The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

My colleague Debbie Henney forwarded to me the following article from Wired.


http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=1

The author of the article writes:

But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.


In my reply to her I wrote:

This is an interesting, if very confused article. The author talks about the libertarian elements of digital communities and the collaboration that wiki and blogs foster seem more in line with the Hayekian emergent and evolutionary search than any socialist collectivism.

I guess where this author lost me was his failure to distinguish between the coercion that lies at the heart of socialism and the personal liberty that lies at the heart of a system of natural liberty. I see the internet as an example of the latter and not the former.

The Invisible Hand

Thanks to Jane Shaw at Liberty and Power for the heads up about a wonderful discussion between Gavin Kennedy and Dan Klein over the meaning and significance of the invisible hand in the Econ Journal Watch

Peter Minowitz concludes his essay, “Adam Smith’s Invisible
with the following words: “Centuries after Smith’s death, we are still struggling
fathom a two-word phrase that stands out in a thousand-page book.”

Gavin's position

Gavin asserts:

The metaphor of an invisible hand is just a metaphor and modern wonder over
its meaning is, well, meaningless.

Klein' response

William D. Grampp contends:

There are nine different interpretations of it that I have seen (which cannot be all of them), and there is a tenth.

the force that makes the interest of one the interest of others,

(2) the price mechanism,

(3) a figure for the idea of unintended consequences,

(4) competition,

(5) the mutual advantage in exchange,

(6) a joke,

(7) an evolutionary process,

(8) providence, and

(9) the force that restrains the export of capital.

from

What Did Smith Mean by the Invisible Hand?
Author(s): William D. Grampp

Source: The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 108, No. 3 (Jun., 2000), pp. 441-465
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

What Does Social Theory Study?

From Taking Hayek Seriously

The discovery that there exist in society orders of another kind which have not been designed by men but have resulted from the action of individuals without their intending to create such an order, is the achievement of social theory — or, rather, it was this discovery which has shown that there was an object for social theory. It shook the deeply-ingrained belief of men that where there was an order there must also have been a personal orderer. It had consequences far beyond the field of social theory since it provided the conceptions which made possible a theoretical explanation of the structures of biological phenomena. And in the social field it provided the foundation for a systematic argument for individual liberty.

From F. A. Hayek, “Kinds of Order in Society”, New Individualist Review.