In establishing a good life, we must guard against the colonisation of society by the market. This raises the question of what is proper within the market domain, and what areas of work and life need to be protected from market practices and discourse. I shall discuss the nature of the market boundaries, and then examine three types of recognition in the social world. I will suggest that private recognition associated with market practices can undermine a wide range of social institutions and practices through which many human goods are conceived, produced and distributed.

Where, and on what grounds, are the lines to be drawn between those social practices that properly belong to the market domain, and those that do not? We may call this the question of market boundaries.

Traditionally, there are two kinds of reasons for limiting the scope of the market domain.

• The first is essentially distributive: it focuses on the possible injustice of allowing the distribution of certain items (e.g. health-care and education) to be determined by the operation of the market.
• The second concerns the possible effects of the market on the nature of various human goods: it focuses on the damage that may be done to these goods when their production and/or exchange takes place through the market; for example, the sale and purchase of sexual services and commercialisation of blood and organ donation.

However, there is another and less obvious way in which the second kind of limitation may threaten the integrity of human goods. This may occur not only through their being produced and/or exchanged in the form of commodities, but also through their character being affected (or infected) by social meanings derived from the market domain. This way has damaging effects on a wide range of social institutions and practices through which many other human goods are typically generated and sustained.

For Michael Walzer, the need to establish and maintain effective boundaries around the market is dictated by one of the key requirements of social justice, namely the prevention of dominance. The concept of dominance is specified in the following way: a good is dominant if the individuals who have it, because they have it, can command a wide range of other goods.

The concept of dominance points to a central feature of Walzer’s approach to the nature of social justice: his insistence on the qualitatively distinct character of the various social goods with whose proper distribution any theory of justice must be concerned. The heterogeneity of these goods (e.g. money, political power, love, knowledge, health, religion, etc.) makes it thoroughly implausible to believe that the requirements of justice can be specified in the form of any single principle, or systematic set of principles. Instead, each such goods should be distributed on the basis of the criterion (or criteria) implicit in its specific ‘social meaning’.

The heterogeneity of social goods is reflected in that of social spheres in which these goods are conceived, created, distributed and enjoyed. Modern societies are characterised by a high degree of differentiation between various domains and spheres within which distinctive kinds of social activities take place: the economy, the political system, the family, education, welfare, religion, etc. Thus, if each social good is to be distributed in accordance with its appropriate criteria, it is essential that these different spheres be kept ‘separate’ from one another in the following respect: the distribution of one sphere’s social goods must not be permitted to determine that of another’s. One must not be able to convert one kind of social good into another. In other words, the logic of the market must not dominant the operating principle of education.

Thus to avoid such ‘dominance’ of one social good over another, the various spheres must themselves be prevented from improper forms of influence upon each other: clearly defined boundaries must be placed around them. In contemporary societies, it is the market economy (the sphere of money and commodities) that poses the greatest threat to justice, for it is the greatest potential source of domination. This is market imperialism.

Modern societies can or do manage to control these imperialistic (or colonising) tendencies of the market. One device of considerable significance is ‘blocked exchanges’: legally and socially enforced prohibitions on the use of money to acquire a wide range of specific social goods. Among such currently non-purchasable items, we can note the following: human beings; political influence, votes and office; prizes and honours; love and friendship; harmful and dangerous goods. However, even a fully effective set of such blocked exchanges will not by itself rule out the possibility of market dominance. Consider, for example, the relationship between political office and economic wealth.

I shall point to the possible significance of quite different form of market colonisation, which involves what might be called illegal or inappropriate transfer of meanings from the market sphere to other spheres. This may take place without the affected items in these other spheres becoming either directly or indirectly purchasable, and hence cannot be prevented by a system of ‘blocked exchanges’. Consider, for example, the political sphere. The sphere of money and commodities may colonise through ‘indirect purchase’ of political power and office, the political sphere. One might also wish to guard against a quiet different danger, however: that the market might colonise the political sphere by reshaping the meaning of the political process in its own image. Then, one might find that voters come to be conceived as consumers whose preferences must be satisfied, rather than as citizens whose benefits must be respected; that political parties shape their policies by drawing on the outcomes of market research rather than by reflective debate about the good society; and that political argumentation is displaced by the promotional and marketing techniques of commercial enterprises.

There is a universal ‘struggle for recognition’: a human need for recognition is typically met through people’s ability to make favourable comparisons between themselves and others. Walzer distinguishes two types of recognition.

• The first is private recognition. In modern societies, each individual tries to win recognition from others, and by any available means: they bargain with one another; they extort; they cheat; they deceive; in fact they do anything they can get away with to secure this valuable prize of recognition. This is a competitive struggle between individuals to achieve superior recognition. Yet, in practice this prized recognition can rarely be secured: it remains fragile, impermanent, always vulnerable both to new bases of comparisons and to the changing opinions of each person and their actions held by others. Hence, its pursuit is highly anxiety-ridden enterprise. Clearly, there are marked conceptual similarities between this modern form of recognition and the acquisition and exchange of commodities in a competitive free market economy.
• The second is public recognition. Public recognition consists of the award of special honours, prizes, and so on for people’s exceptional achievements, distinguished services or outstanding performance, both by the state (e.g. Russia’s Red Star medal) and by various private associations and societies (e.g. Nobel prize of literature). The key feature of such awards is that they must be based on what people are deemed actually to deserve, with the merit of what they have done being judged by reference to specified standards or criteria. Unlike the private recognition, public recognition does not rely merely on opinions, on what people happen to think or feel about someone’s actions without any need to justify these attitudes. Rather its award (or conferral) is based in judgements: some serious attempt must be made to arrive at the truth, and mere opinion is not enough. Furthermore, public recognition shares with private recognition the elements of competition, comparison and positional scarcity, though differs in being objectively awarded.

Yet there is a third form of recognition (the basis for ‘self-respect’) in modern societies. Here, the individuals (such as teachers, doctors and lawyers) have a proper sense of their meeting the standards of their profession, and they must rely primarily on others’ judgements and their recognition by others. Thus, like public recognition, this third form of recognition (or self-respect) is based on objective judgements. However, unlike private and public recognition, there is nothing inherently comparative or relational about this form of recognition, which is potentially available to anyone whose conduct conforms to the relevant criteria. In other words, there is nothing competitive about this form of recognition.

There are two reasons for thinking that the sphere of recognition colonised by the market would be an unwelcome development.

• First, the possibility of achieving self-respect (the third form of recognition) would be endangered, since private recognition cannot provide the kind of recognition upon which this depends. In effect, self-respect (a proper and objective regard for the dignity of one’s person or position) would be replaced by self-esteem (favourable and subjective appreciation or opinion of oneself), which dominates private recognition. Self-esteem, obtained through private recognition, is in many ways a less valuable achievement than self-respect, for ultimately one obtains little real benefit from recognition based merely on opinion, since it may well turn out not to be worth a lot, and especially if the favourable attitudes upon which self-esteem have been extracted by trickery, bargaining and so on.
• Second, the privatisation of recognition would endanger the existence of the objective, non-relational recognition that is necessary for the proper functioning of a wide range of social institutions and practices, through which the various social goods (education, medical and legal services and political and religious practices) are produced. Conversely, therefore, private recognition may be unsuitable basis, not only for the self-respect of individuals but also for the effective organisation and conduct of the kinds of social activities whose standards and norms enable self-respect to be achieved.

If private recognition may be seen as a case of market colonisation and if we value the social goods that are generated by self-respect (the third form of recognition) requiring a non-privatised form of recognition, then a significant reason for objecting to market colonisation has been identified. Unlike the kinds of market colonisation that Walzer identifies, it involves neither the direct nor indirect purchase of the specific goods produced by such practices, but instead an illegal or inappropriate transfer of meanings. Further, what is objectionable here is not a matter of distributive (in)justice.

We are concerned not only with social goods’ conception and distribution, but also with the social conditions for their creation: in particular, with the institutional and other requirement for the integrity of these social practices through which these goods are actually created, sustained, fostered, developed and so on. Thus the possible dangers of market colonisation must be examined in terms not only of its distributive consequences, but also of its effects on the social conditions for the creation of human goods.