Abstract Market Theory

The market plays a profoundly significant role in contemporary society; its operations and effects engage the whole range of human existence from the global to the mundane. At the same time, answers to the question 'what is the market?' are rudimentary at best; the disparity between theory and reality was cast in a particularly stark light by the global financial crisis. Drawing on a variety of sources in recent and contemporary philosophy, finance, the history of modern mathematics, sociology and anthropology, Abstract Market Theory elaborates a new philosophy of the market, and thereby provides a means to address basic questions concerning value, price, capitalism and debt. In doing so it begins to reinvigorate the withered relationship between economic theory and philosophy itself.