<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
The Financial Times' chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf,
reviews today a book by a gentle left-liberal Englishman, Will
Hutton, "Them and Us: Changing Britain - Why We Need a Fair
Society."<br>
<br>
They agree that "the financial crisis challenges the the orthodoxies
of the past three decades [which neither, apparently, calls by their
right name: neoliberalism] ... [and so] the state has to rescue the
financial system..." And that's an important point - a beginning for
a politics beyond the limits of allowable debate for either party
(in Britain or America).<br>
<br>
But the rescue Hutton proposes and Wolf approves is only a matter of
tinkering with "the market". The book, which Wolf risibly refers to
as a "manifesto for a new left-of-centre politics for the UK" is
nothing of the sort. (Or, it's that sort of manifesto as it might be
approved by the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times.)<br>
<br>
More than two generations ago one of the great books of the 20th c.
set out an important account of the market - which this book, even
in the midst of the Great Recession, doesn't approach. <br>
<br>
In <i>The Great Transformation</i> (1944) Karl Polanyi charted the
social and political upheavals that took place in England during the
rise of the market economy. He argued that the modern market economy
and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete
elements, but as the single human invention that he called the
"market society." He sees its effects as overall deleterious, and -
while approving of the existence of markets within a society -
excoriates the transformation of the society into a market. <br>
<br>
Today the most our current advanced thinkers - like Hutton - seem to
be able to do is to advise that we ameliorate its effects. --CGE<br>
</body>
</html>