The Market Synthesis

Abstract

Their aim was the aim of kings: that needing nothing, and obeying no one, they might enjoy liberty, the mark of which is to live just as one pleases. Cicero, On Duties , book 1 §68 (Atkins trans.) THE LOCKEAN LEGACY We have seen that the debates about the political implications of the rise of commerce in the early modern period brought to the surface the long-standing tensions in republican thought between procedural and substantive conceptions of arbitrary power, and between instrumental and intrinsic conceptions of the value of virtue. As a result, early modern thinkers had to make a series of difficult choices about the meaning and implications of republican freedom that their forebears had been able to avoid, between options that their forebears may not have clearly recognized as such. The “republican” defense of commercial society that emerged in these debates represented a substantial departure in many ways from the classical republican view. The classical republican expects the free man to be independent; to depend on the market for the satisfaction of one's own wants and needs is to depend in a radical sense on the wants and needs of other people. The classical republican sees the pursuit and enjoyment of luxury as a threat to individual virtue, and thus to freedom itself; the flourishing of a commercial economy depends on the assumption that people will always want more material goods than they actually have.