Are Markets Moral? - Hardcover

Arthur Melzer; Steven Kautz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812250524 ISBN 13: 9780812250527

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 2018

Synopsis

Despite the remarkable achievements of free markets—their rapid spread around the world and success at generating economic growth—they tend to elicit anxiety. Creative destruction and destabilizing change provoke feelings of powerlessness in the face of circumstances that portend inevitable catastrophe. Thus, from the beginning, capitalism has been particularly stimulative for the growth of critics and doomsayers. While early analysts such as Karl Marx primarily emphasized an impending economic disaster, in recent years the economic critique of capitalism has receded in favor of moral and environmental concerns.

At the heart of this collection of original essays lies the question: does morality demand that we adopt a primarily supportive or critical stance toward capitalism? Some contributors suggest that the foundational principles of the capitalist system may be at odds with the central requirements of morality, while others wonder whether the practical workings of markets slowly erode moral character or hinder the just distribution of goods. Still others consider whether morality itself does not demand the economic freedom constitutive of the capitalist system. The essays in Are Markets Moral? represent a broad array of disciplines, from economics to philosophy to law, and place particular emphasis on the experiences of non-Western countries where the latest chapters in capitalism's history are now being written.

Contributors: Andrew S. Bibby, Gurcharan Das, Richard A. Epstein, Fonna Forman, Robert P. George, Steven J. Kautz, Peter Augustine Lawler, Steven Lukes, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Peter McNamara, Arthur M. Melzer, John Tomasi.

About this title

Review:

"Are Markets Moral? is a welcome project of interest not only to scholars and students in fields such as political science, philosophy, business, economics, and law but also to any reader interested in the relationship between capitalism and morality."—Ryan Patrick Hanley, Marquette University

"A unique collection of essays on morality and the market: no other volume I know of gathers as many different voices or as many concerns with non-Western economies."—Samuel Fleischacker, University of Illinois at Chicago

From the Author:

Arthur M. Melzer is Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University and author of The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought. Steven J. Kautz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University and author of Liberalism and Community.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0812250524
• ISBN 13: 9780812250527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264