======================= 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]> ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]