The discursive emergence of ‘the market’ in capitalist political economy: crisis system and the Longue Durée

This paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better underst...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of critical realism 2024-01, Vol.23 (1), p.1-17
Main Authors: Faure Walker, Rob, O’Regan, John P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
17th century
Bartering
Capitalism
Crises
Discourse analysis
Natural environment
Political economy
Semiotics
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Summary:This paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better understood by the theorization of the generative mechanisms that emerged from the economic and political chaos of the early 1600s. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to show that in the context of the emergence of capitalism in England, these generative mechanisms resulted in the meaning of the word ‘market’ slipping loose of the geo-spatial semiotic bounds by which it had commonly been delineated – i.e. as a physical space in a town or city where goods were bartered or sold – and being re-semioticised to refer to abstract space where all acts of capitalist economic exchange, including those impacting upon the natural world, take place.
ISSN:1476-7430
1572-5138
DOI:10.1080/14767430.2023.2289783