The Relativity of the Market

Last updated on: December 30, 2011 at 3:35 pm by Peter Leithart

The Relativity of the Market 2011-12-30T15:35:02+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Joyce Appleby’s Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England has a forbiddingly monographic title, but don’t be put off. It’s a profound meditation on the earliest construction of modern economic theory, an attempt to explain “how the market becomes central in a given society” and to fill in a gap that has failed to explain “the intellectual response to capitalism as a creative social act.” The writers she examines are long forgotten, their eulogy spoken by Adam Smith under the general moniker of “mercantilist,” which has come to signify “one who advocates state intervention in the market.” Appleby says that the mercantilists were actually doing something far more interesting, namely, imagining “the single abstract market . . . as an appropriate representation for the hundreds of formal and informal exchanges that regularly took place.” Markets of course are ancient; conceiving all economic activity as taking place within a “market” or even conceiving of a singular “market” for a particular commodity had to be imagined; it had to be theoretically constructed, since “the market” doesn’t exist in empirical reality.

To read the mercantilists as advocates of state intervention is to read back from a nineteenth century perspective, from the perspective of Smith’s triumph. They didn’t need to advocate for state intervention because prior to the seventeenth century it was a matter of course that magistrates and kings would oversee economic activities in order to ensure public order and the maintenance of certain social goods. Aristotle started it when he analyzed “economics” not as a discourse on markets or “the market,” but as a discourse on types of household – oikos nomos .

That production and exchange were intertwined with other social realities was a truism that took legal form:

“The minute details of economic activity had always been controlled by society through custom and law.” In England, “the focus of royal policy and the overwhelming concern of those charged with executing the laws lay with maintaining the social order.” When the Tudors faced upheavals of various sorts (increasing population, rising princes, the dependence of English families on international cloth trade and hence on events and decisions beyond Tudor control), they responded to ensure the stability of English society in ways that assumed “the subordination of economic life to social and political considerations.”

The primacy of the social was rooted in a religious vision of society, which was particularly applied to the products of the earth, conceived of as a common good, finally owned by the crown: “Grain was not seen as a commodity to be moved through the countryside in search of the best price, nor was it ever absolutely possessed by the producer. The farmer who grew it – be he tenant or landlord – did not really own the corn; he attended to it during its passage from the field to the market. He could not store it in order to wait for a more propitious moment of sale; he could not move it to a distant market; he could not sell it to a middleman, a regrater, while it stood in the field. Rather, he must load up his carts with his grain, proceed to the nearest market, and offer his year’s harvest to his traditional customers . . . . At a time when the tiller of the soil had God to thank for the weather and the king to thank for his land, manipulating the fruits of the two could easily be viewed as wicked and ungrateful.”

The religious underpinnings of the traditional order came even more clearly to the fore in debates over the enclosure movement and the elimination of the commons. Appleby describes the social effects of the commons this way: “Consolidating strips of land into enclosed private farms led to a radical restructuring of village life. The persistent consciousness of a common fate faded when the principal director of agricultural production became an individual rather than a group of villagers coordinating their farming activities . . . . Born of necessity, the cooperative farming of the commons had created patterns of work, play, and ceremony that reinforced the corporate life of the village. The weak, the irresponsible, and the unlucky were knit into the same village responsibilities with the able. Enclosure disentangled each person from this web of community obligations. The customs and values affected by the enclosures in many ways represented in microcosm the macrocosmic restructuring of English society. For the moralists who opposed enclosures, community farming was worth maintaining because of its pedagogical value: it taught men to appreciate their fraternal obligations and underscored Christ’s injunctions to lay up their treasures in heaven.”

For a “market” theory to emerge, economic considerations had to be liberated from their traditional subordination to social norms and to traditional understandings of Christian brotherhood and sociality. In a series of pamphlets (with titles like A scripture-word against inclosure, 1656), Rev. John Moore charged that (in Appleby’s words) “enclosures turn husbandmen into cottagers, which undid them because they could not care for their families on tiny plots. Not to care for the poor, by treating them in this way, amounted to not loving Christ.” While his opponent (another minister, Joseph Lee, argued that enclosures made for more efficient land use, Moore ignored the point: “Moore took the position that the poor did not represent a needy group of people so much as a silent reminder of Christ’s appeal for the brotherly love through which men overcome their own selfishness.”

Lee also urged the duty of charity to the poor, but argued that the greater returns on enclosed property would enable the wealth to contribute even more to poor relief. But he aggressively dismissed Moore’s objection that enclosures displaced peasants and tenant farmers: “Is a man bound to keep servants to pill strawes or labour in vain? by what Law?” Enclosures were for the “advancement of private persons,” Lee admitted, but that private advance will in the end be to “the advantage of the publick.” Lee too argued theologically, though it was a different theology than Moore’s. When Moore charged that enclosures were motivated by greed, Lee asked whether it was impossible to have a double end, both “our own gains and the advancement of our estates” as well as “Gods glory.” He took the theological high ground against Moore: “God is the God of order, and order is the soul of things, the life of a Common-wealth: but Common-fields are the seat of disorder, the seed-plot of contention, the nursery of beggery.”

Efficiency, work ethic, order, self-improvement, all defended with Christian appeals, take a primary role in Lee’s outlook, while Moore’s primary emphasis on institutionally-embodied charity (a charity that takes concrete form in answer to questions like Who gets to work where? and Who benefits from the harvest?) is removed from the picture. The dividing lines in debates over usury were very similar, the defenders of traditional prohibitions arguing for the primacy of brotherhood while the defenders of usury argued for the rightness of the profit motive and economic efficiency.

> Appleby suggests that Thomas Mun “created a conceptual model of the market” in a series of works written in the 1620s: “Mun created a paradigm. He abstracted England’s trade relations from their real context and built in that place an intellectual model. The shipment of goods, the exchange of bills, the trading of commodities became parts of an overall, unseen commercial flow, which moved independently of the specific, the personal, an the concrete. For the first time economic factors were clearly differentiated from their social and political entanglements.” In Mun’s construct, “the system of exchange was autonomous.” This imaginative theoretical disentanglement of the “economic” from the “social” and “political” is of course a prerequisite for free market arguments against state intervention – for the economy must itself be purified of politics if politics is to be an “intrusion” from the outside.

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