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James Carrier (ed.), Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997, xvii + 276 pages
Reviewer: Anne Vallely
concordia University
On July 4th of this year, Adbusters magazine unveiled a new American flag. In place of the familiar white stars were corporate logos such as those of Nike, McDonald's, Shell, IBM and Coca-Cola. The intention, of course, was to highlight the power that big corporations now have over the political process, but its resonance attested to something closer to home: increasingly, the very meaning of "America"--what it stands for in the popular imagination--is being truncated and reduced to little more than that of "economy." Alternately put, the economy is increasingly the discourse through which Americans define their culture and themselves. Whether this is understood as a flattening and narrowing of social life to fit the dictates of instrumental rationality, or a re-definition of social life in terms of the language of the market, it essentially amounts to the same thing: the idea of the "free market" is now a central organizing principle in American culture.
Meanings of the Market is a collection of essays that explore the complex and often contradictory meanings of the market in Western culture. The reified free market model is pulled out of the skies and down to a level of empirical analysis, to reveal its historical, cultural, and ideological underpinnings. It is an impressive collection of six original essays and a wonderful introduction by James Carrier which weaves the chapters into a coherent theoretical whole. Carrier persuades us to see the free market model as a type of discourse through which we talk about ourselves and others; a lingua franca that imposes a particular type of order and meaning of experience, and through which we understand ourselves. Central to the model is the idea that the world is comprised of detached individuals, free of cultural and social constraints, rationally calculating the costs and benefits of their economic transactions. Carrier reveals this model to be more artifact than fact--one that concerns our idealized selves, and our beliefs about the way things "should" work, far more than it reflects the...