[p2p-research] Fwd: call for papers: p2p and liberalism (emergent orders journal)
Michel Bauwens
michelsub2004 at gmail.com
Wed May 13 04:10:22 CEST 2009
Dear friends,
Below is an interesting call from papers, which I received from Gus
diZerega, which I recently featured in our blog.
I would be an occasion to more fruitfully engage with the liberal tradition
and in particular on the relation between p2p and the market,
I'm going to submit a paper on that topic, but I can imagine that people
like Paul (panarchy), and Kevin may have an interest?
I'm also enclosing excerpts from a paper by Gus, which is his critique of
liberalism. I am curious as to how post-liberal and post-socialist people
can find each other in a dialogue around the primacy of civil society.
Michel
The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders at the Atlas Economic Research
Foundation is seeking papers exploring the theme
*
* *“Organization and Emergence:*
*Tensions and Symbiosis”*
at its
*THIRD CONFERENCE ON EMERGENT ORDER AND SOCIETY*
December 3-6, 2009
We seek original work in three areas:
1. Exploring the relations between emergent orders and the instrumental
organizations within them. To what degree are they benign, mutually
beneficial, or conflicting? For example, the role of interest groups and
political parties within democracy considered as an emergent order; the role
of corporations and unions within the market considered as an emergent
order; schools of thought within science considered as an emergent order.
2. Exploring organizations that straddle the borders of different emergent
orders, such as the market or politics and the environment, the market and
science, democracy and science, and so on. Different emergent processes are
coordinated by different rules biased towards different values. How do they
interact?
4. The nature of rules that generate and sustain emergent processes compared
to rules that generate organizations.
Acceptable papers may be either case studies or more general theoretical
explorations. Revised papers will be published in our new, open source
online journal, Studies in Emergent Order. http://studiesinemergentorder.com
To be guaranteed consideration, proposals must be in by May 20. The
proposal should describe the anticipated argument and how it relates to at
least one of the conference themes. Proposals should be no more than two
pages double-spaced, not including an optional bibliography of works the
author anticipates discussing. Submit your proposal to
editor at studiesinemergentorder.comThis e-mail address is being protected from
spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Fund will select a maximum of 12 papers for inclusion in its conference,
and will notify their authors by May 30, 2009. Final papers must be
submitted to the Fund by September 1, 2008.
Authors of accepted papers will have their expenses met to, from, and during
the conference, to be held in a still to be determined location in upstate
New York. They will also receive $1250 for accepted papers. In return,
authors will participate in the conference and we will have the right to
first publish any accepted papers in the journal Studies in Emergent Order.
for the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders
Gus diZerega
William C. Dennis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, May 13, 2009 at 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: Concerning wilber and beck
To: Gus diZerega <gdizerega at gmail.com>
Hi Gus,
I will look for your call for papers and distribute it, and recommend
cooperation, but if you have it handy, thanks for sending it; otherwise, I'm
sure I'll find it on your site.
Thanks also for your paper.
I would like to quote 'liberally" from it,
I have identified two parts I'm interested in bringing to our blog
readership.
The first part concerns your critique of the weaknesses of liberalism, see
here below under Part One; the second part concerns your paragraphs on
cooperation, see under Part Two:
PART ONE
*Part II: Classical Liberalism Re-examined*
*The Two Major Strengths of Classical Liberalism*
When everyone enjoys equal legal status in all areas of life the breadth and
depth of human cooperation expands enormously. As the web of voluntary
relationships expends and links to other webs, social institutions are
transformed. Networks arise that are far too complex for anyone to grasp in
detail, nor do they need to, because impersonal feedback signals transmit
coordinating information among people who have never met, and never will
meet or even know of one another. Two seminal liberal theorists of these
processes, F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi, termed these developments
“spontaneous orders.” Today they are more widely termed “emergent orders.”
Regardless of what we call them, emergent orders are the inevitable result
of institutionalizing liberal principles, and by far the best appreciation
for them until recently lies among classical liberals such as Mises, Hayek,
Friedman, Boettke, Lachmann, and others.
Emergent orders coordinate vast numbers of independently conceived plans and
projects in such a way as to facilitate more successes than could ever be
accomplished through central direction. While other liberal traditions were
captivated by the wonders of good management, political equality, and
scientific control, classical liberals focused on processes that facilitated
as many people as possible pursuing their own independently chosen plans
while contributing to the successes of others in the process. In this
important sense a revitalization of liberalism more generally depends on
insights found within the classical liberal tradition.
Intimately connected to their focus on emergent order was classical
liberals’ sensitivity to the importance of rules, particularly
constitutional rules and the rule of law, as providing a framework within
which such orders could flourish. Procedural rules facilitating unintended
cooperation among unknown people seeking a multiplicity of unforeseen goals
enabled more of them to succeed than could ever have been the case by
deliberate organization. Over the past ten years in particular this
tradition has weakened in classical liberal circles, and in crucial respects
has shifted to other liberal traditions. A strong case could be made that
the ACLU is a better defender of American principles today than classical
liberals (except for those who joined it). But historically its deepest
appreciation has been among classical liberals.
The two absolutely crucial insights that classical liberals have to offer a
revived liberal tradition in the broadest sense are an appreciation for
emergent processes, particularly the market, and recognition of the central
role for the rule of law. These are not small elements.
But they have been undermined by some serious oversights and an analytical
myopia that has led to political blindness for many, a blindness that has
led to the present situation. Classical liberalism’s present disarray,
disreputable allies, and self-reinforced irrelevance are the result.
*Weaknesses of Classical Liberalism I: Too Narrow a View of Emergent Orders*
Ironically, much of classical liberalism’s current weakness is rooted in one
of its greatest strengths. Classical liberals rarely explored the wider
implications of their emergent order model. They applied it to the market,
as Hayek had done, and in some cases to common law, also following Hayek as
well as Bruno Leoni’s lead. But most classical liberal interest in common
law was for its utility as a defense against ambitious social engineering
plans and economic control. Issues of justice were de-emphasized except
among some libertarians. This motivation opened many classical liberals to
being captured by the later ideal of economic theories of law, where issues
of justice tended to be subordinated to issues of economic efficiency. I
will return to this issue at a later point.**
Beyond this subsidiary interest in common law; classical liberals largely
ignored the implications of Hayek and others having also identified science,
custom, and language as also being emergent processes. I later made the same
case for liberal democracies, and it was also ignored. Yet if these
observations are well founded, very important implications grow from them.
First, if there are several emergent orders based on voluntary transactions,
each coordinating different kinds of plans, then obviously no single set of
procedural rules is a simple transmission belt coordinating human wants. Some
are better for pursuing some purposes, others for other purposes. These
questions were not investigated as a paradigm for researching liberal
principles became subordinated to a program of political advocacy.
This intellectual myopia led to several theoretical weaknesses and political
misdiagnoses. The most important was missing the insight that emergent
orders are the *signature institutions* of liberalism, and so provide a
unifying institutional framework for liberalism as a whole. Markets,
science, and democracy are all expressions of the fundamental liberal
principle of universal equality of status. It is no accident that the most
important new such order, the internet, is a product of liberal rules: any
one can post anything to anybody, with impersonal coordination processes
preventing overload and assisting people in an unknown quantity of unknown
endeavors.
Failing to appreciate the centrality of emergent orders to liberal society
led many classical liberals into complacently accepting traditional
conservative critiques of democracy, predicated on democracies being a
certain kind of state. But democracies are no more states than science is a
religion or markets are planned orders. Once this point is absorbed, the
heritage of anti-statism with which classical liberals had closely
identified needed to be rethought. Not abandoned, rethought. Obviously in
some respects democracies are akin to states – they make laws, field armies,
and collect taxes. But that goes no farther than to say planned economies
are like markets in that they make products and employ labor. Very true,
but seriously misleading when it is left at that.
Predictions of increasing serfdom from the growth in the activities of
democratic government, often based on a misreading of *Road to Serfdom,* has
demonstrably not happened in the Scandinavian democracies, where that
process has gone farther than anywhere else. (In *The Road to Serfdom *Hayek
explicitly exempted Sweden, and targeted Britain, because Sweden operated
within a market order whereas British Labour then wanted to replace that
order.) Hayek’s statement exempting Sweden from his analysis was ignored,
rendering its broader implications invisible. Classical liberals as a
whole, including for a long time this one, read him already ‘knowing’ what
we would find: that big and growing government led to serfdom.
The old ‘state’ model should be jettisoned. I myself prefer a model of
democracy as more resembling a residential cooperative with serious
principal agent problems, particularly at the domestic level. Sweden ceases
to be inexplicable and programs such as Social security take on a new look.
In addition, failing to appreciate science as a signature institution of
liberal principles appears to have allowed many classical liberals to under
appreciate the subversive impact of right wing conservative attacks on
science. The subordination of science to political and religious agendas
legitimates subordinating liberalism to illiberal religious and political
agendas. When I was a student this subordination was regarded as one of the
signature characteristics distinguishing communist regimes from freer ones.
Obviously that can no longer be said to be true after the past 8 years.
Finally, if classical liberals had more fully appreciated culture as an
emergent process, as Hayek had argued, they would have seen *two* possible
loci for liberty: the market and civil society. Those who have read me
before know I think civil society is far the better place to focus that
judgment. It is the least specialized in terms of feedback for assisting
people in cooperative endeavors, and both science and the market grew from
it whereas democracy arose from subordinating the state to civil society. And
this brings me to the second critical weakness of classical liberalism as a
means for understanding the modern world.
*Weakness II: Failure to See How Emergent Processes Interact*
Once we are aware that liberalism has generated and sustained at least three
emergent processes as *direct* expressions of its fundamental principles:
the market, science, and democracy, inquiring minds will wonder how they
interact. I would add modern civil society as a more complex fourth. The
usual classical liberal argument that markets simply reflect human choices
that are exogenous to the market process breaks down. We see in all three
cases that the choices are mediated by the generative rules governing the
order in which they are pursued, and these rules make some choices more
easily realized than others. Importantly, this ease of realization need
have little correlation with the values actors hold personally because the
feedback coordinating these orders is abstracted away from the complexity of
personal motives and values.
This simplification is *both* strength and a weakness. Some, like Ludwig
von Mises, granted this, but argued that the market was better than any
alternatives. For purely economic issues he was right, but Mises only
little explored was the issue of interactions between markets and other free
orders of cooperation or the emergent orders if the natural world.
Each order will have areas where it can perform certain functions better
than alternatives, and areas where it cannot. Determining the precise
dividing lines will be empirical questions more than ones of abstract
theory. Arguably, modern technology strengthens the case for toll roads by
easing toll calculations whereas modern science weakens the case for private
insurance by dissolving large groups of the insured into more differentiated
ones based on genetic predispositions, health histories, and the like.
Theory can only give us some general indications. Neither basic
scientific research nor courts of law will be best done in the market place,
neither basic research nor commodity production will be best done within a
democratic political system, and neither commodity production nor courts of
law will be best done by the scientific community. Even so, in practice, all
three emergent processes will unavoidably influence each other. I hope these
are not controversial statements.
Finally, civil society can accomplish some important tasks better than can
democracy, the market, or science. I would argue that this is a rich area
for research, and that many tasks considered political might be better
handled through civil society than democracy. In my opinion, much of the
future of liberalism’s focus on liberty should rest here. But if classical
liberals are to contribute much, they must free themselves from economic
reductionism, and encompass a broader view of free cooperation and human
well-being.
A final note on this issue. Ecosystems are also emergent processes, albeit
ones tied to biological feedback rather than feedback through mentally
interpreted information. Consequently their rate of adaptation appears to
be slower than with social emergent processes, yet in the final analysis
social processes depend on ecological ones. Simple market reductionism,
assuming that somehow market feedback is all we need to harmonize society
with nature, is highly dubious at best. Yet again, there seems little to no
effort to explore this issue. Here also, civil society probably offers
enormous promise in devising sustainable institutions and practices.
*Weakness III: Failure to Understand Relations Between Emergent Orders and
the Organizations Within Them*
Perhaps due to what I now regard as the malign influence of Ayn Rand, far
too many classical liberals have acted as if business is the natural ally of
free markets rather than an intermittent and unreliable ally and often an
enemy. A better appreciation of the dynamics between emergent processes and
the organizations pursuing goals within them would have made this clearer. A
company that is successful in the market can also be put out of business by
that same market. The current unseemly rush of businesses for taxpayer
funded bailouts is a perfect expression of an organization’s response to an
emergent process, once that process threatens its existence. They seek
either to escape it or to control it.
Classical liberals consistently give lip service to business not
sufficiently supporting the market, but then turn their guns on everyone
else who also wanted government to act. This all too often leads to their
supporting businesses benefiting from political privilege while attacking
the critics of that privilege, and in the process claim they are supporting
“the market.” I will give one example close to my heart, but there are
many.
When environmentalists seek to influence government forest policy,
strengthening controls over the lumber industry, they are attacked as
advocates of ‘big government.’ Yet the national forests are managed so that
ONLY logging companies can bids for the trees, with the bidding rules
further biased to favor very large logging companies and penalizing local
companies. Environmentalists are legally prevented from bidding against the
lumber industry, and are then accused of supporting big government over
businesspeople when they seek to influence government policy by other means.
Needless to say, environmentalists are not taken in by this ignorant or
manipulative rhetoric, even if uninformed classical liberals usually are,
and so the classical liberal position is rendered irrelevant to an issue of
great concern to many people. And not just irrelevant. To the degree it is
not ignorant it is also hypocritical.
Still more revealingly, over and over again classical liberals wonder why
haven’t big businesses seen that their “real” interests lay with free
markets. They never asked themselves whether big business might actually *
really* see where their interests lay: in their survival and growth, with
the help of markets if possible, with their suppression if necessary. I have
a simple question for orthodox classical liberals, including almost every
libertarian: why do you think so many corporations so consistently go
against what you think are their best interests? Might it be because it is
*you* who do not know what their best interests might be?
Consequently a great many classical liberals have allowed themselves to
become allies of and apologists for the growing American oligarchy, an
oligarchy that has little if anything to do with liberal principles. Today
this fact is beginning to be realized, but many are still wedded to old
modes of thought that blame “bad apples” in the business community for the
problem, rather then the system that grew them, and will grow more of them
if these “bad apples” are “picked.”
PART TWO
Many of liberalism’s seminal thinkers were fascinated with how, under
conditions of liberty, even selfishly motivated people were led “as if by an
invisible hand” to serve the general good. This beneficent outcome arose
through competition for customers. I believe it was Hayek who took this
insight even farther, and argued that in an emergent order competition
serves as the discovery process that enables system wide coordination to
happen. These insights became a staple of classical liberal analysis, and I
do not question them.
But these discoveries were so exciting, paradoxical, and important, that an
even more fundamental insight, one that is also paradoxical in its own way,
was little discussed, and often missed. It is that competition arises from
cooperation. Life is an intertwined network of cooperation and competition,
but cooperation is fundamental. This seems to be true even in logic, as
Axelrod’s studies of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ game suggests.
Liberalism vastly enlarges the scope of human cooperation, and by doing so,
ensures that different people will pursue plans that are incompatible. But
in business, science, and democracy, these incompatibilities are discovered
after webs of cooperation have arisen. We develop a product, and discover
it now competes with another product developed and produced in another
cooperative enterprise. From this perspective, competition is *
fundamentally* a product of a complex system rather than individual
volition, though obviously it can be that as well. To make the point
succinctly, individual cooperation *and* competition leads to systemic
competition as a discovery process which leads to the systemic outcome of
coordinating as many plans as possible in a way to facilitate the success of
as many as possible.
Focusing on competition and not* also* cooperation has deeply impoverished
classical liberal social and political analysis. Only now is it beginning
to be addressed through the study of philanthropy. In fact, I would argue
that the reason why Richard Cornuelle’s work did not stimulate much thinking
years ago was due to the myopic emphasis on competition, which led thinkers
to turn a blind eye to the importance of cooperation.
As another example, the Mondragon cooperatives now comprise over 100,000
workers in many businesses and banks, competing in the open market. They
pay well, worker/owners retire with 100% of pay (management gets 80%) and
even today their unemployment is 0%. If a business goes under the workers
are retrained for other jobs. To my knowledge these cooperatives are both
successful and reflect liberal principles, even free market liberal
principles, and while the “left” is interested in them, there has never been
a classical liberal study of them to my knowledge.
A return to a richer conception of human well-being will both encourage work
in neglected areas of analysis, especially civil society, and enable
classical liberals to begin contributing to a desperately needed revival of
liberalism as a strong and vital alternative to conservatism and oligarchy
as principles of American, and human, society.
There is a growing common interest in this project. This vision not only
grows from classical liberalism’s most important insights, it also appeals
across the entire breadth of liberal thought. Two of civil society’s
strongest defenders today are Robert Putnam (*Bowling Alone*) and John C.
Scott (*Seeing Like a State*). Neither is a classical liberal. There is
ample ground here for very fruitful revitalization of a seriously weakened
liberal tradition.
* *
*Conclusion*
Classical liberalism has hit a dead end, abandoned by nearly all its allies,
rendered politically inconsequential, and discredited in the eyes of many by
the behavior of organized business, and irrelevant in the eyes of many
because it cannot address the problems people actually confront except
insofar as they are consumers. This is both a tragedy and an opportunity. The
tragedy is obvious, the opportunity is less so.
By building on traditions far stronger among classical liberals than in the
other two major strands of liberal thought particularly that of emergent
orders and their interrelationships with one another and with the
organizations inside them, this tradition of thought can be reinvigorated. It
does not involve becoming ‘liberals’ in the pejorative sense of the term, it
involves recognizing those liberals share more in common with them than do
classical liberals’ historical allies, and that it might be possible to
rethink the nature of liberalism once this happens.
Since the failure of the Great Society’s most ambitious projects managerial
liberals’ faith in rational control has weakened substantially. Egalitarian
liberals are frozen out of both parties for the most part because they are
critical of our dominant oligarchy. Given the current marginalization of
the Republicans’ strategy which had itself marginalized them, classical
liberals have little to lose in reaching out to other liberals.
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Gus diZerega <gdizerega at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michel
> Sorry for my slow response - I have bitten off more than I can chew, and am
> super busy. I gathered a similar convergence in our approaches from reading
> some of your stuff, and am attaching a paper I've been circulating to some
> of the more open minded classical liberals I know- suggesting why their
> approach has fallen so flat - and what concepts of emergent order might mean
> in the broader framework of liberal political thought. So it's not written
> for the left - but I think you might find it of interest.
>
> I will be putting together something on the Beck/Wilber approach to SD on
> my Beliefnet blog. Not ready yet - but hopefully before too long. I'll
> recommend your stuff agin when I do.
>
> PLEASE consider you or someone competent whom you know submitting a paper
> for our paper call, if that sounds worth while. My piece in the first issue
> gives some kind of context, but ideological conformity is not necessary.
> And/or please encourage folks to submit papers to our journal. I want very
> badly to broaden the conversation to outside Hayek inspired writers.
>
> And that's it for now. I hope you like the paper.
>
> best,
>
> gus
>
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:00 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi Gus,
>>
>> concerning your blog comment, here I am <g>
>>
>> Do feel free to connect via gmail, if you want any public conversation,
>> we have a p2p research mailing list as well,
>>
>> I also invited you to join our ning community,
>>
>> I will of course start checking out the emergent order site,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>> --
>> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
>> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
>> http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
>> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>>
>> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>>
>> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
>> http://www.shiftn.com/
>>
>
>
--
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
--
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
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