(4:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Free Market: A Good Thing?

The free market was always about more than the assertion that supply and demand regulated economic activity. People of the 19th century conceived of a free market made possible because it was populated by rational individuals vested with a right to private property. A person’s mastery of material productive property (a farm or shop) was thought to require the kind of autonomy and self- regulation to qualify them for citizenship. Political democracy actually depended on economic democracy in that widely dispersed property holdings were understood as a guardian of political rights because property safeguarded independence. Private property was seen as a source of freedom, not tyranny, and was shielded from government by due process protections. The Bill of Rights, therefore, only applies to the public realm as a limit on government not to what was seem then as the private realm of work. The classic model of the citizen included the yeoman farmer and the small proprietor whose intellectual integrity and political independence of mind rested on self-mastery and a sufficient measure of economic security. This is what we should imagine when we hear the "Free Market." And although it has been terribly abused and worked only for a minority of Americans we can still learn much from this ideal of the citizen standing with one foot in economic democracy and one in political democracy.

In the last decades of the 19th century however, business leaders were faced with the challenge of maintaining control over the growing surplus wealth produced by large-scale industrialization. Their strategy was to revolutionize the economy by inventing a new legal and economic form we know as the corporation. The new corporate order centralized property, restricted economic democracy and more or less destroyed the political economy of the American citizen. It also however demanded a new understanding of property. Management laid claim to the knowledge, the intellectual property if you will, of working people who had previously controlled work. The complex tasks of craft and trade were segmented, unbundled, simplified, routinized on the one hand and became the property of stockholders, on the other. This revolution changed property rights from control over things or objects to control over knowledge, over processes, over relationships. Sound familiar?

The problem with ideas and processes and relationships is their contingency, they are highly social and political. The are difficult to control so corporations got into the business of speculation, that is the work of predicting and controlling the future. To do that they needed to establish both routine and systematic relations with government and to begin to exercise the powers of sovereignty previously associated only with government.

My personal disquietude over the prospect of not having a life of leisurely perusal of cultural artifacts is leading me to more detailed economic analysis. It is probably for the best that my course on Globalization begins next Tuesday, right after my Systematic Theology class (taught by a professor who doesn't regard herself as very Christocentric or bibliocentric -- I'm not really sure what to expect, since I previously took a course with her on Bonhoeffer, who is ultra-Christocentric and -bibliocentric).

Bill Brower once proposed that one of the last remaining vestiges of non-corporatized education was the seminary, and that may very well be true. Even that is constantly in danger -- it seems more and more likely that "conservative" Christian institutions, like my own alma mater, will allow their political allegiances trump their incoherent "theology" and end up essentially selling out, losing all touch with the liberal arts, with the idea of intellectual excellence and job training as two separate processes, etc. Meanwhile, "liberal" Christian institutions seem increasingly to have little or no constituency -- to be, in Derrida's words, "universities without condition." The gospel is so completely in thrall to a particular "traditional" morality that such activities as promoting homosexual relationships based on mutual fidelity or advocating social and economic justice seem to be vaguely anti-Christian, while at the same time the theological aspects make the project incoherent to secular observers.

In short: We're all completely screwed. There's no such thing as God, and Jesus was a made-up person. The only thing to do is to buy a nice house in Bourbonnais while interest rates are low, get a decent job to pay the bills, and then go into hibernation, using a copy of Capital and the Bible as kindling.

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