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. Acknowledgements List of contributors 1. Markets in historical contexts: ideas, practices and governance Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann 2. Improving justice: communities of norms in the Great Transformation James Livesey 3. The politics of political economy in France from Rousseau to Constant Richard Whatmore 4. Tories and markets: Britain 1800-1850 David Eastwood 5. Guild theory and guild organisation in France and Germany during the nineteenth century Heinz-Gerhard Haupt 6. Thinking green, nineteenth-century style: John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin Donald Winch 7. Toennies on 'community' and 'civil society': clarifying some cross-currents in post-Marxian political thought Jose Harris 8. German historicism, progressive social thought, and the interventionist state in the United States since the 1880s Axel R. Schafer 9. Civilising markets: traditions of consumer politics in twentieth-century Britain, Japan and the United States Patricia Maclachlan and Frank Trentmann 10. The ideologically embedded market: political legitimation and economic reform in India Rob Jenkins 11. The locational and institutional embeddedness of electronic markets: the case of the global capital markets Saskia Sassen Index. 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 Social life requires co-ordination between individual actions.