The Price of the Common Good: Markets, Corporations, and Political Economy

The Price of the Common Good offers a fresh perspective on economic prosperity and solidarity that emphasizes communal interests.

There is more at stake in market economies than self-interest or making money. Lying just below the surface, there are shared projects answering the deepest political questions of how we live together and who we become. The Price of the Common Good exposes the inadequacies of the prevailing individualistic vision of markets and firms and develops an incisive new framework for analyzing the shared goods that are always in play. To get a purchase on the full moral architecture of markets and firms, Mark Hoipkemier recovers the classical idiom of the “common good” for today’s economy.

Hoipkemier argues not that economic institutions should ideally embody communal purposes, but that they already do. Engaging with leading political economists, he shows the centrality of common goods in real-world institutions with examples such as Uber, corporate law, and globalized auto manufacturing. The Price of the Common Good offers both the defenders and critics of the market a richer way of deliberating about shared concerns in markets and firms as they are and as they should be.

Mark Hoipkemier is an assistant professor in the Program on Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at the University of Navarra.