The Place of the Market in Society

Abstract

What is the place of the market in society? Polanyi's answer derives from institutional separation and the self-regulating mechanism of supply and demand. In this article, I offer an alternative approach. Following Aristotle, I suggest that commodity fiction follows from the fictitious nature of valuation in the market economy. I then combine this broader definition of commodity fiction with Aristotle's ideas on means and ends of human action, which leads to a framework relating the uniform standard of value in the market economy to commodity fiction and market imperialism. This framework, like Polanyi, underlines the market's subordination of society, but it explains such domination with how the market subverts political deliberation on the allocation of time and resources to distinct objectives in society. The result is a theoretical framework that goes beyond the embeddedness-disembeddedness dichotomy and that emphasizes how the place of the market in society is inextricably a political phenomenon.