ABSTRACT
The role of the market in the "sociological imaginary" can be portrayed as a Hegelian dialectic, whose thesis is "market" as the name for regular well-bounded episodes in ordinary social life concerned with the provision of goods that cannot be produced by one's own means. Joseph Schumpeter's attitude toward the market is so difficult to grasp because the logic of his thought is diametrically opposed to the Hayekian attitude that pervades contemporary neo-liberalism. The antithesis is the idea of the market as an extraordinary strategy that forces social agents to reorient their economic activities in order to maintain their existence. The idea of Schumpeterian socio-economics as social medicine merits further exploration. In more orthodox histories of economics, the relationship between the physiocratic economists and the political economists is treated much like the relationship between Creationists and Darwinists in conventional histories of biology.
