The commensurability of labor and wage made sense in the context of a particular understanding of the grounds on which an economic exchange can be considered fair. On this understanding, economic exchanges are fair when there is an equality between the exchanged substances. The emergence of mass consumption was closely connected to the increasing de facto legitimacy of wage-labor exchange, under this historically particular understanding of economic fairness, applied to wage labor. The fairness of wage labor exchange became possible through the establishment of an objective equivalence between labor and wage goods, as those goods came to signify free activity. This version of economic fairness was most clearly instantiated in the moral economy that underpinned the mid-century “Fordist” period of capitalism.
The Character and Scope of the Argument
The approach taken in this book is interdisciplinary, ranging across all the social sciences and diverse currents of historical research while also drawing on philosophical works. Especially in the theory sections of the book, I discuss a variety of sometimes conflicting paradigms. I ask my readers to consider approaches to social and economic phenomena with which they might be unfamiliar or perhaps might even think self-evidently wrong. The discussion turns on a dime, as it were, from neoclassical economics to Marxian accounts of capitalism, from economic anthropology to sociological theory, from political economy to behavioral psychology. At the same time, the book combines economic analysis, historical synthesis, sometimes quite speculative social theorizing, and interpretation of culture, bringing together methods and approaches that have their homes in diferent disciplines. But there are good reasons for tromping freely across disciplinary boundaries when considering big questions of the sort that are at the center of this book. When faced with very complex, multifaceted problems, the best approach is to regard the human sciences as a diverse tool kit, and, in order to gain some leverage on the problem, try out as many theoretical approaches and concepts as possible.
Introduction
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