Moral Views of the Market Society

The morality of the market is one of the most significant issues not only in ethics but also, at least since Durkheim and Weber, in sociology. As is often the case, the more pervasive a practice, the harder it is to describe and analyze. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, in their forthcoming paper Moral Views of Market Society do an excellent job surveying and classifying the contemporary sociological literature. The “liberal dream” of the market as a civilizing force (doux commerce) has three major themes:

1. The promotion of individual virtues (integrity, honesty, truthfulness, etc.) and interpersonal cooperation
2. Markets as enabling conditions for personal liberty and political freedom (Hayek, Friedman, etc.)
3. Markets as enabling conditions for cultural production and creative flourishing.

The “liberal dream,” however, in good dialectic fashion, already contains the seeds of a “commodified nightmare,” where each element of the doux commerce thesis is negated.

1. “Instead of virtue, [markets create] envy and wants.” Markets don’t just satisfy, they create wants, feeding the human drive towards pointless, conspicuous consumption (Veblen). Moreover, on an empirical level, the correlation between want-satisfaction and happiness is not at all clear.
2. “Instead of cooperation, [markets create] coercion and exclusion.” Severe inequality makes a mockery of the formally free nature of market exchange, and because of its hegemonic aspirations, the market as one mode of valuing things, is crowding out modes that price cannot capture (a modified commodification argument.)
3. “Instead of creativity, copyright.” I very much like the authors’ reference to Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer in this context, whose works provide an often overlooked conceptual background to understanding the battle between the owners of the 20th Century industrial means of producing mass culture (studios, networks, distributors, etc.), designed mostly to provide instant and easy gratification, and the counter-movement aimed at democratizing the means of cultural production (e.g., blogs, iMovie, Reason, etc.) and keeping open the cultural commons from which all cultural production — both industrial and decentralized — draws (e.g., Creative Commons, FSF, etc.)

The article concludes with an overview of reflexive theories of markets and morals, discussing how theories primarily invented to observe and understand markets became entangled with their objects and were thus transformed into code, executed by markets (e.g., financial derivatives). A similar story could be told about the recent translation of antitrust law into the language of antitrust economics. First, economic concepts were used to describe (and criticize) the state of the law. Over time, the external categories of observation were imported into the law and then transformed into executable legal code, now defining the practice of antitrust law.

In summary, for most of its history, intellectuals have variously praised, reviled, or downplayed the moral consequences of market capitalism. These positions are still very well represented in today’s literature. Still, the distinctive quality of contemporary scholarship is that it goes much further in opening the black box of morality and dissecting the cultural and technical work necessary to produce, to sustain or — conversely — to constrain the market. In doing so, it also reveals the role social scientists play in this process. Continuing this task, then, implies a reflexive approach, where economists, political scientists and sociologists critically consider their own participation in the definition of the market’s moral categories, and in the construction of competing moralizing instruments and techniques.

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