Market universalism refers to the non-metaphorical tendency to use the term market to describe a wide variety of arrangements or processes in the real world. Using institutional criteria, this paper establishes some minimal necessary features of a market, to show that some particular arrangements are not markets. For example, while mechanisms of competition and interaction are ubiquitous, ordinary conversation is not literally a ‘market for ideas’ and much of politics is not literally a ‘political market’. Markets are not and cannot be universal. Yet market universalism overlooks missing markets, the theory of which implies that we are in a world of second-best solutions and that markets are not necessarily the answer to every economic problem. Also, by reducing politics to a form of ‘market’ economics, market universalism downplays the distinctive, non-market nature of the political and legal spheres and corrodes the conceptual separation of civil society from the state.

中文翻译：

---

神话般的市场如何误导分析：对市场普遍性的制度主义批评

市场普遍主义是指使用市场来描述现实世界中各种各样的安排或过程的非隐喻趋势。本文使用制度标准，建立了市场的一些最低限度的必要特征，以表明某些特定的安排并没有市场。例如，尽管竞争和互动的机制无处不在，但是普通的对话实际上不是一个“思想市场”，许多政治也不是一个“政治市场”。市场不是也不可能是普遍的。然而，市场普遍主义忽视了缺失的市场，其理论暗示着我们处在次优解决方案的世界中，而市场并不一定能解决所有经济问题。同样，通过将政治简化为一种“市场”经济学形式，市场普遍主义淡化了政治和法律领域的独特，非市场性，并腐蚀了公民社会与国家的概念性分离。