ABSTRACT
In the next four chapters I consider arguments for the market that appeal to a cluster of values around liberty. The market is often defended as a sphere of freedom, of voluntary uncoerced contracts between free and independent agents who can shape their own lives. This liberal argument is central to the Austrian school and is implicit in the anti-paternalistic arguments in the neo-classical tradition discussed at the end of chapter 3. In examining this line of argument, I focus on what looks the strongest case for it, namely that which asserts a relationship between market institutions and autonomy. I leave aside here, for reasons of space and not cogency, traditional socialist objections, recently revived by feminists: that contracts in markets are often only formally voluntary acts between free and independent agents-the relations between the agent often in substance involve real asymmetries of power; that labour contracts, even if they are born in the Eden of free contract, are a route to significant unfreedoms, since in buying labour power the buyer gains rights of direction.1
