| Summary: | For some decades now, progressively minded social scientists have argued that
markets are too important to leave to economists — indeed, entire new
subfields have formed in response to this concern. But this engagement with
economic life has often been somewhat half-hearted. Particularly telling in this
respect is the fact that these new fields have organized themselves centrally
around the rejection of ‘economism’ — the idea that markets have
self-regulatory properties. Scholars in fields such as political economy and
economic sociology have devoted a great deal of energy to normative critiques of
the market, but they have displayed much less interest in rethinking the core
categories and principles of economic life itself. What the books considered
here have in common, and what sets them apart from established ways of thinking,
is a willingness to tarry with the paradoxes of money.
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