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David Warsh contemplates the significance of "the Market Revolution" and its history for those "of the Left" .. and of a certain age. Some cuts:

the more my friends and I reflected on our own experience, the more the Left/Right distinction lost its capacity to illuminate what had happened to us. We still felt ourselves to be "of the Left" � we were egalitarian, socially liberal, seriously concerned about the environment.

Yet we were nearly as enthusiastic about the new reforms � stable money, deregulation, corporate restructuring, tax simplification, auctions, emissions-trading and the rest � as were any of our friends on the Right. So the shorthand we came to employ among ourselves was to speak of "the Market Revolution." It is hard to convey now how surprising it was to those of us who became involved ..

But then and now, it seems to me that one of the most illuminating pieces of work to appear in all those bewildering years was George Nash�s 1976 book The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America Since 1945 ..

despite the fact that it began with an account of the publication in 1944 Hayek�s passionate defense of markets, The Road to Serfdom, Nash�s book left out for the most part the subsequent rise of market liberalism � and so completely missed the underpinnings of what would happen next. It wasn�t conservatism that conquered the world in the last quarter of the 20th century � it was capitalism.

I think of this because I have begun reading Jerry Z. Muller�s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism and Modern European Thought This is a remarkable book, fifteen years in the making. (Muller is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. [and a Hayek-Ler --g.r]) It seems to me to have the same clarifying effect today as did Nash�s book in its time. And like Nash�s book, it works at least partly by omission. It gives the same strong impression that something important has been left out ..

So what is it that has been omitted? In his final chapter, Muller raises the question of the status of non-market institutions � the family, the church, the university, the state, the Volk. Naturally, economic self-interest penetrates and sometimes pervades each sphere. The decision to have children has an economic dimension. So does the decision to go to join the army, to go to school, to give to charity, to make a new finding and communicate it to others, to pay taxes, to grant benefits.

Will these non-market institutions some day cease to exist altogether? Or linger on only in the most attenuated form? Will there be markets for everything and motives for nothing aside from the aggrandizement of the Self?

Somehow, I doubt it. Economists and other social thinkers only recently have turned their attention to these counterinstitutions, wherein preferences are determined and tastes are made. They are probably far more important than we think. I suspect that markets will turn out to be only half the story. For changes within these little understood non-market institutions can produce very powerful shifts in short periods of time between the opposing poles that Muller sees as characteristic of the modern age.

It's worth noting that Hayek was out ahead of the pack in emphasizing the importance of all of these "counter" institutions. It is also worth noting that folks like economist and Hayek-Ler Steve Horwitz are pursuing advance research on these topics within a broadly "Hayekian" framwork. See, for example, Steve's papers found here.