Debra Satz

The theory of historical materialism is the core commitment of Marx’s social theory. More than his views on markets, philosophical methods, the state and social institutions, it is this theory which sets Marx’s views apart from alternative traditions in political philosophy. Marx believes that there is a tendency for societies to make moral and material progress. The point of Marx’s theory of historical materialism is to offer a theory of the mechanisms which produce this tendency. However, in Marx’s own formulation, the precise nature of these mechanisms remains obscure. In The German Ideology, Marx emphasizes the growth of human productive powers as the fundamental cause of historical change and progress: social forms change in order to adapt to the requirements of further productive development. By contrast, in The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse, Marx emphasizes the desires and interests of classes as fundamental to explaining social change. Here, it is class struggles which determine not only when an old social form will be replaced by a new one, but also the nature of the new social form itself. Marx never specifies the connection between these two explanations of historical change, between the development of human productive powers and class struggles. In particular, Marx is not explicit as to whether there are two distinct mechanisms at work in the production of historical progress, or only one.

In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about a market involving prostitution or the sale of kidneys that makes it morally objectionable? How is a market in weapons or pollution different than a market in soybeans or automobiles? Are laws and social policies banning the more noxious markets necessarily the best responses to them? Satz contends that categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited utility in addressing such questions because they have assumed markets to be homogenous. Accordingly, she offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets--one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality--to show how markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power.

This paper points to a lost and ignored strand of argument in the writings of liberalism's earliest defenders. These “classical” liberals recognized that market liberty was not always compatible with individual liberty. In particular, they argued that labor markets required intervention and regulation if workers were not to be wholly subjugated to the power of their employers. Functioning capitalist labor markets (along with functioning credit markets) are not “natural” outgrowths of exchange, but achievements hard won in the battle against feudalism. Further, and crucially, the existence of such markets required closing off other market choices. Footnotesa I would like to thank the other contributors to this volume, and its editors, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.