By William Hogarth - 1. The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.2. frankzumbach.wordpress.com, Public Domain, Link |
Fourcade and Healy guide us through economic sociologists' (and others') investigation of this question, and point us to one approach in particular, which I will focus on. But my interest in their review goes wider than the question of markets. My initial post about Owen Flanagan's recent book noted that he brings together cross-cultural philosophy, anthropology and psychology, but doesn't have the space to add consideration of "macro-structures" which might affect ethics, through disciplines like sociology, political science and macroeconomics. So I wanted to pause my blogging of The Geography of Morals, and get at least part of this picture in view.
Fourcade and Healy frame the paper as a revisiting of Albert Hirschman's classic 1982 paper "Rival Interpretations of Market Society". They use Hirschman's history of interpretationsthe doux-commerce thesis that markets soften and civilise morals, the self-destruction thesis that they undermine them, and a combination of the "feudal shackles" and "feudal blessings" thesis that existing moral customs either help or hinder the marketas a map of the more recent work they review. They label their categories the "liberal dream", the "commodified nightmare", and the "feeble markets" views (the last being dominant in economic sociology). But they then look at a fourth emerging literature which sees markets and morals as more closely intertwined, the "moralized markets" view.
The paper is a wonderful and clear guide to the literature. If I try to review a review paper like this one, I'll end up having to reproduce most of it. Instead, at the end of this post I will include a quick signposting of what happens in those first three sections. I will use the rest of my post to talk about the moralized markets view, which struck me (as it does the authors) as particularly creative and promising.