C4SS Panelists on the Enduring Legacy of Don Lavoie

The Markets and Society conference this weekend (October 23-26) will feature many interesting panels on topics from public policy to self-governance to digital privacy to immigration and beyond. There will also be longtime C4SSers presenting.

On Saturday from 9:00-10:30am, Nathan Goodman is chairing the panel “The Enduring Legacy of Don Lavoie” featuring:

Cory Massimino – National Economic Planning: What is Right?

Don Lavoie argued in “National Economic Planning: What is Left?” that economic planning was inherently reactionary and thwarted genuinely left-wing aims like peace and liberation. Despite the prevailing conservative-libertarian fusionism of Lavoie’s day, his study of economics and history helped him see the transience of such an alliance: libertarianism was left-wing until the left became obsessed with economic planning and the right was always about militarism and hierarchy no matter how much libertarian rhetoric it adopted. Lavoie’s new (yet old) framing went under appreciated during his time and deserves careful reconsidering for anticipating the contemporary right’s increasing authoritarianism. This essay will build on Lavoie’s framing of economic planning as essentially right-wing, apply that framing to the contemporary American political situation, and argue such a framing is essential for any coherent conception of the political landscape going forward.

Jason Lee Byas – A Role For Lavoian Democracy

Don Lavoie argues for detaching our concept of democracy from the particular institution of voting, and instead seeing it as “openness,” or accessible means to shaping the world around you and its rules. An advantage of this approach is its complementarity with markets and property rights, which might otherwise be seen as in tension with democracy — thus partially reuniting liberalism’s “libertarian” and “democratic” commitments. Yet there is still a tension here. Philosophically, many libertarians may think that any social rules involving force should simply be set by natural rights, and so leaving these open to adjustment by anyone at all (let alone with open access to everyone) will be a problem. Practically, open access to reshaping the rules may spell uncertainty in problematic ways. I resolve these remaining tensions by suggesting a specific role for Lavoian Democracy. In short, many things are left radically indeterminate by any socially-practiced system of rights, and so too are many things left radically indeterminate by a commitment to natural rights. Questions of interpretation and resolution loom large, and the process of interpretation and resolution can either be hierarchical and authoritarian, or a product of ground-up contestation. There are principled liberal grounds — both moral and epistemic — for favoring the latter, and this is the role for Lavoian Democracy. I then offer a handful of institutions and practices that Lavoian Democracy might favor, including unions (of a certain form), adverse possession, and the common law.

Akiva Malamet – Beyond Recognition: Identity, Cultural Discovery, and the Limits of Social Planning

Scholars in liberal theory and political economy have long emphasized what Don Lavoie called the “knowledge problem”: social information is dispersed, local, emergent, and personal, and thus inaccessible to centralized or “high modernist” institutions. Lavoie and others showed that state economic planning fails because planners cannot access or generate this kind of knowledge and often undermine its creation. Liberal institutions, by contrast, enable people to align diverse plans and generate forms of knowledge no top-down authority could anticipate. I extend these insights to issues of identity, cultural development, and interpersonal life. Identity and cultural formation are bottom-up, organic processes reflecting the nuances of how people self-conceive, relate, and find meaning. State planning and institutional treatments of identity often obstruct pluralistic self-concepts and cultural discovery, flattening human diversity and complex individual lives into simple, legible categories. Ironically, formal recognition can perpetuate the injustices it was intended to remedy and reinforce intergroup conflict. State recognition of identity undermines the processes through which identity becomes meaningful, and conflicts with core liberal values of pluralism, self-authorship, and cooperation. Immigration restrictions present an analogous case: they constrain the unpredictable ways natives and migrants associate, pushing societies toward narrower cultural configurations and limiting the scope of both native and migrant identities and life plans. Just as national economic planning distorts economies, national social planning limits the discovery processes through which identity, meaning, and belonging emerge. Lavoie’s work illuminates the epistemic complexity of cultural formation and inner life — offering crucial resources for rethinking identity in open societies.

Roderick Long will also be there, as part of a separate panel on Sunday at 9:00am, offering comments on Aeon Skoble’s “Deleting the State.”

We hope to see many of you there!

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative