voluntarist View: the conditions that will help capitalism thrive can be implemented as a package by way of political intervention

    • There are right and wrong institutions when it comes to the development of market.

Market-friendly institutions: strong property rights, well-developed financial markets, corporate governance.

  • Right institutions is a package to be implemented more or less anywhere.

Shock therapies: fast moving institutions vs. slow-moving institutions.

  • Evans: a successful industrialization must rely on a combination of state capacity and a working connection between public administration and private capita Chibber: the culture of bureaucratic rationality** ** If the culture of bureaucratic rationality is squandered in the competitive process among state agencies with no proper disciplinary oversight, development strategies are unlikely to be successful.

  • Differentiated view: capitalism follows different paths in different places.

Institutions or culture –> economic growth

Different cultures or institutional configurations directly support different types of capitalisms or industrial strategies.

  • Dobbin: different paths <– different moral perceptions about how to maintain social order. Negative
  1. New Direction?

Markets are culture, not just because they are the products of human practice and sense making, but because markets are explicitly moral projects saturated with normativity.

  • Markets making morality.

All social actors, including social scientists themselves, participate in the process of defining markets as moral things.Markets create moral boundaries between persons or societies.

Market is saturated with ethic meanings. E.g. moralizing aspect of payment systems. Markets play a powerful moralizing role by defining categories of worth

Markets are the site of moral conflicts between social actors with different justificatory principles. The logic of efficiency seems to depoliticize social relations, for example, by masking the political conflicts inherent in many kinds of economic policy, and this apparent objectivity helps reinforce its legitimacy.

  • Economists and the construction of calculative agencies

Economic technologies do not just describe the world, but are profoundly involved in shaping it. performativity MacKenzie 2006 homo economicus is made flesh by economic technologies.

  • Generic performativity
  • Effective performativity
  • Barnesian performativity

Connect two lines: categorical consistency and comparability

  • The Governmentalization of the economy