Contested Commodities (Paperback)

by Margaret Jane Radin (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"For anyone interested in the ethical limitations of markets, this book is required reading. -- Elizabeth Anderson, Ethics

"The book represents a significant contribution to debate about the role of markets and market ideology in modern democratic polities. -- A. J. Walsh, Philosophical Quarterly [UK]

"[An] insightful and rewarding book. -- Deryck Beyleveld, Journal of Law and Society

Review
Radin's book is both complex in structure and highly nuanced in argument. Essentially it is a critique of existing theories of commodification that develops a distinctive approach to understanding commodification...Radin, like liberal political theorists, seeks a middle way between universalized commodification and universalized noncommodification, instead of a thesis of compartmentalized commodification she offers a thesis of 'incomplete commodification'...[An] insightful and rewarding book.
--Deryck Beyleveld (Journal of Law and Society )

In this thought-provoking book Margaret Jane Radin asks us to consider whether there are some areas of social life which should be off-limits to the market, and whether some human interactions should be exempted from market-style forms of description and analysis. Although Radin is not the first theorist to address these issues, her eloquently written book contains some of the most sophisticated treatment they have received thus far. She convincingly makes the point that unless we transcend those models of human behaviour which characterize all human interactions as market exchanges, we may find ourselves unable to engage in the forms of valuing required for the maintenance and promotion of a humane society...The book represents a significant contribution to debate about the role of markets and market ideology in modern democratic polities. Future discussions of these issues will undoubtedly be influenced by Radin's work.
--A. J. Walsh (Philosophical Quarterly )

Margaret Radin asks, why not put everything up for sale? Her answer is that doing so would impair human flourishing by compromising the social contexts needed for personhood. She offers a general approach to determining the ethical limits of markets and shows how it works in cases ranging from organ sales, prostitution, and commercial surrogate motherhood to the 'free marketplace of ideas,' compensation in torts, and public choice theories of democracy. Radin's contributions to this controversy are consistently illuminating and through provoking...For anyone interested in the ethical limitations of markets, this book is required reading.
--Elizabeth Anderson (Ethics )

What does it say about us, and what does it do to us, when we talk about people as commodities to be traded in the market? Radin's profound, subtle, and disturbing book asks how the texture of our human world may be altered by ways of speaking and thinking, apparently innocuous and nicely scientific, that we import from market economics and use to characterize non-market behavior. A distinguished writer about property law, Radin avoids facile answers and stresses the complexity of the issue. Nonetheless, she leaves her reader with a warning: the models we use shape the people we may become. One day we may find to our grief (or, worse still, lack of grief) that our intellectual inventions have reinvented our world.
--Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago

Professor Radin has brought very considerable intellectual courage and perspicacity to bear on one of the most vexing and central issues in any liberal, market-based society--where should the market (and market rhetoric) end, and politics begin in the allocation of scarce resources? Law and economics scholars, who more or less assume the virtues of the private market, in most contexts, will be especially challenged by Radin's anlysis. Her book is also beautifully written and displays an elegance and lucidity that is absent in much modern legal scholarship.
--Michael J. Trebilcock, University of Toronto

At a time when belief in markets is ascendant throughout the world, Contested Commodities challenges--at the most fundamental level--the very idea of exchanging things for money. Margaret Jane Radin's arguments are subtle and nuanced, and her central claim about the potentially dehumanizing effects of exchange is powerful and important. No one in recent decades has made this case against the dominance of markets as well as Radin.
--David Strauss, University of Chicago

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (November 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674007166
• ISBN-13: 978-0674007161
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #943,023 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding treatment of a most important subject, November 24, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Contested Commodities (Hardcover)

Radin deals thoughtfully with some virgin territory in legal and social theory -- the question of what theoretical grounds might underlie the common intuition that some valued (indeed cherished) things should be treated by the law as (in whole or in part) "not for sale." Such items as children, body parts, sexual relations, votes, opinions, and the like are among the candidates for this status, and many things that are traded on markets have commerce in them restricted for reasons that relate neither to market efficiency nor fair distribution, but rather to the transformation in meaning (and ultimately value) that can occur when it something is treated as a commodity. Radin's discussion of these novel issues does not resolve them in any simple way, but better than anything else on the subject reveals how sticky they can be. T. Gre

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Money isn't everything, August 31, 2006

By	Robert Jones (Emporia, Kansas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

While I disagree with some of the details Radin's fundamental insight is sound. Whereas human value systems are characterized by value-pluralism (see for example Concepts and Categories, Isaiah Berlin, Princeton Univ. Press) business and capitalism require value monism (i.e., utility is a scalar) and are in contradiction with one another. Technically, the error in capitalism is that utility should be a vector rather than a scalar like money. (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern, Princeton Univ. Press, 1944, pgs 19-20)