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The Impersonal Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

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Extract

It would not be appropriate for me tonight to say anything at all closely related to the work I have been doing or anything that might be thought to be related to government policy. Accordingly, if you find that my remarks are somewhat lacking in content—as you very well may—I hope you will choose to attribute the deficiency, in part at least, to my high regard for the relevance of economics.

While I was trying to hit upon a topic which was sufficiently non-technical and general for the occasion, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to look once again at some analytical models of the market, developed over the years by a few of the great economists of the past, and at the characteristics with which, in their theoretical works, they endowed their market operators, to see in what ways and in what degrees they made their markets impersonal, as distinct from self-regulating or automatic; and, then, to consider some of the ways in which general attitudes to the market system may have been influenced by the degree to which markets have been impersonal, and by the kind and extent of the changes that the expansion of the market economy tends to bring about. Primarily I will have in mind modern Western economies.

I have called my talk “The Impersonal Market” and I introduce at the outset two quotations which serve to define the sense in which the word “impersonal” is used, and at the same time illustrate two distinct though similar attitudes to the market. One of them comes from a student of law who has extended his interests to include social science generally, and one from an economist of very great distinction.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 I hope, however, that my remarks will gain interest from the admirable paper given at these meetings by Dr. Nathan Keyfitz.

2 Glencoe, Ill., 1955, 18.

3 In his Economic Commentaries (London, 1956), 148 Google Scholar; recently referred to by Stykolt, Stefan, review of Clark's, J. M. Economic Institutions and Human Welfare, this Journal, XXIV, no. 1, 02, 1958, 127.Google Scholar

4 Economic Commentaries, 154.

5 E.g., Dicey, A. V., Law and Public Opinion (London, 1924), 246.Google Scholar

6 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations (Rogers, ed., Oxford, 1880), 4, 14, 18.Google Scholar I am certain that Professor Bladen will reprimand me, gently and in private I hope, for being unfair to Adam Smith. My comments apply primarily to the first few analytical chapters of the Wealth of Nations.

7 Schumpeter, Joseph A., History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954), 188.Google Scholar

8 Cole, Arthur H., “Puzzles of the ‘Wealth of Nations,’” this Journal, XXIV, no. 1, 02, 1958, 18.Google Scholar

9 Mill, J. S., Principles of Political Economy (Ashley, ed., New York, 1909), chaps. iv–viii.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 107 n., 106.

11 Ibid., 143.

12 Rosenbluth, G., Concentration in Canadian Manufacturing Industries (Princeton, 1957), chap. v.Google Scholar

13 Principles of Economics (8th ed., reset, London, 1952), 604.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 616–17.

15 Galbraith, J. K., American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston, 1952).Google Scholar

16 Young, Allyn, “Increasing Returns and Economic Progress,” Economic Journal, 12 1928, 528.Google Scholar

17 Dr. Andrew Stewart, President of the University of Alberta, at present Chairman of the Royal Commission on Price Spreads of Food Products.

18 “Increasing Returns and Economic Progress,” 534.

19 Schumpeter, J. A., Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 87.Google Scholar