INTRODUCTION

It is hopefully clear by now that “the market” is not something that can do anything to us of its own volition. It is not an essential being; it has no innate force that demands obedience; it does not ask us to think carefully about our preferences or tell us that we must satisfy its interests; it plays no active role in our lives in and of itself. It really is not a thing to which agential characteristics might be ascribed. And yet this is still the most likely image that is being created when appeal is made politically to “the market”. There remains, then, a tension between the market understood conceptually and “the market” understood ideologically. The absence or the presence of the inverted commas still does make a big difference. The objective of the final substantive chapter is to explore the extent to which this gap remains fundamentally unbridgeable by seeking to learn more about the political rhetoric of “the market” and how it is not always clear whether that rhetoric is being applied to something that most obviously reflects the conceptual or the ideological use of the word.

If the market concept as developed in economic theory provides no basis for saying that “the market” is something that does anything to anyone, there must still be something in it that has allowed this idea to become so prevalent. There might remain a jump, a big jump even, between the market concept and market ideology, but that jump must still appear to be navigable to at least some degree if market ideology is to resonate with people’s sense of what is going on in their everyday lives. That is, there might still be aspects of the market concept that anchor the images that are transmitted through the use of market ideology. It is very difficult to think that this something, whatever it is, relates to the descriptive market concept, where the market is understood as a physical marketplace with all the attendant personal interactions that bring such physical spaces to life in human experiences.