Introduction to : Commerce and Community - Ecologies of Social Cooperation

This essay introduces the key themes, and papers, in an edited volume entitled, Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation. Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The reductive and mechanical “economic systems” that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complex agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this book examines how this pluralistic turn in economic thinking bears upon the venerable social-theoretical division of cooperative activity into separate spheres of impersonal Gesellschaft (commerce) and ethically thick Gemeinschaft (community).This introduction explains how, drawing resources from diverse disciplinary and philosophical traditions, the essays in the collection offers a set of fresh, varied, and critical appraisals of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft segregation of face-to-face community from impersonal commerce. Some authors issue urgent calls to transcend this dualism, whilst others propose to recast it in more nuanced ways or affirm the importance of treating impersonal and personal cooperation as ethically, epistemically, and economically separate worlds. Yet even in their disagreements, the contributors all paint the process of voluntary cooperation – the space between commerce and community – with uncommon color and nuance by traversing the boundaries that once segregated the thin sociality of economics (as science of commerce) from the thick sociality of sociology and anthropology (as sciences of community). The goal is to facilitate a critical exchange among economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists by exploring the overlapping notions of cooperation, rationality, identity, reciprocity, trust, and exchange that emerge from multiple traditions of thought within and across their respective disciplines