ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the case of economic institutions, and of market institutions in particular, the relationship of which to law was a central focus in Bankowski's earlier work, Living Lawfully. It focuses the thesis in a more radical manner, and endorse instead the view that both market and pre-market economies are both moral and ethical; what distinguishes them is 'only' their specific character in these respects. Against Polanyi, Booth argues that market economies are moral economies: what distinguishes them is the specific content of the morality in which they are embedded, not their lack of any such morality. Hayek argues that the crucial difference between markets, and economies be organized, in the absence of any collective or societal-level decisions about the specific purposes to be served by economic activity. As Debra Satz emphasizes, Smith valued the exchange relations of commercial society highly because they replaced the servility and deference of feudal society with relations of social equality.
