Robert F. Garnett Jr. - Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation

Commerce and Community

Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical economic systems that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complexly constituted agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through the lenses of multiple disciplines, this book examines how this pluralistic turn in economic thinking bears upon the venerable socialtheoretical division of cooperative activity into separate spheres of impersonal Gesellschaft (commerce) and ethically thick Gemeinschaft (community).

Drawing resources from diverse disciplinary and philosophical traditions, these essays offer fresh, critical appraisals of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft segregation of face-to-face community from impersonal commerce. Some authors issue urgent calls to transcend this dualism, while others propose to recast it in more nuanced ways or affirm the importance of treating impersonal and personal cooperation as ethically, epistemically, and economically separate worlds. Yet even in their disagreements, our contributors paint the process of voluntary cooperation the space of commerce and community with uncommon color and nuance by traversing the boundaries that once separated the thin sociality of economics (as science of commerce) from the thick sociality of sociology and anthropology (as sciences of community).

This book facilitates critical exchange among economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists by exploring the overlapping notions of cooperation, rationality, identity, reciprocity, trust, and exchange that emerge from multiple analytic traditions within and across their respective disciplines.

Robert F. Garnett, Jr. is Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University, USA.

Paul Lewis is Reader in Economics and Public Policy at Kings College London, UK.

Lenore T. Ealy is President of The Philanthropic Enterprise, USA.

The editors of this path-breaking collection have assembled a veritable all-star list of interdisciplinary scholars to investigate the role of exchange in the development of cooperative behavior, how commerce affects our ability to form or reform meaningful human associations, and the extent to which commerce complements or hinders other important social institutions. This work is vitally necessary. We need to know, now more than ever, how indeed, whether market-based commercial societies can contribute to humane and just societies, and how and whether they contribute to human happiness. These essays broaden and deepen our understanding of human nature, of the nature of human social institutions, and of the effects of markets on human well-being. They deserve, and repay, serious attention.

James R. Otteson, Wake Forest University, USA

This is a profound collection, addressing the relative and interacting roles of community and market in society. The conventional separation between communal gift-giving and impersonal commerce is effectively challenged. The authors, from various disciplines and perspectives, are unified in trying to see the inter-relations between community and market. The results of their research provide us with new and promising frameworks that could transform the study of economy and society.

Mario Rizzo, New York University, USA

This important collection of essays represents a milestone in breaking down the separation between market-based forms of coordination principally associated with economics, and communal modes of cooperation principally associated with sociology and anthropology. The contributions, mostly by economists but also by representatives from other disciplines, provide a fascinating window into the many ways in which the commercial and the communal intertwine and in many cases presuppose one another.

Jochen Runde, University of Cambridge, UK

Economics as Social Theory

Series edited by Tony Lawson

University of Cambridge

Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies, and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value etc.

The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label theory has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical modelling. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the Theory label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.

Other titles in this series include:

1. Economics and Language

Edited by Willie Henderson

2. Rationality, Institutions and Economic Methodology

Edited by Uskali Mki, Bo Gustafsson, and Christian Knudsen

3. New Directions in Economic Methodology

Edited by Roger Backhouse

4. Who Pays for the Kids?

Nancy Folbre

5. Rules and Choice in Economics

Viktor Vanberg

6. Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics

Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. OGorman

7. Feminism, Objectivity and Economics

Julie A. Nelson

8. Economic Evolution

Jack J. Vromen

9. Economics and Reality

Tony Lawson

10. The Market

John O Neill

11. Economics and Utopia

Geoff Hodgson

12. Critical Realism in Economics

Edited by Steve Fleetwood

13. The New Economic Criticism

Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteeen

14. What do Economists Know?

Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr.

15. Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge

Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio

16. The Values of Economics

An Aristotelian perspective

Irene van Staveren

17. How Economics Forgot History

The problem of historical specificity in social science

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

18. Intersubjectivity in Economics

Agents and structures

Edward Fullbrook

19. The World of Consumption

The material and cultural revisited 2nd edn

Ben Fine

20. Reorienting Economics

Tony Lawson

21. Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics

Edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper

22. The Crisis in Economics

Edited by Edward Fullbrook

23. The Philosophy of Keynes Economics

Probability, uncertainty and convention

Edited by Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara

24. Postcolonialism Meets Economics

Edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela

25. The Evolution of Institutional Economics