Question

A presupposition of mainstream economics is that people come to the marketplace fully formed, and that economic arrangements affect neither the preferences nor the character of those who use these arrangements. It is striking, looking back at the history of economic thought, how many of the thinkers we have looked at did not share this presupposition. They were concerned, that is, with the kinds of people that a market economy created or selected for, the way in which character and personality were shaped by commercial society, for good or ill. Indeed, Muller’s book is full of evidence that this question was crucially important to early thinkers responding to the advent of “commercial society.” Find evidence in the readings we have done that this was a concern, both on the positive and the negative sides of the question. Do you believe that contemporary economics loses something by ignoring this sort of question? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Capitalism has never been a subject for economists alone.Philosophers,Politicians,Poets and social scientists have debated the cultural,moral,and political effects of capitalism for centuries,and their claims have been many and diverse.The Mind and the Market is a remarkable history of how the idea of capitalism has developed in Western thought.Ranging across an ideological spectrum that includes Hobbes,Voltaire,Adam Smith,Edmund Burke,Hegel,Marx, and Matthew Arnold, as well as twentieth-century communist, fascist, and neoliberal intellectuals,historian Jerry Muller examines a fascinating thread of ideas about the ramifications of capitalism and its future implications.This is an engaging and accesible history of ideas that reverberate throughout everyday life.We live in a world shaped by capitalism.In one or another of its ever-changing forms,capitalism has been with us and it will be with us for a long time yet.

A working definition of capitalism is " a system in which the production and distribution of goods is entrusted primarily to the market mechanism,based on private ownership of property ,and on exchange between legally free individuals".Humans have been exchanging objects with one another since Stone Age.But it was only in the eighteenth century that one can begin to speak of an economy in which production for trade became more significant than production for subsistence,and in which the market became central to the production and distribution of goods.