Market, State, and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Clarendon Paperbacks)

This book is total hodgepodge. The author pretends to lay out a new vision of socialism which he calls "market socialism". The idea is that all productive enterprises should be cooperatives that are ruled democratically by their workers and provided with capital by state agencies. These enterprises would compete with each other to produce the benefits of the market and their cooperative mode of governance would forestall its drawbacks.

This would be mighty interesting if the author had actually constructed a plausible theoretical model of this society. But his model of cooperatives is nothing more than a brief sketch. I can't remember the last time I read a book where a central theoretical idea is left so undeveloped. Instead of working show more on his vision of society in detail, the author goes on to discuss a number of disparate topics around the theoretical periphery of market and state, such as consumer choice, social justice, multiculturalism, the nature of politics, citizenship and so on. Surprise surprise, none of these discussions amounts to anything because no vital links can be drawn to the author's stillborn framework for market socialism. The author invokes Hayek in one chapter and Marx in the next, but all chapters are separated from each other so no general argument emerges.

Since the author spends almost 100 pages on a "Critique of libertarianism", I should add that his reading of Hayek's "Law, Legislation and Liberty" is unfair and woefully partial in both senses of the word. Hayek's discussion of justice, which the author repeatedly refers to, is only a small part of the book. I don't understand how anyone can write a theoretical book about markets and actively refer to Hayek's work, yet fail to make any use of the most basic element of Hayek's theory: the dispersed and ordinary knowledge which comes together in markets and makes them so effective. Including this key aspect of Hayek's work wouldn't have saved the author's vision of "market socialism", but at least the hodgepodge would have been more interesting. show less