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Article: Free Men, Free Markets.("The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought")(Book Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- May 5, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, by Jerry Z. Muller (Knopf, 448 pp., $30)
The market starts as a physical place, a Middle Eastern souk or a midwestern mall or a square in Paris or Nairobi. Then economists turn it into an abstraction, "the market," in order to conceptualize exchanges between buyers and sellers. Now historian Jerry Z. Muller offers us the market as an emblem of a social and economic system that emerged in Europe around 1600, which the Enlightenment dubbed "commercial society" and we call capitalism. From the start, some thinkers, the most famous being Adam Smith, have been drawn to that emblematic market, with its ...