Science, Science & Marxism

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Mon Jan 14 07:51:20 PST 2002


Justin wrote:


> Well, isn't that what you are saying? What else could it mean to say that,
> for example, it's no good to criticise Mark using Hayekian arguments
> becauase Hayek uses individualist premises and Marx doesn't?
>
> In fact, my own Hayekian arguments don't depend on any strong individualist
> premises, so far as I can tell. I mean, I argue from facts about
> individuals, but these are not ptremised to be facts based on things oustide
> history and culture, but rather facts based on individuals in a social and
> institutional context. I take it that that's how Hayek in fact saw people;
> see Chris Sciabarraa' hayek, marx, and Utopia. Or anyway, if it's not hoqw
> he saw peoplem it's hwo I see people.

Hayek's conclusions about markets don't follow from Marx's premises. In fact, as I tried to show, Marx's premises lead to conclusions about markets opposite to Hayek's at least so far as their role in an ideal society is concerned.

In Marx higher forms of social relations are identified by their greater consistency with the development and expression of rational self-consciousness.

This dependence of the degree of rationality in the individual on the individual's relations embodies the ontological idea of "internal relations." Hayek implicitly treats social relations as external rather than internal when he assumes that the "rationality" of individuals is independent of their relations. This is what underpins the explanatory approach Popper calls the "logic of the situation" in the passage I pointed out to Brad recently. Popper, in identifying the approach with "economics,", has Hayek explicitly in mind.

For Marx the fully rational self-consciousness is that of the "universally developed individual," a concept that sublates a great deal of earlier thought about "rationality" e.g. it sublates Aristotle (the concepts of sophia, episteme, techne, nous and phronesis) and Hegel (the concept of the "educated person"). One aspect of this is that the "will" of such an individual is both a "will proper" and a "universal will."

If we elaborate "an ideal republic of the imagination" (Keynes's phrase) on the basis of this concept we will have no room for market relations. In fact market relations will be incompatible both with "good" relations (i.e. with relations treated as an end in themselves) and with relations which will produce the most "efficient," i.e. instrumentally effective, organization of the "realm of necessity."

Hayek claimed to show that on his premises about "individuals," primarily his premises about "rationality," markets were a necessary feature of an "efficient" social organization. At best he demonstrates that this is so on his premises. He doesn't demonstrate that on Marx's premises markets are such a feature. Marx makes radically different premises.

What is going on here is the misidentification of rationality with consistency so that the mere fact that an argument is internally consistent is taken as demonstrating that it's true. This produces "foolish consistency." One sign of this is immunity to a reductio ad absurdum argument.

Keynes, aware that "formal logic" was "mere dry bones" which excluded "most of the principles usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought" (CW, vol. X, p. 338), claimed this was a feature of Hayek's psychopathology. He says of Hayek's book Prices and Production that

"The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam." (vol. XII, p. 252)

In the General Theory he makes the same point about another "Austrian," Lionel Robbins.

"It is the distinction of Prof. Robbins that he, almost alone, continues to maintain a consistent scheme of thought, his practical recommendations belonging to the same system as his theory." (VII, p. 20, note 2)

He claims that to a lesser degree (e.g. they don't deny the existence of unemployment just because their premises are inconsistent with it) it characterizes "classical theorists" in general. This is the point made in the reference to "Euclidean geometers" in the General Theory (a reference most likely due to Whitehead with whom Keynes had done a course of lectures on Non-Euclidean geometry in 1904 - Whitehead frequently used Euclidean geometry to demonstrate the limitations of deductive reasoning from axioms).

"The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight - as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry. Something similar is required to-day in economics." (VII, p. 16)

As I pointed out some time ago, the misidentification of reason with instrumental reason can be taken as expressive of the same psychopathology. It is an instance of the irrational "purposiveness" to which Keynes points in "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (vol. IX, pp. 329-30), an essay which elaborates an "ideal republic of the imagination" very like Marx's. The Austrian von Mises explicitly identifies such "purposiveness" with rationality.

"We can imagine beings similar to men who would want to extinguish their humanity and, by putting an end to all thought and action, to attain to the unthinking, passive, vegetative existence of plants. It is doubtful whether there are or have ever been such men. Even St. Aegidius, the most radical advocate of asceticism, was not altogether consistent in his zeal for austerity when he recommended the birds and the fish as a model for man. To be entirely consistent, together with the Sermon on the Mount, he would have had to extol the lilies of the field as the embodiments of the ideal of complete abandonment of all concern for the improvement of one's lot.

"We have nothing to say to men of this kind, consistent ascetics who by their self denying passivity give themselves up to death, just as they would have nothing to say to us. If one wishes to call their doctrine a world view, then one must not forget to add that it is not a human world view, since it must lead to the extinction of mankind. Our science sees men only as acting men, not as plants having the appearance of men. Acting man aims at ends, i.e., he wants to overcome dissatisfaction as far as possible. Our science shows that aiming at ends is necessary to existence and that human ends, whatever they may be, are better attained by the social cooperation of the division of labor than in isolation. (It is worthy of note that no historical experience has been found in conflict with this proposition.) Once one has appreciated this fact, one realizes that no standard of value of any kind is contained in the system of economic or sociological theory or in the teachings of liberalism, which constitute the practical application of this theory to action in society. All objections to the effect that economics, sociology, and liberalism are predicated on a definite world view prove untenable once it is recognized that the science of action is concerned only with acting men and that it can say nothing about plant-like beings living with no thought of tomorrow, whom we can scarcely consider as human." <http://www.mises.org/epofe/c1p3sec2.asp>

Ted



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