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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:38 2006 |
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======================= HES POSTING =================
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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