Session 2
Session 2. Capitalism as a Form of Market System: (1) A Model of Pure Capitalism as Pure Private Enterprise. (2) The Market as a System for Spreading Decentralized Cooperation. (3) The Market as a Somewhat-Successful Peacekeeping System in a World of Scarcity. (3) Features of the Market System that Lead to Cooperation and Peacekeeping. (4) The Essential Customs and Rules of Market Systems. (5) Exchange as the Market System’s Means of Allocation: Its Nature, Justifications, and Consequences.
Read first: Gerald Gaus, "The Idea and Ideal of Capitalism," Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics, ed. Tom Beauchamp and George Brenkert (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 73-99
Then read: Lindblom, "How It Works: Market-System Coordination," and "How It Works: Bones Beneath Flesh," The Market System, pp. 35-61.
Then: Lindblom, "Quid pro Quo," Market System, pp. 111-123.
So you’d like to know more…
Jeremy Waldron, "Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom," Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1981-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1993): 308-339.
Suppose that, following Gaus's ideal of capitalism, we instituted a pure private-property economy, so that we got rid
of all common and public property. So every single bit of space becomes privately owned. What happens to those
people without a place to stay who can't get anyone to let them stay anywhere? Where do they sleep? Where do they
pee? They aren’t free to be anywhere.
Click here for George Orwell's famous account of being homeless.
Albert O. Hirschman, "Rival Interpretations of Market Society," Section I, "The Doux commerce Thesis."
Considers various historical versions of the claim that expanding commerce promotes cooperation peace. But is capitalism the only economic system that allows for expanding commerce?