Market Triumphalism: The Threat of Market Values on Social Values

Abstract

The events of the last decades of the twentieth century, especially the 1990s, have exposed the victory of extreme liberal economic ideas that have dogmatic faith in the total ability of market forces, and the dominance of these forces over the policies and institutions regulating economic activity. This "idolatrous" trend in sanctifying the market is not content with just promoting the role of the market in relations of production of goods and services as independent facts, but has caused essentially human social activities to fail by commodifying them, that is by turning them into commodities subject to the profit motive, which disrupts the essential nature of these activities and displaces them from their lofty social intentions by making them the object of vulgar commercial bargaining, and thereby crossing the "moral boundaries" of the market function. Chief among those who oppose this phenomenon is professor of philosophy of governance and sociology at Harvard University, Michael Sandel. His books have raised the question of the ethical limits to the function of the market and what the greed for profit has caused in terms of attacking these boundaries, to conclude that it is necessary to regulate the role of the market in society so as not to allow "market practices" to escape the moral limits of the market and enter the social spaces beyond those limits, including trade and private profit from public goods and excess in applying the profit motive outside its place in societal activity.