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Article Excerpt
The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, by Jerry Z. Muller (Knopf, 448 pp., $30)
The market starts as a physical place, a Middle Eastern souk or a midwestern mall or a square in Paris or Nairobi. Then economists turn it into an abstraction, "the market," in order to conceptualize exchanges between buyers and sellers. Now historian Jerry Z. Muller offers us the market as an emblem of a social and economic system that emerged in Europe around 1600, which the Enlightenment dubbed "commercial society" and we call capitalism. From the start, some thinkers, the most famous being Adam Smith, have been drawn to that emblematic market, with its promise of a profusion of goods, rapid interchange, and other exciting transformations. Others, the most notorious being Karl Marx, have been repulsed by it. They have devoted their energies to vilifying the market system, just as its apologists have spoken up in its defense. Between them, they have shaped a good part of the face of modern culture.
As Muller's brilliant and engaging book shows, the birth of consciousness of market...
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