Public Services on the Market: Issues and Arguments
Rutger Claassen2011, Public Reason
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
AI
AI
This special issue presents a collection of scholarly reflections on the increasing marketization of public services over the past few decades. It argues that the shift away from state-provided public services, influenced by liberalization and privatization trends, has received insufficient critical analysis within moral and political philosophy. The issue emphasizes the need for philosophical engagement with the institutional practices that affect public goods and services, advocating for a comparative assessment of market and state performance to inform ethical discourse. Ultimately, the contributions aim to stimulate further discussion on the implications of marketization amid current socio-economic challenges.
Related papers
Markets as Mere Means
British Journal of Political Science, 2017
:There has been a remarkable shift in the relation between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued responsibility of the state. This paper investigates and rejects currently existing egalitarian liberal theories about this division of labor and it presents and defends a new theory of marketization, in which social rights and democratic decision-making occupy center-stage.
State and the Market – Debate and Developments
Time and again we are reminded that capitalism is more about competiveness and its advantages than ownership. Critics say that what we find today is not planning for people but planning for capital. Does this auger well for India " s faster and more inclusive growth? That way even in the classical capitalist growth theory does not preclude petering of growth. State activity then is necessary to make " stationary state " a state of activity if not of growth. There is entry for " state in the market " .The " State " has evolved, so has its functions, the latter often overlapping. The changes have been more in " domain " than in " direction " in general. From the era of laissez faire to state socialism and then to neo-liberalism, in every phase and every reform, " market " has been the crux of the matter. Again from non-interventionist, free market policy to public distribution and to the present privatisation bogey and further to the need for market/globalisation management, the debate goes on.While some pay eulogy to the market pointing out state failure, others hail the government (state) pointing out the market failure. That means the solutions lie in finding the right balance between the state and the market which is precisely what China and India are trying to do now. Although the debate " state versus market " per se is an old one, the recent changes in the international political economy have deepened the debate. More generally, the trends of the past decade have generated considerable debate about the role of knowledge, transnational corporations (TNCs), and multilateral institutions as vehicles for promoting growth and development. While the virtues of economic globalisation and the liberal market-oriented ideology continue to reign, evidence abounds of an increasing unease with the effects of unbridled market forces. In India for instance, besides the visible ills of globalisation (and/or marketization) including ecological imbalance, the perceived ones also have made the both the central and state governments to go in for more and more safety nets and public programmes like food security, job guarantee, direct cash transfer etc., in the name of market regulation.The present paper while considering some theoretical insights to the debate, tries to make a conscious decision to seek modern expressions of the major perspectives, viz., liberalism, economic nationalism, and structuralism. We also try to examine how – as Geoffrey Underhill feels – state and market make up a matrix or a " condominium " , i.e. " an integrated ensemble of governance " in order to move in a more welfare-oriented and redistributive direction. The limitations of the study: need to consider the complex situations in the functions of all the layers of the government in a federal setup , and the viewpoints of all the stakeholders, citizens, corporates etc., to focus upon the new trends in citizen centric governance.
Market versus State: The Dichotomy and Beyond
The optimal size of government, the adequate quantity of state intervention is a core issue in modern economics. Besides economic reasoning, the debate has an ideological side. Some people argue for the general superiority of market, while others claim that the presence of a strong government is unavoidable in modern economic systems. Nevertheless, besides ideological beliefs, there are economic rationales for both views. In this paper I overview these arguments and attempt to provide a theoretical framework to analyze the necessity of state intervention. I claim that the presence of market failures can ‘legitimize’ state intervention. However, the government also often tends to fail and its failures might make the situation worse. Return to the market could be an answer for that, but nevertheless, there may be other alternatives. In this paper, I argue that informal institutions (culture, norms) are also able to correct certain imperfections of free market without a claim for an authority.
Research directions on states and markets
A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, 2019
Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such
The Role of the State in the Modern Economic System
Problems of Economic Transition, 1994
The State and the Market in the Conditions of Modern Globalization: Struggle of Opposites or Synergy of Interaction?
Economy of Ukraine
State, market and globalization are three concepts, the interrelation and influence of which can be traced throughout almost the entire period of their existence. It is possible that, according to some anthropologists, in primitive societies the economy was not based on market relations, but the formation of market institutions is impossible without protection from the government (state or at least quasi-state) and even more so without direct creative intervention of the state. At the same time, however, it should be borne in mind that in the context of globalization there are ongoing changes both in the essence of the state and in the tasks that it must solve. Sometimes there are allegations of erosion or extinction of the nation-state, which are not yet true. Of course, the political and economic development of society makes its adjustments, but functions such as protection from economic aggression, legislative provision of fair competition, participation in large projects that ca...
Market and Society: How do they relate, and contribute to welfare?
2004
This paper discusses how markets and society relate to each other. We present and discuss three views: markets as separate, markets as embedded, and markets as impure. One’s stance on the contribution of markets to welfare hinges on the conceptualization of market and other spheres in society. If, for instance, one perceives of the economy (the economic domain) as an all-encompassing sphere or as a sphere totally separate from others, then one would believe markets necessarily contribute to welfare. Markets are presumed to be ubiquitous in mainstream economics; the orthodox view is that of the ‘market as separate’. Indeed, Frank Hahn notably conceded that neoclassical economics does not describe markets, but ‘conjures’ them up. Mainstream conceptions of the market are functionalist – in the appropriate conditions the market is an efficiency conduit, and hence wealth and welfare generating. Creating these appropriate conditions then drives policy, such as the provision of health care...
‘States and Markets: A Global Historical Sociology of Capitalist Governance’. In: Mathias Albert and Tobias Werron, What in the World? An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Global Social Change (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020): 177–194.
Until the 19 th century, politics and economics were not discrete fields. In Europe during the early modern period, power and profit formed a single logic: property and title went hand-inhand with administrative offices; warfare was conducted by 'privateers' as well as 'crown' forces; and sovereignty was closely bound up with commerce. Power and profit only became formally demarcated during the course of the 19 th century. During this period, 'economic' interactions were increasingly carried out through 'faceless' transactions via the 'symbolic token' of 'generalized money' (Simmel 1978[1900]: 332-3). Under these conditions, every product was exchangeable, including labour. Hence, for the first time, 'free labour' could be sold (as wages) according to market logics. The bracketing of a 'private' sphere of market exchange had the simultaneous effect of generating a 'public' sphere of political regulation. The economy became the realm of civil society mediated by logics of market exchange ('the self-regulating market' organised through 'the invisible hand'), while politics became the realm of the state governed by the national interest ('raison d'état'). The decoupling of politics and economics was as much ideal as it was real. It was ideal in that states and markets remained tightly intertwined: just as the market required the state to recognise private property and provide a legal apparatus that could sustain accumulation and enforce contracts, so the state required the revenues that accrued from property, accumulation and contracts. But it was also real inasmuch as market logics were given a degree of autonomy, both semantically and legally. The separation of states and markets that, from a contemporary viewpoint, appears natural can be traced to practices the emerged during the 19 th century (Giddens 1985: 135-6; Rosenberg 1994: 126). Any discussion of the relationship between states and markets is putting back together what was once an organic whole. This chapter examines the relationship between states and markets over the last century and a half, since the emergence of the first stage of globalisation. Its goal is to demonstrate the extensive entanglements through which logics of rule and gain have been sustained. In
Related papers
ECONOMICS AND THE ASSAULT ON THE MARKET
Abstract. State and market are complementary institutions. The state is the major institution coordinating modern societies; it is the constitutional system and the organizations guaranteeing it; it is the main instrument through which democratic societies have been changing capitalism so as to achieve their own agreed political objectives. Markets are institutions based on competition which the state regulates so that they contribute to the coordination of the economy.
Principles of Public Economy
Part of The Coming Ecological Crisis Pt 2 Economics by Dr Peter Critchley There has been an explosion of interest in the connection of morality and markets. The demands that capitalism moderate its unethical activities implies a social identity connecting egoism and altruism that simply is not available within capitalist relations. Capitalists are compelled to accumulate capital as a systemic imperative, not out of moral choice. For a better understanding of how capitalism cannot supply an ethical base it is worth examining the original thinkers behind the free market, who had a ‘political’ sense of how prices, value and the wider economy worked. Before economics became an independent discipline, a ‘science’ no less, economics was political economy and moral philosophy – the economy could only be understood in its relation to society, institutions, codes and values and cultures. Modern economics has forgotten its past and it shows. This argument focuses upon constants to establish a non-relativism in politics and morality grounded in essential human nature and to point out the dangers of libertarianism and relativism.
The State and the Market: An Institutionalist and Relational Take*
RCCS Annual Review, 2012
The State and the Market: An Institutionalist and Relational Take * State-market relations call for a holistic view of the relationship between the material and relational dynamics of society, on the one hand, and between these dynamics and institutional dynamics on the other. As the institution-of-institutions, the state contains mechanisms that are essential to the existence of markets themselves, and these mechanisms are not natural givens. It is therefore a mistake to conceive of the state, the market and society as opposing entities. One should turn instead to the institutionalist perspective, which draws from Polanyi, in order to offer a political approach to the state and the market. Economies are actually institutional production systems wherein the material density of the state both as organization and administration is of relevance. The institutionalist perspective thus needs to be fine-tuned in order to show that the state is more than a political-legal entity. That is one of the main goals of the present article.
Markets and States: Against Minimalism
paper argues against the currently fashionable case for "state minimalism," or laissez-faire. It not only argues for a strong state, but also for an activist one, though operating on a different basis from the many recently failed interventionist states. The argument is developed via a critique of a series of overstated or one-sided propositions that bolster the state minimalist position.
Rethinking Markets: Anarchism, Capitalism and the State
The Libertarian Ideal, 2016
This article examines markets as structures independent of capitalist socio-economic organisation. It rethinks markets as economic tools that can be placed in radically different economic systems far removed from the normalities of capitalism. By examining how markets are shaped by five monopolies created by state intervention and artificial economies of scale that rely on massive subsidisation, I see how some of the fundamentals of capitalism, the factor markets and capital-labour relations, are reshaped in a conception of free markets that are not influenced by capitalist agency. I go on to see how the Austrian School's subject of the individual as an agent of subjective economic desires is changed when placed within structures of free, or freed, markets. The institutions of markets, the surplus value distribution and the multiple social relations that present themselves as possible under a regime of rethought markets shows this subject as instituted in a diverse economy of possibilities and existences. I then examine how, even under capitalism, such a diverse economy already exists on the peripheries and in the interstices of the modern economy.
Debate on Market Socialism
Radical Philosophy, 1985
Beyond the Market? comments on Boris Frankel The editors have asked me to comment on Frankel's Beyond the State?, since Frankel devotes several pages to a criticism of the sort of arguments which I advanced in my Economics of Feasible Socialism and in some other works. The key issue is evidently the relationship between socialism and the market mechanism. Frankel also criticises the ideas of many other thinkers, and-challenges some aspects of Marxist orthodoxy. Let me say at once that I found his work refreshing, vigorous and honest. Agreements He devotes much space to a CrItIcIsm of received ideas about the state, and he is right to do so. Its role in modern societies, in East and West alike, is very different indeed from the 'orthodox' models, both of Marx and of the 'ideal-type images of capitalism' of 'Chicago' laissez-faire. The traditional distinctions between the state and 'civil society', between base and superstructure, are in urgent need of drastic amendment. Frankel rightly focuses on many confusions: should (for instance) a movement such as Poland's 'Solidarity' be demanding freedom of social institutions from the state, or control by society over the state? What role should the state, and state planning, play in models of socialism which stress the autonomy of selfmanaged productive units? Perhaps, as he claims, 'stateless socialism will probably only guarantee unfreedom and inequality.' What, within any sort of class analysis, should be the status of state employees, which in more developed countries constitute a sizeable percentage of the total workforce? Evidently, such categories as 'exploitation' and 'surplus' value do not relate to them. A large part of our economy no longer fits into the Marxist division of it into 'Departments I and II'. These and some other 'sacred cows of Marxian orthodoxy' must be abandoned, argues the author. It is not my intention to enter more deeply into discussion of these matters, only to stress that Frankel is fully justified in raising these issues, and does so in ways which stimulate and inform. Who is 'productive'? This reader was, however, worried about his retention of one element of the dogmatic tradition: the treatment of 'unproductive' (or non-surplus-generating) labour. The problem here is not one of the typical employee in the public sector: obviously, a hospital nurse, probation officer, city architect, street sweeper, tax inspector, do not generate surplus value in any sense of the word, and their incomes evidently arise out of taxation. Marx, as is known, treated
Market, socialism and democracy in an interdisciplinary perspective
In this period of economic and social distress, a comprehensive assessment of the foundations of our economic and social systems has been unfolding in virtually all the most developed countries. We will employ a pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach for analysing some controversial elements of the following issues: 1) the definition and analysis of the market in an institutional and evolutionary perspective; 2) authoritarian and democratic socialism, namely, how to bring together freedom and social justice; 3) the possibility of reformulating the Marxist labour theory of value without reference to the concepts of classic economics; 4) the theory of historical materialism and the importance of bringing to the fore also the cultural and psychological factors; 5) the links of these issues with the debate between holism and methodological individualism; 6) the role of psychoanalytic perspective in elucidating many aspects of these concepts and, on this basis, to identify suitable policies for our most urgent economic and social problems.
Market and Society: How Do They Relate, and How Do They Contribute to Welfare?
Institutions, Communication and Values, 2009
The relationship between market and society is a hotly debated issue in the social sciences. At the level of theory, this discourse dates back to considerations of social order in which Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume were among the most important early contributors. The discussion has considerable ideological overtones as well, where the contribution of the market to welfare and well-being is at stake. Welfare is usually conceptualized in material terms, and we surmise that both market and society can contribute to welfare and well-being. There are spheres outside of the domain of the market that contribute to well-being, and a certain accomplishment in the market can contribute to well-being that is not captured in welfare. In this paper we do not deny that. We conceptualize the relation between market and society, focusing more specifically on periods of reform. Reforms in the health care sector are a case in point. Expanding and Purifying Markets Views on how market and society relate to each other may be classified according to figures 1 through 3. There are three broad ways in which to perceive the relation between the two spheres. First is to see market(s) and society as two separate realms (figure 1). Obviously, the neoclassical economic view, specifically the Walrasian approach, 347
Markets, privatisation and law and order – some economic considerations
Criminal Justice Matters, 2014
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.