Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World. Edited by Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 268p. $70.00.

Since the fall of the Soviet Bloc regimes, it has become accepted wisdom that the market system has triumphed—that relying on the free, independent exchange between economic actors is a far superior way of allocating resources than attempting to “plan” from above. At a general level, this accepted wisdom is hard to dispute. Yet, like all such propositions, its heuristic usefulness cuts two ways: Embracing it wholesale makes for an easy bet; it also, however, encourages one to overlook a more complex and ambiguous reality that lurks beneath the surface. We might agree, for example, that markets confer myriad economic and political advantages. What we might less readily agree on, however, is what, precisely, we mean by “markets.” As the essays in Markets in Historical Contexts make clear, if we mean institutions that are “not encumbered by geography, weight, unequal access to information, government regulation, or particularistic agendas” (p. 226) (not to mention cultural context), then we will quickly find ourselves running afoul of social science's ultimate limit: reality.