MARKETS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXTS: IDEAS AND POLITICS IN THE MODERN WORLD; ED. BY MARK BEVIR

Markets in Historical Contexts is the result of a dialogue between historians and social scientists thinking about markets in modern society. How should we approach markets after the collapse of Marxism? What alternative ways of thinking about markets can we recover from the past? The essays in this volume set out to challenge essentialist accounts of the market. Instead they suggest that markets are always embedded in distinctive traditions and practices that shape the ways in which they are conceived and the manner of their working. The essays range widely over European and non-European societies from the eighteenth century to the present, from the great transformation to globalization. Rational peasants, republican economists, popular conservatives, guild theorists, early environmentalists, communitarians, progressives, consumers, Gandhi's descendants and others are all revived. The volume thus recovers alternative ways of thinking about markets, many of which are neglected or marginalized in contemporary debates. Cover......Page 1 Half-title......Page 3 Title......Page 5 Copyright......Page 6 Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgements......Page 9 Contributors......Page 10 1 Markets in historical contexts: ideas, practices and governance......Page 13 The turn to governance......Page 18 Embedded markets: networks, traditions and ideals......Page 22 Theorizing economic governance......Page 31 2 Improving justice: communities of norms in the Great Transformation......Page 37 Making peasants modern: improvement and its practices in the eighteenth century......Page 40 Conclusion......Page 55 The limits of the received story......Page 58 The meaning of political economy before the Revolution......Page 63 Rousseau’s modern republicanism for small states......Page 66 Physiocracy as a Christian critique of modernity......Page 69 The innovative political economy of the 1790s......Page 73 ‘Modern’ versus ‘democratic’ republicanism......Page 76 4 Tories and markets: Britain 1800–1850......Page 82 5 Guild theory and guild organization in France and Germany during the nineteenth century......Page 102 6 Thinking green, nineteenth-century style: John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin......Page 117 Mill’s neo-Malthusian environmentalism......Page 119 Romantic environmentalism......Page 123 A non-Christian environmentalist ethic......Page 127 Ruskin’s environmentalism......Page 131 Economic man, market failure and welfare economics......Page 135 I......Page 141 II......Page 144 III......Page 150 IV......Page 152 8 German historicism, progressive social thought, and the interventionist state in the United States since the 1880s......Page 157 The German historical school and American genteel reform......Page 159 Historicizing capitalism......Page 163 Relativizing morality......Page 165 The rejection of liberal reform......Page 166 The ethical potential of industrial capitalism......Page 169 Progressive democracy and the state......Page 171 Two conceptions of progressive democracy......Page 174 Progressive thought and US social policy......Page 176 Conclusion......Page 180 9 Civilizing markets: traditions of consumer politics in twentieth-century Britain, Japan and the United States......Page 182 The ideological foundations of consumer politics at the turn of the twentieth century......Page 183 Consumer politics in transformation......Page 193 Consumerism after world war II......Page 201 Conclusion......Page 212 Introduction......Page 214 Embedded markets, Indian policy reform and the ideological context......Page 215 Contested conceptions of swadeshi......Page 223 Governance, Mandir politics and the redefinition of swadeshi......Page 229 Conclusion......Page 233 11 The locational and institutional embeddedness of electronic markets: the case of the global capital markets......Page 236 Has the ultimate market arrived?......Page 237 The market for capital today......Page 238 In the digital era: more concentration than dispersal?......Page 245 The continuing utility of spatial agglomeration......Page 248 The global capital market and the state......Page 253 Conclusion......Page 257 Index......Page 259 Presenting a much-needed corrective to the model of the "free market", authoritative contributors make historically-informed, interdisciplinary inquiries into the nature of market involvement in social, cultural and political relations. They examine critical thinkers, social movements and organizations and the ways in which they have influenced market relations from the eighteenth century to the present. The volume recreates those critical traditions and reform movements which sought to negotiate a path between the free market and the Marxist utopia of a society without markets. This book presents a much-needed corrective to the model of the 'free market' which has come to dominate public and academic life. Leading historians, theorists and social scientists offer historically-informed, interdisciplinary inquiries into the embeddedness of markets in social, cultural and political relations from the eighteenth century to the present Leading academics offer a historically-informed, interdisciplinary inquiry into markets and their social and political relations