Concept Essay Three: Alternative Value Creation

The forms of living politics explored in this book are quests for alternative values: both alternative values in the ethical sense and different ways of thinking about economic value. On the surface, these quests may look like mere nostalgia or attempts to return to imagined, and economically unrealistic, “good old days;” but a closer look suggests a more fundamental questioning of a particular economic and ethical regime: a regime that is all too often taken for granted. French pioneer of research on social memory Maurice Halbwachs, many decades ago, highlighted the limitations of the mechanical explanation of economic value in terms of laws of supply and demand. Demand itself is a product of memory, history, and custom. The relative values that we attach to things are the (often unconscious) product of centuries of social negotiation and conflict over the meaning of human happiness and prosperity and the proper way of organizing society. So value is inescapably built on values.