Humanity and Nature in Economic Thought: Searching for the Organic Origins of the Economy
本书收录了2020年一场线上会议的论文，分析大卫·休谟、亚当·斯密等八位思想家作品中的“有机”元素，旨在证明这些元素一直是经济思想的内在部分，但书中对“有机”的定义模糊，论证不够有力。
This volume contains the contributions to a conference organized by Gábor Bíró from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, held online in the summer of 2020. The conference—as well as the book that resulted from it—was intended to draw attention to a topic that, according to the editor, had hitherto been neglected by the majority of historians of economic thought: the “organic” aspects present in the ideas of many economic thinkers. “The aim is to demonstrate that organic aspects have been inherent parts of how celebrated thinkers addressed economic issues” (1). To this end, the “organic” elements in the works of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich August Hayek, and the Polanyi brothers are analyzed in the eight chapters following the introduction, each of which is devoted to one (or, in the case of the Polanyi brothers, two) of these thinkers.The works of these authors were written over a period of more than two hundred years—from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Hayek's Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973–79). The reader may well wonder whether all of these authors had in mind the same thing when they used the term organic—if they used it at all, that is. Therefore, the justification for putting such a wide range of economic thinkers on the common denominator of “organic aspects” depends a lot on what exactly is understood by “organic aspects.” The editor lets the reader know that “by organic, authors of this volume mean something that is related to given sensitive, cognitive or social human qualities” (1). This is a definition (if it can be called a definition at all) that is remarkable both for its imprecision and for its generality. It rather serves to obscure than to clarify the meaning of organic. However, general as this definition is, in a way it is still too narrow, because, as the very title of the book—Humanity and Nature in Economic Thought (and here I emphasize “and nature”)—clearly implies, the essays that follow are not confined to the discussion of “human qualities” (whatever these may be).But let us for a moment leave aside the intentions of the editor and the ideas behind the book. We will return to them later. Now I would like to turn to the eight essays, which, after all, may stand on their own—whether or not they constitute a coherent whole. Maybe thus we will also be better able to understand what organic is all about.Very often, the contributions to collections like this one differ in quality quite a bit. The present book is no exception. At one end, we have Hilton L. Root's essay about unintended order and self-organization in Hayek (chap. 8). Nobody who has at least a passing familiarity with the oeuvre of Hayek will learn anything new from the essay. All the usual Hayekian tropes are dutifully rehashed, and that's it. Root ascribes to Hayek the belief that an economy is “organic” (169) and calls Hayek's theory of morality “organic” (165). Obviously, this adjective is used only for one reason: to make the paper somehow fit into the book. The phenomena of self-organization and unintended order Root refers to are characterized as “evolutionary” by most other economists, and there is actually no good reason to call them by any other name. At least, no such reason is given by the author.At the other end, there is the splendid discussion by Antonello La Vergata of the relations between Darwinism and Malthusianism (chap. 4). He goes way beyond the usual story of biology importing economic concepts and economics reimporting the same concepts in a biological guise. La Vergata not only describes the to and fro between biology and economics, leading to what today is called social Darwinism, against the background of the intellectual climate of Victorian England, but also discusses the developments on the Continent and in the United States. He emphasizes the moral dimension of the work of Malthus, a dimension that served as the link between the biological, the social, and the political sphere. It is this moral link on which social Darwinism is based and that almost inevitably leads to both the moralization of nature and the naturalization of society—phenomena the dangers of which La Vergata warns against. Of course, in his essay, he does not restrict himself to the “given sensitive, cognitive or social human qualities” the authors are supposed to discuss under the heading of “organic.” It is no wonder, then, that he never (as far as I can remember) uses this shibboleth at all. His contribution does not suffer from it—quite the contrary.The remaining six chapters fall somewhere in between these two contributions. In chapter 2, we learn that David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature, made use not only of mechanical but also of chemical analogies. In chapter 3, the well-known relations between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments are illustrated by the changes the practice of infanticide underwent in the course of economic progress. Chapter 5 tells the story of John Stuart Mill's socialist (or, rather, corporatist) leanings and his view of the “organic” nature of socialism (or corporatism). The topic of chapter 6 is “Marshall's commitment to Economic Biology” (110) and its influence on his views on the relative importance of statics, dynamics, and organic growth for the economy and for economics. In chapter 7, the “organic unity” in Keynes's General Theory is discussed (133). Since the economy cannot be separated from the motives and ideas of economic actors, the General Theory is not a general theory of the economy per se but a general theory of capitalism, based as it is on, as Keynes saw it, the irrational motive of moneymaking. Finally, in chapter 9, the editor compares the economic conceptions of the Polanyi brothers. According to him, both were seeking for “organic solutions” to “mechanic problems” (189). The more radical Karl saw the solution to the problems of capitalism in a kind of liberal socialism, whereas Michael pleaded for capitalism not to be abolished but to be reformed. In each of these six chapters the reader will learn something new—or at least a new way to look at something old and well known.All in all, this volume is a collection of one fascinating and a couple of (more or less) interesting essays. This is nowhere near enough to justify the sweeping claims made in the introduction. Above all, the authors fail to make a convincing case for the need for an organic history of economic thought. The ideas they present are certainly not unimportant, but, for the most part, they have been discussed before—only they have been called evolutionary, psychological, or sociological. In fact, the use of the term organic seems more than a little bit contrived—not the least because it is never clarified what exactly is meant by organic. At the end of the book the reader is no wiser than at the beginning. In addition, the alleged raison d’être for such an alternative history of economic thought simply does not exist—namely, the absence of evolutionary, psychological, and sociological (call them organic, if you will) aspects in the history of economic thought. These aspects have certainly been dealt with by historians of economic thought—in fact, to such an extent, that it would be superfluous to give any examples here. Reading this volume, one cannot help the impression of old wine in new bottles.