On the origin of rules: Between exchange and self-sufficiency

The paper addresses the question of whether the socio-economic rules of a market economy can be explained as the result of contractual exchange among rational individuals. It proceeds by re-examining the logical relationship between the concepts of exchange and self-sufficiency. The basic difference between these concepts is found to be the extent to which individuals are relieved from producing the goods they consume. With self-sufficiency being defined by the impossibility of this relief, the emergence and observation of socio-economic rules are more appropriately characterized as collective self-sufficiency rather than exchange, because rules must be observed by each individual rather than by “specialized suppliers of social order.”