Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Market’ functions as far more than an economic category; it operates as a civilisational formation that restructures the psyche, erodes psychosocial integration, and generates the conditions for mass addiction, fanaticism, and spiritual displacement. Bruce Alexander’s work dominates this constellation, advancing the thesis that the globalising free-market society — defined by minimally regulated competitive markets penetrating every domain of human existence — systematically produces dislocation by severing the bonds of belonging upon which healthy identity depends. Alexander goes further to characterise fervent belief in free-market ideology as a literal addiction, coining the figure of the ‘Market God’ to capture the quasi-religious, totalising quality of this commitment. Historical and philological voices — Seaford on the monetisation of archaic Greece, Benveniste on the Indo-European semantic fields of commerce and exchange, Vernant on productive versus acquisitive labour in the ancient oikos — provide the longer genealogy of market relations, tracing how monetary economies reshaped consciousness, cosmology, and social form well before modernity. The central tension running through the corpus is between market society as a source of innovation and freedom versus its inexorable destruction of the integrative social fabric. The market thus appears simultaneously as economic mechanism, mythological narrative, addictive object, and agent of psychic disintegration.
A free-market society is a social system in which virtually every aspect of human existence is embedded within, and shaped by, minimally regulated competitive markets.
Alexander provides his foundational definition of free-market society as a total social system, arguing that its comprehensive penetration of human existence is precisely what renders it destructive of psychosocial integration.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
Many people are heavily addicted to free-market ideology — including entrepreneurs, political leaders, and individuals of modest means and station.
Alexander advances the literal — not metaphorical — claim that addiction to the ‘Market God’ constitutes a genuine clinical and social phenomenon, characterised by denial, zealotry, and imperviousness to evidence.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right.
Alexander decodes free-market ideology as a secularised theological narrative — complete with myths of origin, the fall, and redemption — revealing its depth-psychological function as a substitute religion.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
Only free-market society inexorably destroys psychosocial integration everywhere, even at the best of times.
Alexander distinguishes the universal capacity for individual dislocation from the uniquely systematic, structural destruction of psychosocial integration that is intrinsic to free-market society.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
I meet people occasionally who manifest addiction to the Market God in my neighbourhood, on the bus, at the university. Although they are not as eloquent as the media writers whom they often quote, their passion is intense and it affects their entire lifestyle.
Alexander grounds the ‘Market God’ thesis in phenomenological observation, describing the lived behavioural signatures of ideological addiction across social strata.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
The crucial flaw of globalising free-market society is that the balance
Alexander identifies the structural failure of free-market society as its destruction of the balance between individual autonomy and social belonging — the dual requirement he regards as foundational to human psychological health.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Free-market society, like Socrates’ anarchic democracy, breaks down traditions and legitimate authority, so that people can participate in the market as individual economic actors.
Alexander draws a structural parallel between Platonic tyranny and free-market society, arguing both produce addiction by dismantling the integrative social forms that sustain psychic wholeness.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
The necessary connection between the new economics and human misery was recognised both by intellectuals who were infatuated with free-market capitalism, like William Townsend and Herbert Spencer, and by those who were horrified by the suffering it produced.
Alexander documents the historical recognition, by thinkers across ideological positions, of the link between early free-market expansion and mass human suffering, grounding the dislocation thesis in historiography.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
For many years, even failure on an enormous scale did not open most people’s eyes to the futility of a war that so perfectly shielded free-market society from painful self-examination.
Alexander argues that the War on Drugs served ideologically to deflect scrutiny from the market society that generates the dislocation underlying addiction.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
In international markets, the greatest free-trading nations in Europe and North America impose crippling tariffs on farm produce from the Third World for domestic political reasons.
Alexander exposes the gap between free-market ideology and actual market practice, demonstrating that even its most ardent proponents systematically violate its principles in the exercise of political and economic power.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Between the late 1400s and 1776, recognisable free markets, but still no fully fledged free-market society, had come into existence. The gains in economic vitality were obvious to all.
Alexander historicises the emergence of market society, tracing dislocation back to the enclosure movement and the slow transformation from localised markets to a total social system.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Fanatical commitment to apocalyptic Christianity is widespread in the most highly marketised segment of the contemporary world, the United States.
Alexander argues that the dislocation produced by intensely marketised societies predictably generates religious fanaticism as a compensatory form of belonging and meaning.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy).
Seaford argues that the monetisation of archaic Greece — the earliest thoroughgoing market society — restructured both cosmological imagination and tragic subjectivity, providing historical precedent for market-driven psychic transformation.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
On the one hand it means that wealth (and the pursuit of wealth) has no limit, so that men accumulate money and land, enslave others, and destroy the polis.
Seaford identifies the unlimited, boundary-dissolving logic of monetary value as a structural threat to the polis, anticipating modern critiques of market society’s erosion of communal form.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
The desire for wealth and material success became the all-absorbing passion. ‘All the world,’ says the preacher Martin Butzer, ‘is running after those trades and occupations that will bring the most gain.’
Fromm situates the emergence of market psychology in the Reformation’s destruction of medieval social structures, identifying the all-consuming pursuit of gain as both cause and symptom of the individual’s newly anxious freedom.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
In the Indo-European world commerce is the task of a man, an agent. It constitutes a special calling. To sell one’s surplus, to buy for one’s own sustenance is one thing: to buy, to sell for others, another.
Benveniste’s etymological analysis reveals that market activity — as a distinct, professional, intermediary role — had no common Indo-European root, suggesting its emergence as a culturally specific and relatively late development.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
By the 1800s, most other European nations were also imposing free-market economics on their colonies — by force when necessary — producing unprecedented wealth and innovation for the colonisers, along with mass dislocation and dire poverty for most colonial subjects.
Alexander frames colonial expansion as the forcible globalisation of market society, documenting its dual legacy of material productivity for colonisers and psychosocial destruction for colonised peoples.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
Markets were of limited and marginal importance within Babylonia proper still remains generally consistent with the textual evidence.
Seaford surveys the historiographical debate on ancient Near Eastern economies, establishing that redistributive rather than market-based systems predominated in early civilisations, situating Greek monetisation as a historical rupture.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside
The premium set on generosity is so great when measured in terms of social prestige as to make any other behaviour than that of utter self-forgetfulness simply not pay.
Alexander, drawing on Polanyi’s economic anthropology, contrasts pre-market social orders — in which reciprocity and generosity structure exchange — with the competitive individualism of free-market society.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside
piprāskō or pérnēmi ‘to sell by transferring the object (at the market)’, generally overseas.
Benveniste’s reconstruction of Greek commercial vocabulary reveals that earliest market transactions were associated with long-distance, overseas exchange rather than embedded local reciprocity.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside