The role of markets: Replies
Rule, James B.
HORST BRAND faults me for failing to identify market ideology as a "coherent system of thought, embodying a politically legitimating purpose." I don't think that this charge withstands even a...
...We on the left should be as suspicious of the categorical rejection of market ideas as of their slavish acceptance...
...What's really at issue here, I think, is our differing attitudes to what he might call the "coherence" of market thinking...
...Brand, like the market enthusiasts he loves to hate, views social policy as a Manichean struggle between "the Market" and non-market forces, particularly government...
...My aim is to break with both positions— that is, to cast doubt on the necessity (and even the sense) of voting "The Market" up or down, once and for all...
...JAMES B. RULE'S most recent book is Theory and Progress in Social Science...
...Market ideology is indeed a coherent system of thought—or at least, as coherent as ideologies get...
...86 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...I don't think that this charge withstands even a casual reading of my essay, which inveighs at length against the ascendance of market ideology and many of its political applications...
...Brand categorically extols the latter...
...nor do all government constraints on market processes deserve our support...
...Instead, I plead for hard-headed, critical examination of specific market arrangements, in hopes of distinguishing where they serve humane values and where they have to be opposed...
...Not all market arrangements need undermine values dear to the left...
...But that very "coherence" ought to be suspect...
...the marketizers simply take the mirrorimage opposite position...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
