DEMOCRATIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION

We have traced the close association between freedom and the market in Western political thought to the contingent fact that the rise of modern commercial societies in early modern Europe appeared as a threat to the freedom of the people concerned, and that the conception of freedom that was inherited from classical antiquity was ambiguous and flexible enough that it could be used to defend as well as to criticize this development. The resulting ideological crisis created the conceptual space for the invention of market freedom, a view that was built out of a synthesis of republican and juristic ideas. In particular, the commercial republican claim that the pursuit of self-interest provides the most reliable path to collective prosperity was woven together with the Lockean appeal to consent as the foundation of legitimate political rule – the difference being that consent was now seen as something that is given day to day and moment to moment in the market, rather than as something that was given at a hypothetical founding moment.