Contested Commodities

How far should society go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services? Should they be able to treat such things as babies, body parts, and sex as commodities that can be traded in a free market? Should politics be thought of as just economics by another name? Margaret Jane Radin addresses these controversial issues in a detailed exploration of contested commodification. Economists, lawyers, policy analysts, and social theorists have been sharply divided between those who believe that commodifying some goods naturally tends to devalue them and those who believe that almost…