Markets & Society Journal

The Markets & Society journal aims to promote the development of interdisciplinary research of consequence grounded in mainline political economy and to promote the analysis of historical and contemporary issues in the social sciences through a variety of disciplines, methods, and strategies.

Volume 1, issue 2 engages the ideas and arguments in three books—Kenneth Boulding’s Stable Peace (1978), Elise Boulding’s Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (2000), and Christopher J. Coyne’s In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (2022). The common theme across these books is the desire to understand various aspects of peace between and among people. Understanding peace, with all of its nuances and complexities, is central to understanding human well-being and flourishing. The contributions to this symposium shed light on the many aspects of peace across interdisciplinary divides and explore the implications of policies that promote or interfere with stable peace. 

In volume 1, issue 1, Virgil Henry Storr and Stefanie Haeffele introduce the journal as a space for and across a variety of disciplines, utilizing a variety of methods, to explore key questions about the nature of markets and the potential of society. Then in a series of keynote addresses, economist Peter J. Boettke explores the possibility and likelihood of social cooperation in a cosmopolitan liberal order, economist Deirdre N. McCloskey discusses the historical importance of liberalism in spurring human flourishing, and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks to the key role that museums play as collections of human attainment and the complex nature of heritage and ownership of the arts. There are also five original research articles exploring the themes of liberalism, family, crises, repugnant markets, informal markets, and technological change.