Market Embeddedness and the History of Economics

In the first of the eleven essays making up this book, Bevir and Trentmann state the perspective unifying them. Against the rise of a “neo-liberal discourse” idealizing the market as a beneficial coordinating mechanism, Bevir and Trentmann point to the embeddedness of markets.1In particular, they assert their cultural embeddedness, arguing that “how precisely any particular state or market operates will depend on how it is governed by a host of beliefs, discourses, practices, and institutions” (p. 10). The first goal of the volume is to provide historical case studies illustrating the richness of past conceptualizations of the relationship between society, markets, and the state (p. 2). The second goal is to reconsider the role played by “agency” in the history of capitalism.2The editors argue against Karl Polanyi that liberals have not always been in favour of markets irrespective of social and environmental concerns, and that peasants and rural elites have not always defended traditional forms of social coordination. The general point is conveyed by the following passage: “The question was, for all these groups, not simply one of support or resistance to markets but about how markets should be embedded within social and political contexts. Social groups and intellectual traditions that were ambivalent about markets also helped to shape the contours and dynamics of capitalist societies” (p. 4). In other words, liberal market economies “arose as embedded within the context of particular types of civil society, which were themselves a contingent product of European history” (pp. 7–8).