[Review Essay: Stephen Wilkinson, Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade (New York: Routledge, 2003), xi + 248 pp.] Georg Simmel warned in 1900 that capitalism creates not only a market economy but also a market culture in which "money becomes the central and absolute value." (1) Some cultural critics seem to take the "root of all evil" claim seriously, asserting with rhetorical flourishes filled with normative hyperbole that commodification is the primary cause of all social problems. Our anxieties about money, however, are often vague and tempered by our sense that it appears to be more or less the best way to organize life and measure value in such a complex and pluralistic world. Somewhere between demonization of the market and blind faith in it lies a clear analysis of precisely what is wrong with the commodification of life.
