Not only are there willing buyers for body parts or babies, Radin observes, but some desperately poor people would be willing sellers, while better-off people find such trades abhorrent. Radin observes that many such areas of contested commodification reflect a persistent dilemma in liberal society: we value freedom of choice and simultaneously believe that choices ought to be restricted to protect the integrity of what it means to be a person. She views this tension as primarily the result of underlying social and economic inequality, which need not reflect an irreconcilable conflict in the premises of liberal democracy.
As a philosophical pragmatist, the author therefore argues for a conception of incomplete commodification, in which some contested things can be bought and sold, but only under carefully regulated circumstances. Such a regulatory regime both symbolizes the importance of nonmarket value to personhood and aspires to ameliorate the underlying conditions of inequality.
Margaret Jane Radin is Professor of Law at Stanford University.
What People are Saying About This
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.
Martha Nussbaum
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
David Strauss
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
Michael J. Trebilcock
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
