- The Historicity of Economic Fairness: A Note on the Historical Semantics of “Fair”
There are reasons to think that the notion that economic fairness entails an exchange of commensurable substances of roughly equal value is peculiarly modern and that, given the timing of its emergence, this idea of fairness might well have been connected to the rise of wage labor.1 Although there were markets before the emergence of capitalism, they were quite circumscribed, and labor markets in particular were limited in extent. Wage labor consequently had a relatively marginal place in the economy. Before the rise to dominance of market capitalism, the basis of the legitimacy of economic exchange was not that the substances changing hands were commensurable and of equal magnitude.2 Rather, the exchange of goods and services (often between patrons and clients) in precapitalist contexts typically expressed normative obligations and expectations attached to the social identity and status of the parties involved in the transaction.3 A minimal condition (although certainly not a suficient one) on those kinds of exchanges being legitimate was that the parties comport themselves in accordance with norms attached to their respective social positions and that the terms of the exchange conform to customary expectations.4 If in an exchange more was demanded or less given than custom dictated, the legitimacy of the exchange would be thrown into question.
With the growing importance of wage labor, and the broader expansion of the market economy, economic exchange became, at least in theory, a more neutral matter, in the sense that the particular social identities of the exchanging parties were not supposed to determine the terms of the exchange. But this did not mean that emergent, modern ideals of economic exchange were devoid of a normative dimension—a sense of the conditions under which exchanges could be deemed proper and fair. There were formal and substantive normative dimensions to modern economic exchange, both of which informed conceptions of fair wage exchange.5 On formal grounds, economic exchanges were viewed as fair insofar as they are entered into without coercion by notionally free subjects, conceived of more or less along the lines of liberal ideology. On substantive grounds, fairness was objectively grounded in the properties of the substances being exchanged. A substantively fair exchange is one in which the exchanged substances are self-evidently of roughly equal value (however value is construed). To be sure, there were variations across diferent capitalist contexts in how exactly the substantive notion of fairness was worked out. As noted briefly in the previous chapter, Richard Biernacki’s (1995) comparative work on the norms governing wage-labor exchange in Germany and England in the early industrial period shows how in Germany value was a function of labor time, whereas in England value was reified in the product of labor. According to Biernacki, this diference reflected distinct, culturally embedded notions about the source of value. But in both cases, there was an understanding that fairness in the exchange of work for a wage obtains where the value represented by the wage is equal to the value represented by the work given for it.
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