What Money Can’t Buy

"I actually brought this book into the discussion as an example of exactly what you just said – so much of the debate on the aftermath of the crisis has been extremely naïve. I think this is quite a superficial book, which purports to deal with some of the profound paradoxes of markets that we have just talked about, but doesn’t do it all. Yet of all the books on my list, this one has attracted by far the largest attention. This illustrates what we discussed at the beginning – that despite the magnitude of the crisis that started in 2007, our societies and intellectual leaders have not been ready to seriously confront the flaws in the market system. This book gives a laundry list of examples where markets overreached and led to clearly unacceptable moral outcomes – for example, selling babies or human organs. But these are just superficial pimples on the deep structure of the market economy, a structure which Sandel doesn’t really penetrate. Although he talks about the way that markets have eliminated morality and social awareness from public life, or fragmented and atomised society, he doesn’t even refer to the really serious work on these issues that started more than 150 years ago with Karl Marx. Sandel and his many enthusiastic reviewers seem only just to have discovered that market forces tend to dissolve social bonds and ethical values. But this is exactly what Marx wrote, with infinitely more power and prescience, in the famous passage in the Communist Manifesto about the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions” by what he called the “fetishism of commodities” operating at a global level: “All fixed relations are swept away, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”"