Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; List of contributors; Plates; Introduction: the culture of the market; Part I. Market Regimes Old and New: 1. The ruling class in the market place: nobles and money in early modern France; 2. Territorial gardens: the control of land in seventeenth-century French formal gardens; 3. Money, equality, fraternity: freemasonry and the social order in eighteenth-century Europe; 4. Market culture, reckless passion and the Victorian reconstruction of punishment; Part II. Personality and Authority in the Age of Capital: 5. New cultural heroes in the early national period; 6. Preserving 'the natural equality of rank and influence' liberalism, republicanism and equality of condition in Jacksonian politics; 7. Banking on language: the currency of Alexander Bryan Johnson; Part III. The Lens of 'High' Culture: 8. An entrepreneur in spite of himself: Edgar Dégas and the market; 9. A Yankee Diogenes: Thoreau and the market; 10. Need and honour in Balzac's Père Goriot: reflections on a vision of laissez-faire society; Part IV. Agency and Structure: 11. The reformist dimensions of Talcott Parsons's early social theory; 12. The strange career of The Lonely Crowd: or the antinomies of autonomy; 13. Persons as uncaused causes: John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of Capitalism, and the 'invention' of formalism; Index.

Promotional Information

A collection of thirteen essays examining how 'the market' has been perceived, represented and experienced differently in different epochs.

Reviews

' ... impressive standard of scholarship ... ' Times Literary Supplement