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Strange bedfellows? Peter J. Boettke and Stephen Resnick!

Submitted by Shaka on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 20:22
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At Amazon.com we find BOTH Peter J. Boettke and Stephen Resnick engaged in a little "book spam," plugging Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism After Hayek, and with almost identical talk of a "socialist vision for the twenty-first century."

Peter Boettke’s plug for market socialism:

Theodore A. Burczak's Socialism after Hayek is a thoroughly researched and thoughtful examination not only of the ideological debate that framed the twentieth century, but of Hayek's intellectual framework. Burczak hopes for an economic framework that is both humanistic in its approach and humanitarian in its concern while being grounded in good reasons. The book should be on the reading list of every comparative political economist and in particular anyone who wants to take Hayek seriously, including those who would like to push Hayek's classical liberal politics toward the left in the twenty-first century. Burczak has made an outstanding contribution to the fields of political and economic thought and to Hayek studies in particular.

Stephen Resnick’s plug for market socialism:

A brilliant, fair-minded approach to Marx, Hayek, Sen, and Nussbaum yields a needed socialist vision for the twenty-first century.

Everybody at the Daily Paul should recognize Peter Boettke as the editor of the Review of Austrian Economics and the Director of Graduate Studies in Economics at George Mason University.

Not sure who Stephen Resnick is? According to Wikipedia he is the founder of Rethinking Marxism, the pre-eminent journal for communists trying to salvage something from Marx's debunked theories.

In 1989, Resnick joined efforts with a group of colleagues, ex- and then current students to launch Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that aims to create a platform for rethinking and developing Marxian concepts and theories within economics as well as other fields of social inquiry. He remained a member of the editorial board of the journal until 1994. He continues to serve as a member of the advisory board of the journal.

He has co-authored with Richard Wolf, another Marxist, six books:

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical

Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy

Class and Its Others

Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism

Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR

New Departures in Marxian Theory

»

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I purchased the book and will write a critique.

Submitted by Shaka on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 23:14.

In the meantime, I will quote from page one to give you an idea what it is about:

Classical socialism was a movement to replace the unplanned and exploitative institutions of capitalism with national planning, public ownership, and distribution according to human need rather than by the arbitrary capriciousness of the market. Its goals were to distribute economic resources broadly among the people in order to create the conditions for widespread substantive freedom and to end alienating, exploitative labor processes. Socialism promised all people the resources to live a flourishing life, not just the market freedom to exchange, which offered no guarantee of a decent standard of living. This traditional socialist project was derived from Marx and Engel's dream of a future that would transcend the allocative and distributional anarchy of the market through the abolishion of private property and the establishment of social ownership of the means of production and central planning. Socialism, or perhaps its more advanced form of communism, would realize the human potential to harness productive forces to acheive a rational economic order, social justice, and real freedom for all.

Classical socialism had no larger enemy in the twentieth century than Friedrich Hayek... Hayek's economics and social theory are based on what might be called an "applied epistemological postmodernism."

For contemporary socialists, this raises fundamental questions. Is there any meaningful notion of socialism that can answer Hayek's epistemological critique?

My aim in this book is to answer these questions in the affirmative by developing a "libertarian Marxist" conception of socialism, a socialism committed to forms of procedural and distributive justice that are central to the Marxian tradition and a socialism keenly aware of the factual and ethical problems emphasized by Hayek.

I skimmed Burczak's book.

Basically, he feels that Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which was written in 1944, is outdated because it takes the Soviet Union as its model for central planning. Burczak feels that modern socialists are sooooo much smarter than those dumb Russians, that there is just no comparison.

What do you guys think? Should we give Burczak control of the economy and see if he really is as smart as he thinks he is?

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Shaka, you so crazy! www.sniperflashcards.com

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Shaka, you so crazy! www.axiomaticeconomics.com

Very interesting post, Shaka.

Submitted by reedr3v on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 21:45.

It will be even more interesting to see reviews from our leading free market economic thinkers.