Organizing the Marketplace
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3924926 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lukas Rieppel (0000-0003-3141-7995, Williams & Associates, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 232-252 |
| Publication date | 2018-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Osiris (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/699856 |
| OpenAlex | W2898341893 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 44 |
This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural selection, the logic of organization was far more teleological and, often, authoritarian. Instead of asserting that competition for access to scarce resources among autonomous agents yields adaptive outcomes in the population at large, it held that organic entities inexorably tend to develop from a state of simplicity to one of complexity. Moreover, it stressed the production of hierarchical structures wherein the whole was privileged over its constitutive parts, in biology as well as society. It is my thesis that the logic of organization proved especially attractive in debates about the transition from free-market to corporate capitalism, providing a powerful means to describe, discuss, and dispute the centralization, rationalization, and bureaucratization that contemporary observers often took to be characteristic of a distinctly modern political economy
Authoritarianism · Biology · Bureaucracy · Capitalism · Darwinism · Democracy · Economics · Epistemology · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Teleology · Economic Theory and Institutions · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Ecology
The Great Persuasion
Generelle Morphologie der Organismen
Scale and Scope
The Visible Hand
The Nature of the Transnational Firm
Natural Images in Economic Thought
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932
Bringing the State Back In
Political Descent
Invisible Hands
Corporations and American Democracy
Brahmin Capitalism
Essays
Accounting for Profit and the History of Capital
Biological atomism and cell theory
The redoubtable cell
The Nature of the Firm
The Emerging Organizational Synthesis In Modern American History
Atlantic Crossings
From the organism of a body to the body of an organism
In Search of Progressivism
In search of human nature
Herbert Spencer
The Metaphor of Organization
Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism
Ernst Haeckel and the Theory of the Cell State
Competing Notions of "Competition" in Late Nineteenth-Century American Economics
The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904
Safe Driving Depends on the Man at the Wheel
The Scientific Life
The Romantic Conception of Life
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |