The development of commercial law is certainly a deeply complex matter, subject to diverse cultural, professional, political, legal, and social influences. In relation to the argument of the present book, however, the significant point is that the drift of commercial law over the course of the twentieth century was in the direction of afirming the right of the consumer to some quantity of usefulness from purchased products. The rise of the implied warranty indicates that fairness in exchange had shifted from being primarily a formal matter of free assent to a contract to being a matter of a roughly equal exchange of substances. Fair market exchange obtains where the quantity of usefulness notionally represented by the money exchanged for a commodity (in turn indexing the value of the labor given in exchange for the wage) is met by reasonably equivalent quantities of usefulness in the commodity.
The legal notion that consumers have a right to useful objects through market exchange was, like all rights, grounded in a broader normative order. The entitlement of consumers to wage goods containing a reasonable duration of use power flowed, I would suggest, from the moral economy underpinning wage labor itself. As we have seen, historians have suggested that the moral economy of mid-twentieth century American capitalism coalesced around the concept of “purchasing power,” the ongoing increase of which constituted a “fair exchange” for labor’s contribution to increasing productivity. The efort to secure the use value of consumer commodities, by legal, commercial, and political means, expressed the imperatives of that moral economy while also providing it with vital institutional and ideological support.
Standardizing Utility
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