Theoretical Contestations: State, Market, and the Individual

Abstract

How do states and markets contribute to individual well-being? Are individuals better off when markets are left untrammeled? Or does placing limits on the market better enable individuals to pursue their own ends? If so, by what criteria should states and markets be limited? Dominant thinking, grounded in conservative, Marxian, post-Marxian, and post-structural theories, tends to locate the problematic welfare and individual well-being in either state or civil society, taking one of the two poles of civil society — its enabling or disabling role vis-à-vis individual well-being — for the whole. Advocates of the free-market position idealize the market’s enabling function by denying its equally powerful potential for impingement. Critics, on the other hand, view the market in primarily negative terms thereby denying its significance to individual well-being. In advocating state-based welfare as the only effective antidote to the vicissitudes of the market, critics of the market ignore the damaging effects of the lack of participation in exchange relations for self and social esteem vital to individual well-being.