ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Market System as a “Stark Utopia”
Author: Ozel Huseyin
This paper attempts at showing that the liberal vision of the market society, which is based upon the “invisible hand” paradigm, is “a stark utopia” to use Karl Polanyi’s words, for it cannot solve the three important problems to which any social design must offer solutions, namely, the economic problem of accumulation, the ethical problem of individual freedom, and the social problem of “order” without sliding into contradictions that could even jeopardize the reproduction of the system. The reproduction of the market system is a contradictory process because of the institutional strains and contradictions inherent in the very constitution of the system. In order to show this, Marx, Schumpeter, and Polanyi’s respective accounts of the market system is utilized, with the belief that these three thinkers are important in understanding the unstable character of the market system. All these three thinkers, it is argued, find the source of instability in the tensions within the institutional structure of the market society. It is argued that Marx (with the analyses of accumulation and fetishism), Schumpeter (with the notion of the “creative destruction”), and Polanyi (with his idea of “double movement”) are all indispensable in the development of the thesis that the working of the market system undermines its own institutional structure, and thus make the reproduction of the capitalist society a contradictory process.
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