ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author develops from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel a new argument against the possibility of a pure market society. After advancing that argument, he shows how it can be extended to question the current reliance on mathematical models. The author argues that just as no animal can be mobile without being both enabled and limited by its particular contingent type of mobility, so, too, no citizen can be rational or political without being enabled and limited by its particular contingent substantive identity. This argument begins with Hegel's conception of nature. Nature, for Hegel, is all outside. Forms and processes and laws that may be described in conceptual purity become real only when embodied in space and time, where their primary connections are external. Hegel's institutional recommendations for political and social structures occur at the end of his discussion of spirit realized objectively in the world.
