Continuity and Change in the American Political Economy

This book began with a simple but important argument regarding the market-state dichotomy that has played such an influential role in shaping the way we think about political economy and public policy. The dichotomy is grounded in the belief that the market and the state exist as two fundamentally different realms of human activity. In this view, markets are self-constituting and pre-political. They arise from the innate “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase in The Wealth of Nations. ¹