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AT A RECENT think-tank luncheon in Raleigh, economist Bruce J. Caldwell chatted with a local lawyer active in Democratic party circles. The man asked Caldwell what his new book was about. "It's an intellectual biography of Friedrich Hayek," replied Caldwell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He got a blank look. "He was an economist. A libertarian economist."What an understatement.Hayek, who died in 1992, was not just any economist. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. His 1945 article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," is a touchstone work on the role of prices in coordinating dispersed information. His 1944 bestseller "The Road to Serfdom" helped catalyze the free-market political movement in the United States and continues to sell thousands of copies a year.Economist Milton Friedman calls him "the most important social thinker of the 20th century." Hayek's most significant contribution, he explains, "was to make clear how our present complex social structure is not the result of the intended actions of individuals but of the unintended consequences of individual interactions over a long period of time, the product of social evolution, not of deliberate planning."Indeed, Hayek is increasingly recognized as one of the 20th century's most profound and important theorists, one whose work included political theory, philosophy of science, even cognitive psychology. Citing the "proof of time," Encyclopedia Britannica recently commissioned Caldwell to replace its formulaic 250-word Hayek profile with a nuanced discussion more than 10 times as long. Harvard has added him to the syllabus of Social Studies 10, its rigorous introductory social theory course.Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on MargaretThatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly "irrational" customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today's rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today's fragmented and specialized markets, today's emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today's multicultural challenges.Hayek's 1952 book, "The Sensory Order," often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. "Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals," says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. "Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names `connectionism' and `parallel distributed processing.' Remarkably, Hayek is never cited."
Hayek was "one of the last unprofessionalized economists," says Harvard political philosopher Glyn Morgan, who was instrumental in adding Hayek's writings to the Social Studies 10 syllabus three years ago. ("It was actually quite controversial," he says, adding, "This course was known as a slightly left-of-center course, and people were skeptical of Hayek.") Unlike today's increasingly professionalized social scientists, Morgan adds, Hayek was "a top-notch economist, but he wrote on the history of ideas, he wrote on a variety of things."Born in Vienna in 1899, Hayek fought in World War I and earned degrees in law and political economy in the rich intellectual atmosphere of the University of Vienna. In the early 1930s, he was invited to join the faculty at the London School of Economics. There, he made his name as the leading intellectual opponent of John Maynard Keynes. (The two men were nonetheless friends.) Keynes believed that economic slumps could be cured by government deficit spending, while Hayek argued that those policies would only exacerbate the underlying problem of excessive production capacity.Beyond his technical arguments with Keynes, Hayek was out of step with his contemporaries' zeal for centralized economic planning, which was widely held to be more productive and efficient than market competition. In 1930s Britain, even political moderates advocated nationalizing all major industries. During and after World War II, central planning reached levels of detail that are inconceivable today. Britain's wartime Utility scheme, for instance, dictated mass-produced furniture designs that eliminated craftsmanship and ornament. Wartime rationing treated bookcases as essential and dressing tables and upholstered easy chairs as unnecessary. Price controls and punitive taxes continued to discourage "irrational" designs until 1952."It is not enough to say that some of his views were unpopular," writes Caldwell in "Hayek's Challenge," just published by the University of Chicago Press. "For most of his life his economic and political positions were completely out of sync with those of the rest of the intelligentsia . . .. [F]or much of the century Hayek was a subject of ridicule, contempt, or, even worse for a man of ideas, indifference."Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."
The key to a functioning economy -- or society -- is decentralized competition. In a market economy, prices act as a "system of telecommunications," coordinating information far beyond the scope of a single mind. They permit ever-evolving order to emerge from dispersed knowledge."What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today?" economist Lawrence Summers said in an interview for "The Commanding Heights," Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's 1998 study of the resurgence of economic liberalism. "What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." Summers, who was then deputy treasury secretary and is now president of Harvard, recently reaffirmed those views in an e-mail.Information technology has strengthened Hayek's legacy. At MIT's Sloan School, Erik Brynjolfsson uses Hayek to remind students that feeding data into centralized computers doesn't necessarily solve a company's information problems. In any complex operation, there is too much relevant information for a single person or small group to absorb and act on."As Hayek pointed out, the key thing is to have the decision rights and the information co-located," says Brynjolfsson. "There are at least two ways of achieving that. One is to move information to decision maker. The other is to move decision rights to where the information is."This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek's best-known work, "The Road to Serfdom," which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain's well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria.The book was shocking enough in Britain, where it was respectfully, though critically, received. But in the United States, where Reader's Digest published a condensed version, "The Road to Serfdom" was a bestseller and a political lightning rod. It rallied supporters of traditional free enterprise and enraged the intelligentsia to whom it was addressed. How dare this mustachioed Austrian suggest that the ambitions of the New Deal might have anything in common with Hitler or Stalin!Even today, the book's thesis is often misstated as what Caldwell calls "the inevitability thesis -- that if you start down the road to intervention in the economy, you're automatically going to end up in a totalitarian state." But Hayek spent much of his career arguing against the then-popular idea of historical laws. Nor did he oppose an a wealthy society, he believed, could provide a basic income for the poor.
Rather, he argued that to fully control the economy meant to control all aspects of life. Economic decisions are not separate from individual values or purposes. They reflect those purposes."We want money for many different things, and those things are not always, or even rarely, just to have money for its own sake," explains Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University and author of "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought" (2002). "We want money for our spouses or our children or to do something in terms of the transformation of ourselves -- for everything from plastic surgery to reading intellectual history or building a church. These are all noneconomic goals that we express through the common means of money."Hayek argued that only in a competitive market, in which prices signal the relative values placed on different goods, can people with very different values live together peacefully. And only in such a market can they figure out how best to meet their needs and wants -- or even what those needs and wants are.Caldwell, who is editing Hayek's collected works for the University of Chicago Press, is currently working on the project's edition of "The Road to Serfdom," a task that entails reading the largely forgotten contemporary works with which Hayek was contending. "It's almost chilling to read some of these books. They were willing to accept fairly massive interventions in the economy -- directing labor, who should be working at what jobs and that kind of thing," says Caldwell. He adds, "`The Road to Serfdom' today reads reasonably, most of it. You read these other books and you feel like you're on another planet."Because he emphasized the pluralism of values, the limits of knowledge, and the totalitarian side of "rationalist" (or, as he would put it, "scientistic") control, some have claimed Hayek as a precursor to postmodernism. Indeed, toward the end of his life, postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault gave lectures on Hayek's work.Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, says that in a broad sense Hayek anticipated many postmodern critiques. "Hayekian liberalism and postmodernism alike are not interested in total knowledge, or in the total institutions necessary to maintain such a vision," says Gillespie, who holds a doctorate in literary studies. "For Hayek, the very essence of liberalism properly understood is that it replaces the ideal of social uniformity with one of competing difference." That's why Foucault, though no Hayekian liberal, "recognized that Hayek's formulation of a private sphere was a meaningful hedge against the worst excesses of state power."Unlike postmodernists, Hayek never rejected the idea of scientific knowledge. But in confronting the advocates of centralized economies, Hayek did take pains to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.Beginning with "The Sensory Order," he began to differentiate between "simple" sciences like physics, which study phenomena that can be explained by only a few variables, and "complex" sciences like biology, psychology, and economics, which depend on so many variables that precise predictions are impossible. "Hayek felt that many of his opponents, all claiming the mantle of science, were but pretenders to the throne," Caldwell writes. "He constantly encountered people who thought of themselves as objective scientists, people who held ideological views different from his and who immediately felt comfortable attributing their differences to the fact that, whereas they were scientists, he was an ideologue."Hayek and postmodern philosophers were troubled by many of the same issues, but they came to different conclusions. "I don't view him as a postmodernist in the way that some interpreters have," says Caldwell. However, he adds, "I think they had similar enemies."Virginia Postrel is the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness" and an economics columnist for The New York Times business section.
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Boston Globe Media Partners, LLCThe Future and Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel
Future and Its Enemies&
by Virginia Postrel&
The Free Press, New York,
pp., $25.00 (hbk)&&
(ISBN 0 684 82760 3)&
by Dr. Edward Younkins&&
Professor of Accountancy
and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia
and author of Capitalism and Commerce.&
It has often been said that
there are two types of people in the world ? those who divide human beings
into two types and those who do not. Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason
magazine, in her brilliant, bold, and compelling new work, The Future
and Its Enemies, defies conventional political boundaries of left and
right and liberal and conservative to divide the world into stasists and
dynamists. The book's thesis is that the most useful and pertinent intellectual
vision is about those who want to stop, turn back, or regulate change and
those who welcome the future. Ms Postrel's division is reminiscent of Thomas
Sowell's unconstrained and constrained visions as thoroughly discussed
in his Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. Ms Postrel,
herself a dynamist, is proposing a new political dividing line based on
how one views and approaches the idea of change.&&
Stasists have an aversion
to change and either abhor progress or want to control it according to
their own vision. Stasists include those who long for the good old days,
technophobes, technocrats, supporters of big government programs, and individuals
whose investments or jobs are in jeopardy due to some specific innovation.
They may come from the left (unionists, environmentalists, Luddites, etc.)
or from the right (religious traditionalists, nativists, etc.). Stasists
on the left want to regulate the market and the development of technology.
Those on the right loathe change and have protectionist economic leanings.&&
Various types of stasists
such as Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, the Unabomber, unionists,
and environmentalists have joined to advocate the restriction of immigration
and to oppose global trade. Ms Postrel observes that although stasis supporters
are numerous, their visions of the ideal future are varied and incompatible
making their alliances fragile and temporary.&&
Stasists want a regulated,
engineered world ? the future must be managed. Stasists are into social
engineering as exemplified in Bill Clinton's bridge to the 21st century
and Al Gore's information superhighway. They want to control and limit
change. Ms Postrel notes that the growth of government is making it easier
for stasists to get their way. Bureaucratic regulations enable stasists
to prevent, delay, or control innovations and changes.&&
Scorning the idea of nested
rules based on the diversity of human bonds, stasists believe they know
the one, best way and demand that everyone live by their ideas. Not only
do they want their detailed rules to apply to everyone, they also want
specific rules and institutions to govern each new situation and keep things
under control. They crave certainty and expect specific outcomes, knowable
in advance, rather than general patterns and an open future. Politically-imposed
statist plans tend to be very specific ? they admit no unarticulated and
tacit x-factors and no feedback and learning. Stasists prefer knowledge
that can be articulated and easily shared. In addition, they strongly value
and support the views of an articulate &lite ? someone needs to
take control and make things right.&&
Stasists portray the market
either as an impersonal machine or as a small cabal of powerful men. They
tend to detest commercial bonds since a dynamic marketplace erodes the
ability of political& &lites to enforce collective decisions.&&
Imagining life out of time,
stasists want to simplify life and to hold it still. In addition, they
take existing conditions as a fixed scratch line, considering neither how
we got where we are nor how things might evolve.&&
Ms Postrel describes two
types of stasists ? reactionaries, whose central value is stability and
technocrats whose central value is control. Whereas reactionaries wish
to reverse change, restoring the past and holding it in place, technocrats
desire to manage change, centrally directing progress according to a predictable
plan.& Reactionaries often ally themselves with technocrats ? they
unite in hostility against capitalism, the consumer culture, and globalism.&&
Reactionaries fear the infinite
series ? an open-ended progression of invention, learning, adaptation,
and change. Some seek rules that would ban change. Others, such as Pat
Buchanan, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kirkpatrick Sale, want to return to some imagined,
more stable past. The power of reactionaries lies in their ability to alter
the values enforced through technocratic structures or to create new technocratic
agencies devoted to reactionary purposes.&&
Technocrats worry about
the inability of the state to control dynamists and about a future that
may be unpredictable and beyond the control of the elite. Technocracy is
the ideology of the one best way. It follows that technocrats are for the
future, but only if someone is in charge of making it turn out according
to their plan. Technocrats want rules that will control outcomes. They
establish standards and impose a single set of values on the future. They
prefer setting goals once and for all and talk about comprehensive systems
and national standards. They do not tolerate diversity and decentralised
trial and error.&&
Technocrats celebrate their
knowledge and expertise and exude an air of omnicompetence. Seeking predictability
and order, they see themselves as social engineers who formulate rational
solutions to public problems. Political arguments tend to take place between
technocrats advocating competing overarching schemes. Technocrats like
to locate the spirit of America in national greatness achieved through
bold federal projects.&&
Technocrats know how to
stop things. Technocratic regulations stifle innovation and diversity,
deprive people of the benefit of their own knowledge, and create roadblocks
in the form of new rules to master, or anticipate, before acting.&&
Ms Postrel is at her best
when she is describing the dynamist perspective ? a world view in which
she fervently believes. Dynamists prefer an open-minded society where creativity
and enterprise, operating under general and predictable rules, generate
progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists appreciate evolutionary processes
such as market competition, playful experimentation, scientific inquiry,
and technological innovation. A dynamist is one who works creatively across
barriers and obstacles and in areas once thought to be disparate to construct
combinations based on the free play of imagination and discovery. Dynamists
seek progress, rather than perfection, through trial and error, feedback
loops, incremental improvement, diversity, and choice. They are learners,
experimenters, risk takers, and entrepreneurs who understand the importance
of local knowledge and evolved solutions to complex problems. Not surprisingly,
dynamists are frequently attracted to biological metaphors as symbols of
unpredictable change and growth, variety, experimentation, feedback, and
adaptation.&&
The author explains that
dynamism is for people who like process and pattern and an order that is
unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever-shifting. Dynamists appreciate dispersed,
even tacit, knowledge and recognise the limits of the human mind at the
same time that they celebrate learning. They also prefer competing nested
rule sets and want to limit universal rule-making to broadly applicable
and rarely changed principles. Dynamists also permit many visions and accept
competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on metaphysical
principles or what the future should look like.&&
Ms Postrel states that the
central organising principle of dynamism is an open-ended process and that
its central value is learning. Unconscious evolution can sometimes develop
better solutions than can the best engineers. Dynamists, members of what
Ms Postrel calls the party of life, look for solutions to emerge from the
interaction of all the individuals. They share beliefs in spontaneous order,
experiments and feedback, unintended consequences, an infinite series of
evolved solutions to complex problems, the limits of centralised knowledge,
and the possibility of progress. Dynamists care about protecting the processes
that permit an open-ended future to unfold.&&
Dynamists learn from choice,
competition, and criticism. Both new ideas and criticism are part of the
process of trial and error learning. Dynamists also understand that cultures
learn from experience.&&
Dynamists appreciate and
accept the variety of human life and value the joys and possibilities of
human life that can occur when people are free to experiment and learn.
The dynamist moral vision emphasises individual flourishing and responsibility
? it sees human nature fulfilled in learning, creating, and adapting to
the world. Dynamists believe in the capacity of human beings, gradually
and voluntarily, by trial and error, to improve their lives.&&
Ms Postrel discusses dynamists'
attraction to systemic, process-oriented approaches and their appreciation
for how simple units and simple rules can form complex orders without design
and produce countless combinations. Patterns are shaped by decentralised
actions, feedback, and responses. For example, dynamists see the market
as a process, a decentralised system for discovering and sharing knowledge
and for trading and expressing value.&&
Dynamism sees the past and
the future as inextricably connected and progress as incremental ? knowledge
and experience are cumulative. Dynamists believe that we live in a world
of options constrained by decisions already made and actions already taken
? many before we were even born. They attempt to refine and improve our
inherited ideas and determine more precisely the limits to their applicability.
Dynamists view cultural trends as part of a decentralised, undirected process
of experiment, feedback, and learning.&&
Progress, for the dynamist,
is an infinite series ? a process, rather than a product. For them, an
opportunity is a problem no one has solved, addressed, or considered. Innovations
are based on coming up with new combinations of ideas, testing them, finding
their deficiencies, trying possibly better combinations, etc. Technological
progress thus is a series of stages involving experimentation, competition,
mistakes, and feedback.&&
A trial and error process
invests no one with decision power, assumes no one is omniscient, acknowledges
human differences, and permits diverse approaches. This process recognises
the human condition including both the limits and potential of the human
An infinite series of progress
allows for learning, diffused expertise, and the search for x-factors ?
the unarticulated knowledge that can only be elicited by experience and
experiment. So-called tacit knowledge is expressed in relationships and
habits transmitted through webs of economic and social connections. Tacit
knowledge, a special case of local knowledge, is embedded, in the things,
customs, services, and routines we encounter daily. Tacit knowledge sometimes
only travels through apprenticeship. The paucity of articulated knowledge
increases the value of turning local (including tacit) knowledge into easily
shared information or products. Local knowledge is dynamic, constantly
adjusting to new ideas, information, and events. It exists as dispersed
bits of incomplete and sometimes contradictory knowledge which all separate
individuals possess. Prices are an important signal of changes in local
conditions.&&
Ms Postrel argues that dynamist
systems, ranging from a solitary organisation to an entire civilisation,
requires rules that are compatible with knowledge, learning, and surprise.
Dynamists look for rules that let people forge new bonds, invent new institutions,
and find better ways of doing things. According to the author, dynamist
rules: (1) allow individuals (including groups of individuals) to act on
(2) apply to simple, generic units and allow them
to combine in (3) permit credible, understandable,
enduring, and enf (4) protect criticism, competition,
and feedback, and (5) establish a framework within which people can create
nested, competing frameworks of more specific rules.&&
A dynamist vision thus calls
for general rules on which actors can depend ? a reliable foundation on
which to build complex, ever-adapting structures that incorporate local
knowledge. New schemes of rules will be voluntarily subscribed to, allowed
to evolve, and able to incorporate detailed knowledge of the particulars.
These new schemes of rules will operate as separate nested systems within
the general rules.&&
Ms Postrel explains that
contracts treat individuals as free and equal generic units, creating their
own bonds. Only by treating individuals in this manner can overarching
rules allow people to take advantage of their own ideas. Contracts allow
people to incur reciprocal responsibilities and commitments, to make promises
others can& rely on, and to establish reasonable expectations for
future actions. When people cannot make binding, enforceable commitments,
dynamic progress is severely hampered.&&
Well-functioning legal systems
are especially important when strangers interact in commercial and other
situations. The goal of contract law is not to inspire legal disputes but
to settle or avoid them. The idea of contract fosters dynamic progress
by encouraging specialisation and allowing an extended order to develop.&&
The author notes that rules
should protect criticism, competition, and feedback by allowing the freedom
to challenge established ideas and to offer alternatives. Nested rules
recognise the diversity of human bonds by permitting individuals to choose
the specific rules under which they prefer to be governed.&&
Ms Postrel and other dynamists
view nature as a dynamic process, not as an end. An evolving, open-ended
nature may impose practical constraints, but it cannot dictate eternal
standards. She explains that stasis is neither natural nor desirable and
that there is no static standard for the natural. If nature doesn't define
its own purposes, and if even natural states may incorporate human artifice,
then nature cannot be a guide even to its own moral and proper destiny,
much less to human life.& Change and self-transformation are among
the truest expressions of our enduring human nature.&&
Dynamists celebrate the
pleasures of achievement ? work that is its own reward. According to Ms
Postrel, play is what we do for its own sake. It is how we try new things,
how we learn, and how we create new combinations. Freedom is an essential
aspect of play. So are rules. all games have rules that require us to stretch
our minds and bodies. Whereas play depends on some kind of underlying order,
fun stems from finding originality within constraints. If combinations
explain the near endless supply of new ideas, play explains where those
combinations come from. Play is a spur to our most creative and significant
work. The progress of civilisations depend on people who make play out
of work ? they create the variations that become the source of progress
and the discoveries that drive the infinite series.&&
A dynamist society imposes
no single order beyond the basic rules that allow for plentitude and experimentation.
A dynamist system enables people to create their own corner of the universe
? their own pockets of stability and nested rules within the broader dynamic
world. Dynamist social systems recognise the human need for voluntary association
and community and thus allow for people to continually invent ways to provide
themselves with stability amidst change.&&
Ms Postrel discusses a fascinating
range of cases to illustrate how free individuals have formulated solutions
and found opportunities that never would have been thought of by technocratic
planners or reactionary thinkers. These examples include post-it notes,
the Internet, computers, shampoo, fashion, medicine, contact lenses, fisheries,
movies, etc. In all these areas she demonstrates how and why openended
and unplanned trial and error is the key to human progress.&&
Dynamist thought draws from
many intellectual disciplines including: classical liberal philosophy and
legal theory, free-market economics, political science and public administration,
the study of organisations and business strategy, information systems,
decision theory, cognitive psychology, human information processing, science,
technology, ecology and evolutionary biology, etc. Notable dynamist thinkers
include Friedrich Hayek, Herbert Simon, Aaron Wildasky, Daniel Botkin,
and many others.&&
Dynamist thinkers like Ms
Postrel will probably like the new movie, Pleasantville, that tells the
story of twins (a brother and sister) who are magically transported via
a TV remote control out of their dysfunctional ?90s home into a monochromatic
fantasy world of a ?50s-type sitcom called Pleasantville that reminds one
of Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriett. These
teen-aged visitors bring spontaneity to this ordered little world thereby
changing the sitcom's universe from black and white to colour in more ways
than one. As feelings are felt for the first time by the Pleasantville
characters, strange but beautiful splashes of colour begin to appear apparently
randomly (since we don't know the underlying interacting factors) in their
black-and-white world. As the townspeople are introduced to passionate
emotions and new ideas, colour starts to enter their world. The teen-agers
awaken new ideas in the citizens, making them question things that they
had taken for granted. Some embrace the new vision and colour scheme, while
others fear its influence. There is a split between those who want to retreat
from change, knowledge, and human responsibility and those who want to
embrace them. By the finale, all traces of black-and-white along with the
50's utopian and sanitised values have been replaced with a functional
community with its full range of social concerns and citizens who are colourful,
liberated people with free wills.&&
Dynamists thinkers should
also like the 1991 film Mindwalk ? a philosophical, socio-political, and
scientific dynamist conversation between a physicist, a poet, and a politician.
The scientist is an idealist (and a dynamist), the poet is a romantic,
and the politician is a pragmatist. The three discuss the systematic makeup
of the universe. The physicist argues against mechanistic solutions and
convinces the others of the interconnectedness of all things ? there are
world within worlds, organisms within organisms, systems within systems,
Some readers of this review
(and Ms Postrel's book) may balk at her seemingly purely material conception
of progress. After all, man's most profound questions and problems are
existential, moral, and spiritual. As such, true progress would be oriented
toward the right ordering and perfection of the soul. Perhaps Ms Postrel
should have spent some time explaining that by making life easier, safer,
and more prosperous, progress and technology permit persons to spend more
time to pursue higher level concerns such as character development, love,
religion, and the perfection of one's soul in order to achieve union with
God in an eternal community of insight and love.&&
Ms Postrel's vision of dynamism
presupposes a libertarian institutional framework that guarantees man the
freedom to seek his material and moral well being and happiness as long
as he does not trample the equivalent rights of others. Only then will
a person be able to use his rationality and free will to choose, create,
and integrate all the values, virtues, and goods that can lead to his moral
well-being. This, of course, includes the rational assessment, choice,
and use of technology itself.&&
One caveat needs to be made.
Ms Postrel fails to emphasise that the world is not conveniently divided
into stasists and dynamist. The ability to accept and embrace change is
one trait among many and is normally distributed throughout the population.
In addition, individuals may tend to be more stasist or more dynamists,
but do not totally reject change or accept change in all aspects of their
lives ? no one is purely or consistently a stasist or a dynamist. Change
acceptance varies across a continuum and situationally. Nevertheless, her
distinction does demonstrate the relative ability of each vision to promote
human flourishing in the real world.&&
This well-written, readable,
and insightful work defies conventional political boundaries by arguing
that a more politically relevant categorisation is achieved by defining
how individuals and groups view the future. Ms Postrel's book is a must-read
for anyone interested in commerce, technology, public policy, and the search
for truth in a dynamic world.&
& 1999 / All rights reserved ?