s87.
John Gray (1998), False Dawn, p 37. In his powerful account of the dismantling of cultural traditions by the free market logic of the New Right, Gray argues that it is the unregulated free market experiment of the late nineteenth century and the 1980s—an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, he claims—that has done the damage. It is argued in Lean Logic, however, that the market essentially replaces the more direct, social forms of reciprocal obligation; the free market expressed in globalisation is a logical development of that process, yet the real unpicking of direct reciprocity starts when the market moves centre-stage as it did in the eighteenth century. The additional damage done by the free market—albeit avoidable and ill-advised—is an expression of the natural tendency of any social formula to mature towards its limit case.
