Countervailing Powers : The Political Economy of Market, Before and After Adam Smith

This book will trace the trajectory of the surprising idea that the victims of monopolistic conspiracies should be allowed to fight back using the same fraudulent and immoral weapons as the conspirators. In other words, if left to itself, the market will produce the antibodies necessary to survival, notwithstanding its most sinister pathology - the tendency of its principals to conclude private agreements behind the scenes. Originally conceived in a moral context halfway through the 16th century, the idea was then taken over by the world of commercial law in exactly the form it had been employed theologically. Surprisingly, though, after doing the rounds for over a century, it then disappeared without trace. This book will look at how Adam Smith revived and recharged the idea. He applied it in The Wealth of Nations (1776) to the conflict of interest between employers and workers in the attempt to break the stranglehold of the artificial compression of wages to minimum subsistence level. After Smith, the freshly revived idea went underground again for another half-century until, in the 1820s, it assumed a front-row position in the newborn liberal political economics. This book will look at how, in the framework of the debate over the repeal of the Combination Laws, the idea was dusted down and put back in the fight, having first been stripped it off its moral clothes and dressed instead in the new robes of economic pragmatism.-- Provided by publisher Acknowledgements......Page 5 Contents......Page 7 1 Introduction......Page 9 References......Page 17 Capitalists Stack the Deck......Page 19 Vulnerable Interests......Page 25 Must Wages Be Low?......Page 32 Markets Besieged by Combinations......Page 44 References......Page 50 The Right to Resist Takes on a New Guise......Page 56 A Doubly Heterodox Idea......Page 64 From Moral Theology to Commercial Law......Page 74 Defending Commerce, Defending Society......Page 78 References......Page 82 Ideas That Refuse to Die......Page 87 The Market Heals Itself......Page 91 Smith’s Disenchanted and Merciless Gaze......Page 97 The Monopolising Principle......Page 102 References......Page 107 Reality Consists of Numbers......Page 111 Better to Keep Them in Chains......Page 115 The Economic Rebirth of a Moral Principle......Page 127 Self-Regulating Society: The Giants Take Each Other Out......Page 136 References......Page 143 Bibliography......Page 145 Index......Page 159 Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Adam Smith, Workers' Rights And The Political Side Of The Market -- Chapter 3. Monopoly Versus Monopoly -- Chapter 4. Against The Current -- Chapter 5. Who's Afraid Of Giants? Riccardo Rosolino. Electronic Reproduction. Ann Arbor, Mi Available Via World Wide Web.