The essays in this volume provide various perspectives on the meanings that different individuals and social groups have attached to their experience of the market. Based on a wide range of literary, artistic, philosophical, and other historical sources, they explore how the norms and practices that market societies foster have been shifting and conflict-ridden.

In speaking of the "culture of the market," the authors do not assume that culture is simply a reflection of autonomous economic forces, nor do they suppose that the market is always associated with the same cultural forms, independent of time, place, tradition, and human volition. Yet to speak of the cultural implications of the market is to assume that markets, precisely because they are aspects of culture, have cultural concomitants, and that careful observers are capable of identifying at least some of them.

Just what those concomitants are, whether they are best understood as preconditions of market behavior or as results of it, and just how necessary or contingent their connection to market activity may be, are open questions on which the contributors to this volume shed new light.