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considering, howsoever briefly, what it means for a market to be truly public. The point from which I begin is that an aggregate of private persons, engaged in personal pursuits and associating with others like themselves, is different from and offers far less to its members than does a community of persons realizing themselves in public action. Public action involves persons exchanging their distinct perspectives in spirited words toward creating solidarity with one another and undertaking concerted actions in the world the responsibility for which they share. I will offer a brief discussion of public markets, including their social interdependence which is implicit in Adam Smith's famous notion of the 'invisible hand.' I will then clarify my meaning of a public as opposed to a private life. I will then suggest that we ought to recognize and emphasize the market's inherently public character far more than we do. That is, I am not taking a position in opposition to the market, so much as I am suggesting that today's market should be a locus of activity supportive of public life as I shall define it.

The marketplace has been praised since the time of Adam Smith due to its efficiency at satisfying individual preferences and rewarding creativity in those who enter it, whether as manufacturers, merchants, skillful workers, or ingenious entrepreneurs. Indeed, there is little argument that the market has proven to be far better at organizing resources and structuring the power of labor so as to provide the goods and services needed by society than centralized systems of economic control. Rather than the dead hand of centralized bureaucracy that fails to note changes in needs and to encourage innovation in products and production, the market works 'as by an invisible hand' to provide what is needed for those who are willing to pay, through enlivening the individual initiative of many who seek their livelihood in market exchanges. Adam Smith's famous 'invisible hand' describes the mysterious power of the market to generate successful moves as though there were an overriding intelligence directing things, rather than a large number of independent agents seeking their own welfare through successful transactions with other, like-minded agents.

In the modern world the Smithian account of the market has been joined with a popular form of Lockean or even Hobbesian individualism to suggest that people are nothing other than self-interested maximizers of their own utility (or profit). The market has become a place where people totally indifferent, if not hostile, to one another seek their best options through voluntary exchanges with other egoists. Libertarian defenders of the market propose that society would be better off with as few social institutions as possible, so that all intercourse could take on the market character of voluntary exchanges between individuals. Milton Friedman has asserted, 'Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.' (4)

If we return to Smith's image of the 'invisible hand,' however, we find a view of market behavior that is social in a way far more fundamental and pervasive than contemporary market rhetoric permits. Adam Smith was no Hobbesian, nor even a Lockean. For Smith, as for other Scots, such as David Hume, humans are not primarily self-interested creatures, but social ones. We have a natural capacity for sympathy, for recog