Markets were once understood as the crucible of morality, not the site of depravity and dissolution, where souls get bought and sold, as the left still seems to think. To be sure, “the market” remains hallowed ground, but it has become contested terrain – which a new book helps us navigate.
NEW YORK – In his most notorious (and most misinterpreted) polemic, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that if morality was a matter of thinking about what we owe each other, its origins were to be found at the moment when commercial transactions forced us to abstract from the differences between unlike things, and to assert equivalence where there was none. It was here that money – for Karl Marx the universal commodity – became the mechanism which enabled routine exchanges between strangers.
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