This essay is an attempt to provide a modern overview of the economic calculation debate from the Austrian School perspective. Specifically, the many arguments against market socialism will be consolidated to demonstrate the neglected theoretical strength of the free-market perspective. In this regard, the fact that market socialism never has been implemented or even become a ballot box alternative can be better understood.
As the Marxian philosopher Louis Althusser used to put it, no reading is innocent. The meaning a reader derives from a particular piece of scholarly literature is unavoidably influenced by his premises and analytical frame- work. When the underlying theoretical framework of the reader differs sharply from that of the writers under examination the result is likely to be profound misunderstanding.
In March 1921, V. I. Lenin, ruler of revolutionary Russia, stood before the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party and dramatically admitted that something had gone awry with the Revolution. The new policy he unveiled that day admitted not only that the Bolsheviks had failed to ignite a world- wide socialist takeover, but that the revolution they did ignite had brought Russia to the “very edge of the abyss.”
Even after the bitter defeat of War Communism, Lenin never doubted that socialism entailed the abolition of trade and money. The Soviet doctrine of “socialist commodities” did not enter the picture until the 1950’s.
This paper traces Spencer’s theory of causation through various disciplines, with special emphasis on Spencer’s “scientific” system of ethics — something he regarded as the crowning achievement of his life’s work. I shall attempt to explain Spencer rather than criticize him. His theories are subject to many criticisms, even when accurately portrayed. But, more often than not, slander and misrepresentation have been the stock tools of Spencer critics.
Mention the name of Herbert Spencer to the average person and, if he is familiar with it at all, he is likely to say that Spencer was a political theorist who advocated laissez faire, and might even recall Spencer as a sociologist. But it is unlikely that he would identify Spencer as an anthropologist.
Free societies (whatever the fine points in defining “free”) are not necessarily self-perpetuating. An understanding of this has underlain many of the attempts — past and present — to clarify the nature of a capitalist economy — both its dynamics in furthering what has been called the free or even “permissive” society and its dialectics in apparently creating a social milieu inhospitable to its continued existence.
That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laizes-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well know and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises’ followers have unwitting distorted them and made them seed at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States. Mises is made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism.
It was in the circle of Polish economists that the notion of liberalism was first interpreted distinctly. In the first twenty tears of the nineteenth century they presents the ideological skeleton of liberalism which made possible a more definite portrayal of the entire phenomenon.
1. Edmund Burke, William Godwin and Benjamin Constant
