Exploring the Concept of 'the Market': Combining History of Ideas and Historiographical Approaches

围绕市场的公共话语通常将市场机制的形象作为某种纪律力量。因此，这些机制被赋予了自己的意愿，并被广泛认为有能力根据这一意愿采取行动，强制执行本来不会产生的结果。民粹主义者的一句话“你不能抵制市场”是这种思维方式的完美例证，它助长了人们对无能为力的看法，因为人们被认为在抽象但控制性的市场逻辑面前失去了对自己命运的控制。然而，在这些宣称市场机制无所不知的言论背后，存在着许多分析性的假设，这些假设往往根本没有得到反映。我们被告知，市场能够将特定的行为优先权强加给我们，但通常我们不会被告知原因。纪律部队形象的力量本身通常足以使形象中包含的关于反叛危险的信息变得可信，支撑这种社会和政治被动性的最重要的隐蔽假设是，市场能够自动协调个人经济活动，以追求最佳可能结果。用技术语言来说，这是一种假设，即如果让它们单独执行使供给与需求相匹配的任务，它们将完全“清除”。这就是民粹主义概念如何解释市场协调的事实，通过市场协调，日常经济决策的无数实例凝聚成一个有效的经济体系。不幸的是，现实世界的市场往往会偏离配置效率的相应形象，这一点在全球金融危机期间和危机前后发生的巨大配置失败中得到了生动的证明。几乎可以肯定的是，现实世界中的这些困难与这样一个事实有关：在经济学家的学科领域历史上，他们从未对市场协调问题提出过明确的经济学解决方案：是的，这些解决方案用逻辑和数学术语表达;所谓的市场协调问题被具体描述为一个“问题”是有充分理由的，然后，我的项目试图揭示一些方式，在这些方式中，对于学院派经济学家来说，解决市场协调问题的持续无能变得越来越不重要。在经济学的方法论和教学法方面都出现了专业发展，这使得这个问题几乎完全被回避了。从方法论的角度来看，我们可以找出19世纪20年代到20世纪30年代的一些转折点，这些转折点使经济学日益成为一门“选择科学”，从而消除了人们对更广泛的市场环境的影响的兴趣，而在更广泛的市场环境中，个人被要求进行选择。“市场”，作为一种具体的日常买卖关系的实质性现象，因此几乎从经济学研究中消失了，尽管经济学家容易被指责在严重的市场困境中失去联系。从教学上讲，从19世纪70年代开始，学生们通过接触来自假设的罗宾逊克鲁索经济的例子，学会了理解个人选择的基本经济本质。在一个人的荒岛环境中，协调是不必要的，这使得市场如何运作的问题变成了一个难以驾驭的逻辑练习。也不允许市场崩溃的时刻发生，因为从周围的等式中得出的基本逻辑总是能够坚持自己。这就相对容易理解为什么许多评论家要求在全球金融危机之后发展一种新的经济学，这种经济学从根本上打破了罗宾逊这个人物被迫生活的数学框架。

Public discourse surrounding the market typically forwards the image of market mechanisms as some sort of disciplinary force. Such mechanisms are thus given a will of their own and are widely believed to have the capacity to act upon that will to enforce outcomes which otherwise would not have arisen. The populist phrase 'you can't buck the market' is the perfect illustration of this way of thinking, and it feeds perceptions of powerlessness insofar as people are deemed to have lost control of their own destiny in the face of abstract but controlling market logic. Yet behind these pronouncements of the omniscience of market mechanisms there lie any number of analytical assumptions which tend not to be reflected upon at all. We are told that the market is able to assert particular behavioural priorities onto us, but typically we are not told why. The power of the image of a disciplinary force is usually enough on its own to render believable the message contained within the image about the dangers of rebelling.The most significant of the covert assumptions underpinning such social and political passivity is that markets are able automatically to coordinate individual economic activity in pursuit of the best possible outcome. In technical language this is the presumption that they 'clear' perfectly if left alone to perform their task of matching supply faultlessly with demand. This is how the populist conception accounts for the fact of market coordination, through which myriad instances of everyday economic decision-making cohere into a functioning economic system. Unfortunately, real-world markets have a tendency to depart from the accompanying image of allocative efficiency, as was demonstrated only too vividly by the colossal allocation failures which occurred in and around the global financial crisis. Such real-world difficulties are almost certainly related to the fact that at no point in their subject field's history have economists offered an unequivocally economic solution to the issue of market coordination: solutions couched in logical and mathematical terms, yes; solutions couched in genuine economic terms, no. The so-called market coordination problem is described specifically as a 'problem' for good reason, then.My project seeks to reveal some of the ways in which the ongoing inability to resolve the market coordination problem has been rendered increasingly unimportant for academic economists. Professional developments have occurred within both the methodology and pedagogy of economics which have allowed that problem to be almost entirely sidestepped. Methodologically, it is possible to identify a number of turning points from the 1820s to the 1930s which increasingly moved economics to become a 'science of choice', thus eliminating interest in the effects of the broader market environment in which individuals are called upon to choose. 'The market', as a substantive phenomenon of concrete everyday relationships of buying and selling, has consequently all but disappeared from economics research, albeit leaving economists susceptible to the accusation of being out-of-touch in moments of acute market distress. Pedagogically, from the 1870s onwards, students have learned to understand the fundamental economic essence of individual choice through exposure to examples drawn from a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe economy. No coordination is necessary in a one-person desert island setting, which turns the question of how markets work into a mathematically-tractable exercise in logic. Neither are moments of market breakdown ever allowed to occur, because the underlying logic drawn from the surrounding equations is always able to assert itself. This makes it relatively easy to understand why many commentators have asked for a new type of economics to be developed in the wake of the global financial crisis, one which breaks fundamentally with the mathematical framework in which the Robinson character is forced to live.