Meanings of the Market

Meanings of Market: Free Market in Western Culture. JAMES G. CARRIER. Oxford: Berg,1997; 276 pp. Reviewed by DEBORAH WINSLOW University of New Hampshire Recently my university has been considering adopting a new form of market-model budgeting. One surprising development, as reported by faculty representatives to inevitable planning committees, is that task is not just difficult, but is also uncomfortable. Designing systems to balance departmental credits (students attracted, income acquired) and debits (space occupied, services used) is accompanied, they say, by a troubling sense that there is something essentially wrong about entire undertaking. Their idea of market model they must use conflicts with their understanding of a University. University represents a community within which ideas and knowledge are freely exchanged for common good, but market, James Carrier tells us, embodies idea of a world of disassociated individuals who interact through competitive buying and selling for individual gain. This idea of Market (capitalized, to distinguish representation from purely economic), as an important element of culture of Western societies . . . (p. 23), is concern of Carrier and his seven anthropological associates in this collection. Meanings of market is a timely book, not just for anthropologists but for everyone living in post-Reagan Thatcher world of market culture, a world in which, Carrier assures us, We are all neo-classical economists (p. ix). Carrier opens volume with his own wideranging and illuminating introduction to western Market concept, which, he asserts, has its own language, history, and politics. It generally is understood to be rooted in human nature, a protection against an intrusive state, efficient and rational in allocating resources, and necessary to ensure economic growth and prosperity. Because there have been markets in other times and places unaccompanied by this particular and, since 1980s, almost unquestioned culture, Carrier concludes that Market is worthy of study in its own right. introduction is followed by six papers and an Afterword, all of which dovetail nicely with volume's theme. In first essay, Demons, Commodities and History of Anthropology, Joel Kahn analyzes late eighteenth-century expressivist/romanticist demonizing of Enlightenment instrumental rationality. This analysis he frames with an opening review of anti-materialism in treasure of Sierra Madre and a concluding discussion of Western origins of anti-Market sentiments in modern Islamic economics. Kahn argues, contra M. Taussig (The devil and commodity fetishism in South America, 1980), that contemporary understandings of market are informed as much by critical anti-Market strands in modern thought as by . . . Market triumphalism (p. 76). This paper is a useful corrective to ahistoricism of some recent critique-of-development literature. It also introduces a motif that pervades volume: belief that the `market model' represents not just a defense of 'markets', but an elaborated 'theory' about human nature and best means of promoting human emancipation (p. 75). While expressivists thought that human nature is best realized in community, not hyperindividualism, anarcho-capitalists described by Susan Love Brown in The Free Market as Salvation from Government, take opposite position. They contend that the free market, unhampered by government intervention, can coordinate all functions of society currently being carried out by state (p. 99). They attach to this position a moral valuation of personal autonomy that has roots in both nineteenth-century American anarchism and an American tradition of resenting any authority that compromises individualism

Free market · Economic Theory and Institutions