sense of what any other human being could understand (in Dilthey's sense, or in Rousseau's, what every other human being could 'sympathize' with). That means that we are freed from all kinds of more properly 'irrational' myths about subjectivity and can turn our attention to that situation itself, that available inventory of resources, which is the outside world itself and which must now indeed be called History. The Sartrean concept of the situation is a new way of thinking history as such: Becker avoids any comparable move, for good reasons. I have implied that even under socialism (as in earlier modes of production) people can very well be imagined operating under the Becker model. What will be different is then the situation itself: the nature of the 'household', the stock of raw materials; indeed, the very form and shape of the 'commodities' therein to be produced. Becker's market thus by no means ends up as just another celebration of the market system but, rather, as an involuntary redirection of our attention towards history itself and the variety of alternative situations it offers.

We must suspect, therefore, that essentialist defences of the market in reality involve other themes and issues altogether: the pleasures of consumption are little more than the ideological fantasy consequences available for ideological consumers who buy into the market theory, of which they are not themselves a part. Indeed, one of the great crises in the new conservative cultural revolution -- and by the same token one of its great internal contradictions -- was displayed by these same ideologues when some nervousness began to appear over the success with which consumer America had overcome the Protestant ethic and was able to throw its savings (and future income) to the winds in exercising its new nature as the full-time professional shopper. But obviously you can't have it both ways; there is no such thing as a booming, functioning market whose customer personnel is staffed by Calvinists and hard-working traditionalists knowing the value of the dollar.

The passion for the market was indeed always political, as Albert O. Hirschman 's great book The Passions and the Interests taught us. The market, finally, for 'market ideology', has less to do with consumption than it has to do with government intervention, and indeed with the evils of freedom and human nature itself. A representative description of the famous market 'mechanism' is provided by Barry:

By a natural process Smith meant what would occur, or which pattern of events would emerge, from individual interaction in the absence of some specific human intervention, either of a political kind or from violence.

The behaviour of a market is an obvious example of such natural phenomena. The self-regulating properties of the market system are not

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