The Dictionary of Human Geography

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may be wildly different in their costs to buyer

and seller alike.

When Simmel (1978) noted thatexchange

is one of the ‘purest and most primitive of

forms of human socialization’, he endorsed

the idea that a market is asocial construc-

tion. As Stanford economist John McMillan

puts it: for markets to work they must be ‘well

built’: the field of market design, accordingly,

refers to the analysis and pragmatics – the

purposeful building – of institutions for trans-

acting market exchanges. As McMillan says:

Market design consists of the mechanisms

that organize buying and selling; channels

for the flow of information; state-set laws

and regulations that define property rights

and sustain contracting; and the markets

culture, its self-regulating norms, codes

and conventions governing behavior ... A

workable design keeps in check transaction

costs. .. Transaction costs are many and

varied. (2002, p. 9)

And yet even in acknowledging these proper-

ties, it is not unusual to hear the claim from

economists that ‘no one is in charge of the

market’ (McMillan, 2002, p. 7). And to this

extent, as Vaclav Havel once put it, the market

‘is the only natural economy’. This, of course,

raises another meaning of market that is both

ideological and political (seeideology). In

addition to markets and market transactions,

there is the idea of ‘the market’, or ‘the market

system’ or ‘the free market’. It is an abstract

notion – abstracted from the actual inter-

actions and functionings of many different

forms of market – but one that arises in at a

particular moment – its modern founding

charter is associated with Adam Smith’sThe

wealth of nations– and it has a long and com-

plex history. Smith was fully aware of the fact

that markets had their limits, that government

provisions andpublic goodswere indispens-

able to the operations of markets, and that

markets left to their own devices could in fact

be destructive. And yet he retained the ideo-

logical notion that markets were natural –

rooted in human impulses to truck, barter an

exchange. There is, of course, an alternative

narrative. Even at the time of Smith’s writing,

his world was awash with the operations of a

distinctively moral economy that privileged

use-value above exchange-value (Thompson,

1991) and of claims for a just price. Popular

reactions in defence of an arena that was seen

to be beyond the market – the commons –

defined much of what passed as politics

(Neeson, 1993). At the very least, then, the

modern market was not so much natural as

the product of struggle. And it is a struggle

that is central to the operations of the market

in the twenty-first century. Theglobal com-

mons represent a frontier of contemporary

resistance to – and shaping of – the rules of

the market (Saad-Filho and Johnson, 2005).

The contested nature of markets – in the

details or their operations or as a utopian

vision – is central to any understanding of

economy, liberalism and modernity

(Harvey, 2005). Karl Polanyi’s The great

transformationand Friedrich Hayek’sThe road

to serfdom were both published in 1944.

Hayek, an Austrian economist trained at the

feet of Ludwig von Mises, but forever associ-

ated with a largely non-economic corpus

produced at the London School of Economics

and the universities of Chicago and Freiburg

between 1940 and 1980, is widely recognized

as one of the leading intellectual architects of

the neo-liberal counter-revolution (seeneo-

liberalism). Margaret Thatcher pronounced

that ‘this is what we believe’ as she slammed a

copy of Hayek’sThe constitution of libertyon

to the table at Number 10 Downing Street

during a Tory Cabinet meeting. Hayek’s cri-

tique ofsocialism– that it destroys morals,

personal freedom and responsibility, impedes

the production of wealth and sooner or later

leads to totalitarianism – is theurtext for

market utopians. Collectivism was by defin-

ition amaderather than agrownorder: it was,

Hayek said, constructivist rather than evolu-

tionary, organized not spontaneous, a ‘taxis’(a

made order) rather than a ‘cosmos’ (a spontan-

eousorder),an economy rather than a ‘catal-

laxy’, coerced and concrete rather than free

and abstract (see Gamble, 1996, pp. 31–2).

Its fatal conceit was that socialism (and social

democracy for that matter) admitted the ‘reck-

less trespass oftaxisonto the proper ground of

cosmos’ (Anderson, 2005b, p. 16).

The other half of Hayek’s project was a ro-

bust defence of Westerncivilization– that is

to say of liberty,scienceand the spontaneous

orders that co-evolved to form modernsociety

(‘Great Society’, as he termed it). It was a

buttressing of the liberal (unplanned) market

order from which the preconditions of civiliza-

tion – competition and experimentation – had

emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this world as

an iron cage constituted by impersonality, a

loss of community, individualism and personal

responsibility. But unlike Weber, Hayek saw

these structures, properly understood, as ex-

pressions of liberty. From the vantage point of

the 1940s this (classical) liberal project was, as

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