Be Civil

thinking outside the marketplace of ideas.

[T]here is no such thing as a “market society,” for the simple reason that the market is not a society. It is a mechanism of exchange that is embedded in other social relationships. In “freeing” the market, economic liberalism actually weakens those relationships. Societies will be unable to survive, and even to compete economically, if they just accept whatever results uncontrolled markets and international competitive pressures produce.

— Paul Hirst, “Associative Democracy,” Dissent (Spring 1994)

So if we are to have a market economy, we also need a definition of citizenship (what I have called ‘the public household’) that permits individuals to participate fully, in the market as well as the polity, as members of a civil society. A market economy without a civil society is an individualistic monstrosity.

— Daniel Bell, “Socialism and Planning: Beyond the Soviet Economic Crisis,” Dissent (Winter 1991)

H/T Sebastian Berg, Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Reorientation in the British and the American Left

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