Methodological Tensions in Understanding Markets

Methodological Tensions in Understanding Markets

The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University on 14-15 December  2022

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Markets can no longer be taken for granted. As little as a generation ago, markets were often touted as catch-all solutions for problems as far-ranging as global inequality, poverty, and political stalemate. But in the wake of a major crisis that threatened to bring global financial markets to a halt, an ensuing world-wide recession that threw labor and product markets into chaos, a pandemic that has encouraged a re-imagination of the role of the state in product and service provision, and a growing consensus that inequality is often exacerbated by market dynamics, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to a better understanding of how markets arise, evolve, thrive, or collapse. Markets have become ubiquitous sites for the most crucial and the most day-to-day human interactions, highlighting the urgency of understanding their nature, their potential, and their ethical pitfalls. Armed with the insight that markets are structured by law, legal scholars are central participants in the debates that have arisen.

The tension between conceptual analysis, or theory, and history is age-old. Today, however, the tension seems of particular interest in thinking about markets and market societies in order to evaluate their normative pitfalls and imagine their ethical reform. Economic historians, influenced by the intensification of conceptual rigor within economics, have honed their conceptual tools to advance analytical concepts that travel. They have suggested, for example, that the agency problem or the puzzles of collective action problems (free-riding etc.) can illuminate the development of market institutions across time and space. Meanwhile, historians outside of economic history have concentrated on contingent particularities, seeming to suggest that general conceptual laws are of little use in understanding change over time. Some have claimed that historicizing the development of seemingly general conceptual categories reveals a contingent, political core at the heart of analytical work.

For the most part, however, the possible connections between these styles of work – whether conflictual or cooperative – have been left implicit. This conference aims to generate a discussion that will bring these themes out into the open, asking whether there is a horizon for productive cooperation between legal history or comparative inquiry and conceptual analysis in law. Bringing together theorists of market institutions, in particular private law and corporate law theorists and comparativists as well as legal historians interested in the ethics of the markets, we hope to take a deeper look at the interaction between the development of general legal concepts and their concrete, in-context manifestations.

Co-sponsored by TAU's Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History, the Max Planck Institutes for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt) and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

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