ABSTRACT
A 'market economy' must coexist with, and perhaps prosper on the back of, a publicly organized form of civil society. In the nervous cultural climate and the fast shift of political priorities that characterized the Western world generally in the early 1980s, there was at least one crucial elision. In a series of important papers, Elliott Currie has offered the additional argument - that it is precisely in societies which have embraced the idea of 'market society' that the level of dislocation to civil society has been most marked. The 'material reality' of market society in part finds expression in the accelerating inequality as the second of the nine late twentieth century crises. In many different market societies, the inequality of material struggles finds expression in the rapid development of a range of sensory or escapist crimes associated, for example, with drugs, alcohol or sexual pleasure.
