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Markets are thought of by some as liberating the individual. Rather
than a feudal system in which each is assigned a role or tasks by
an authority, each is free to make decisions concerning how to use
their resources and direct their productive activities in light of
market prices for goods and services. These prices are not dictated
but reflect the preferences of individuals, aggregated by an
invisible hand. In this posthumous work, political philosopher
Waheed Hussain argues that this way of thinking about markets
obscures their systemic nature. He shows that a better way to think
about the invisible hand is as a mechanism that drops each of us
into a maze whose design is opaque to us. It liberates us from the
direct bondage of a feudal system; but leaves us subordinate to an
arbitrary authority, one whose character is harder to discern.
Hussain locates this authority in the way the market shapes the
options available to us, exercising what he calls an impersonal
authority over each of us. According to Hussain, the market system
is objectionable when and because it is arbitrary, governing us
without giving anyone a voice concerning how the authority is
exercised. This is incompatible with what Hussain takes to be
fundamental to human freedom, the freedom to make choices in the
face of an option set that one can make sense of as being available
for good reasons, to which one can assent as a free person.
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