This book is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the essential relationship between markets and morals. Smith, Burke and Marx, Durkheim, Polyani and Hayek - all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This framework of interdependence and ethics embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present-day is but a part. The book argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.
