The betrayal of liberal economics

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Notes

1 According to Witztum, modern economics has no resources for diagnosing failures of the market (in contrast to the local market failures reducible to false or missing prices). But how promising is the search for pertinent resources in those older traditions? Do they offer guidance for adequate modern re-embedment? Hence a few more words in terms of a critical appraisal of currents to some extent congruent with the concerns of the book could be helpful, including Smith, Marx and approaches in the tradition of Aristotelian virtue ethics sometimes informing contemporary critics of marketisation à la Michael Sandel and Karl Polanyi. Some of those strands are referred to, but more could be said about how they could inspire us, and in how far the problems they entail suggest that we ought to be cautious.

2 As is well known, abstract views of allocation are sharply rejected by those endorsing a catallactic view of economics. The comparison between the allocation perspective and the view of social institutions conditioned by the catallactic lens is specifically instructive.

3 All this may be combined with an emphatic republican or Aristotelian vision of the polis as space for the full development of human sociality, but also with a broadly Kantian outlook stressing foundational interdependence and complementarity of private and public.