Following the failure of 'actually existing socialism' in Eastern Europe and Asia, a consensus has grown, on Left and Right, around the virtues of market economies. The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics calls for a reappraisal of that consensus. It reviews the strongest arguments offered in defence of market economies and contests that they are often less compelling than recent opinion would suggest.
The arguments discussed include: those for markets from liberal neutrality, from welfare, from autonomy and freedom and from the forms of recognition it is taken to foster; the Austrian arguments at the heart of the socialist calculation debate concerning the 'calculation' and 'epistemic' virtues of the market; and arguments from within the public choice tradition. The author defends non-market institutions against the growing incursions of market norms, including a detailed discussion of the changing conceptions of intellectual property rights in science, and develops a case for associational socialism.