This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

Market freedom consists in the ability to impose costs on other people without being responsible to them for doing so. A market is a domain of conduct in which people who enjoy this privilege interact with each other. This understanding of market freedom has three notable advantages. First, it clarifies and broadens our conception of what a market is by showing that market freedom is enjoyed in a wide range noncommercial contexts, and that rights of possession and exchange, systems of incentives, and so on are not constitutive features of markets but contingent constraints on them. Second, it clarifies and broadens our understanding of the value of market freedom by showing that it is a necessary condition for the pursuit of traditional liberal ends such as limited government, social progress, and personal development. Third, it clarifies our understanding of the limits of market freedom by showing that in a liberal polity markets have to be authorized by republican means and constrained by various republican (responsibility-promoting) mechanisms.

Republicans have traditionally held that participation in or dependence on markets is incompatible with the enjoyment of republican freedom. Philip Pettit, departing from this tradition of thought, argues that markets do not pose a direct threat to republican freedom because they do not involve the imposition of an alien will. The distinction between intentionally and nonintentionally imposed constraints on which this line of argument rests dissolves once we treat freedom as a property of persons rather than actions: the salient question is not how a constraint was imposed, but whether its presence diminishes our fitness to be held responsible for what we do and is within the power of human beings to remove. It follows that while republicans may support the delegation of decision-making power to markets in order to limit the power of the state, they do not give us positive reason to value market freedom. A republican theory of freedom is therefore qualitatively different from a liberal one.

The crisis of anthropogenic climate change is made worse by the hegemony of neoliberal, free-market economic orthodoxy. Almost everywhere the idea of “the market” reigns supreme, like an angry god demanding constant deference and tribute. The essential problem is this: Neoliberalism is hostile to the idea of economic planning and redistribution; it maintains that the market is largely self-regulating, but adapting to and mitigating the worst of climate change will require robust and active states.

This chapter argues that the big, brainy, intricately structured American novel that goes by the name of the “encyclopedic” or “systems” novel is shaped by an ambivalent relation to the correspondingly capacious, complex, and informationally rich sphere of the financial markets. It begins by tracing the idea of the all-knowing market from Adam Smith to the “efficient market hypothesis” that continues to dominate the discipline of financial economics today, and shows how this intellectual history has intersected with the history of the novel. The chapter challenges the critical consensus that reads the contemporary "big novel" as defined by the determinism of conspiracy plotting, and argues that it is more closely aligned with the contingent – yet collectively synchronized – dynamics of the classically “efficient” market. The latter portion of the chapter shows how major encyclopedic or systems texts – by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Garth Risk Hallberg – position the omniscient financial market as performing both a redemptive mapping and an oppressive (and aggressively masculine) surveilling of the social totality.

This chapter argues that the big, brainy, intricately structured American novel that goes by the name of the “encyclopedic” or “systems” novel is shaped by an ambivalent relation to the correspondingly capacious, complex, and informationally rich sphere of the financial markets. It begins by tracing the idea of the all-knowing market from Adam Smith to the “efficient market hypothesis” that continues to dominate the discipline of financial economics today, and shows how this intellectual history has intersected with the history of the novel. The chapter challenges the critical consensus that reads the contemporary "big novel" as defined by the determinism of conspiracy plotting, and argues that it is more closely aligned with the contingent – yet collectively synchronized – dynamics of the classically “efficient” market. The latter portion of the chapter shows how major encyclopedic or systems texts – by Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Garth Risk Hallberg – position the omniscient financial market as performing both a redemptive mapping and an oppressive (and aggressively masculine) surveilling of the social totality.