1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Commodification
Some goods are freely traded as commodities without question or controversy. For other goods, their commodification – their being made available in exchange for money, or their being subject to market valuation and exchange – is hotly contested. “Contested” commodities range from labour and land, to votes, healthcare, and education, to human organs, gametes, and intimate services, to parks and emissions. But in the context of a market economy, what distinguishes these goods as non-commodifiable, or what defines them as contestable commodities? And why should their status as such justify restricting the market choices of rationally consenting parties to otherwise voluntary exchanges?
This volume draws together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research on the legitimate scope of markets and the kinds of goods that should be exempt therefrom. In bringing diverse answers to this question together for the first time, it finally identifies commodification studies as a unique field of scholarly research in its own right. In so doing, it fosters interdisciplinary dialogue, advances scholarship, and enhances education in this controversial, important, and growing field of research. Contemporary theorists who examine this question do so from across the disciplinary spectrum and ground their answers in diverse scholarly literature and divergent methodological approaches. Their arguments will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, economics, law, political science, sociology, policy, feminist theory, and ecology, among others.
The contributors to this volume take diverse and divergent positions on the benefits of markets in general and on the possible harms of specific contested markets in particular. While some favour free markets and others regulation or prohibition, and while some engage in more normative and others in more empirical analysis, the contributors all advance nuanced and thoughtful arguments that engage deeply with the complex set of moral and empirical questions at the heart of commodification studies. This volume collects their new and provocative work together for the first time.
Preface by Margaret Jane Radin
Introduction: Contested markets and commodification studies
Vida Panitch and Elodie Bertrand
Part 1: Commodification studies: Past and Present
1. Commodification: The traditional pro-market arguments
Marie Daou and Alain Marciano
2. Classical anti-commodification arguments: Commodification and fictitious commodities – Polanyi’s decisive contribution
Nicolas Postel and Richard Sobel
3. Contemporary anti-commodification arguments: Market failures – Identifying contested markets without morals? An analysis of the externality argument for inalienability
Elodie Bertrand
4. Contemporary anti-commodification arguments: Corruption, inequality, and justice
Vida Panitch
5. Sociology of moral contestation of exchange institutions
Philippe Steiner
Part 2: A history of contested commodities
6. Land: Land as commodity— A history of a problem
Pierre Crétois
7. Usury and simony: Trading for no price – Thomas Aquinas on money loans, sacraments and exchange
Pierre Januard and André Lapidus
8. Labour: From disguised servitude to limited servitude— A history of the social incorporation of the commodification of work
François Vatin
9. Gambling: Using the market to regulate practices
Marie Trespeuch
10. Insurance
Emily Nacol
Part 3: Contested commodities and the state
11. Vote buying and campaign finance
Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman
12. Health care
L. Chad Horne
13. Education: Commodification and schools
Harry Brighouse
14. Security and prisons
Jonathan Peterson
15. Cultural goods: Cultural commodification and cultural appropriation
Michael Joel Kessler
16. Care work: Revaluing care through partial decommodification— In praise of unpaid care from all
Jennifer Nedelsky
Part 4: The body and intimacy as contested commodities
17. Human organs
James Stacey Taylor
18. Blood and plasma: Or, if you’re such an altruist, why don’t you sell your plasma?
Peter M. Jaworski
19. Gametes: Commodification and the fertility industry
Kimberley D. Krawiec
20. Contract sex
Laurie J. Shrage
21. Surrogacy: The ethics of paid surrogacy
Stephen Wilkinson
22. Adoption: A mosaic of market and non-market elements
Martha M. Ertman
Part 5: Non-human nature and environment as contested commodities
23. Natural capital and biodiversity: Money, markets and offsets
John O’Neill
24. Emission trading: Commodification of pollution— From resistance to proliferation
Nathalie Berta
25. Ecosystems: Ecosystem services and the commodification of nature
Julia Martin-Ortega, Paula Novo, Erik Gomez-Baggethun, Roldan Muradian, Ciaran Harte, and M. Azahara Mesa-Jurado
26. Water: Distributive justice and the commodification of water
Adrian Walsh
27. Animals: Ending cruelty through markets
Aksel Braanen Sterri
28. Seed: Commodification, decommodification and commoning
Fabien Girard, Christine Frison, and Christine Noiville
29. Parks and forests: The question of the commons
Catherine Larrère
Index
Biography
Elodie Bertrand is Associate Research Professor in economics at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, ISJPS (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and CNRS, UMR 8103). She co-edited the Elgar Companion to Ronald Coase (2016), and The Limits of the Market: Commodification of Nature and Body (2020).
Vida Panitch is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on questions of commodification, exploitation, and distributive justice. She co-edited Exploitation: from Theory to Practice (2017).
"In an era when the commodifying tendencies of capitalism are speeding up and the market extends its reach into multiple areas previously considered outside its domain, this much needed Routledge Handbook of Commodification provides invaluable insight into a hotly contested terrain."
Anne Phillips, author of Unconditional Equals, Professor Emerita, LSE
