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Need some definitional clarifications here: 
 
Note difference between "the market" as a process, and 
"the market" as a legal, institutional, social, cultural construction. 
 
The first cannot exist without the second, and the second is 
both variable and historically specific. 
 
Query for Dr. Brewer (hard to talk about sophisticated issues 
in internet sized bites, but right now that's about all I can 
handle anyway ...) -- 
 
Admitting that "fixed stages" is reserved for a particular 
kind of historical conceptualization -- 
 
There is nevertheless a difference among the following: 
predictable outcome 
single outcome 
multiple outcomes 
multiple outcomes but one will be victorious 
multiple outcomes but one could be victorious 
one clearly better outcome and others are dangerous 
 
and degree of: 
inevitability 
 
Smith was really happier talking about process -- the first 
definition of market, and analyzing the relationship between 
market-as-process and institutional framework.  (Which is why 
he appears so "modern" to us, one might argue). 
 
But ... I think you can argue that it was extraordinarily 
difficult for the eighteenth or nineteenth century European- 
educated mind to really understand different-ness in an 
unranked sense. 
 
I'm not saying that an Adam Smith wasn't capable of remarkable 
breakthroughs in perceiving flexibility -- but I do think we 
ought to try to understand the cultural constraints within which 
these thinkers operated. 
 
We acknowledge that they were constrained, for example, by certain 
levels of mathematical or scientific tools -- could we also 
acknowledge that they could not have imagined the Nobel Prize- 
author Toni Morrison's novel, "Beloved"? 
 
Mary Schweitzer <[log in to unmask]> 
 
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