Introduction
Richard Cornuelle recognized that community falls into a blind spot between market and state. His work tries to understand and rally an independent “third sector” capable of addressing social ills and shows that charitable and service organizations share some of the virtues of enterprises in their ability to put innovative ideas into action.
Robert Garnett shows that, despite these efforts, Cornuelle remained wedded to a “separate spheres” approach, distinguishing
the commercial sector and the “independent sector,” the latter defined as a pluralistic array of noncommercial institutions. … Cornuelle’s rendering of these two sectors is careful and nuanced. Yet he posits a distinct human propensity – the desire for profit or the desire to serve others – as the driving force of each sector. … his dual-system theory struggled to find a way beyond a principal pillar of the Progressive edifice, namely the narrow view of commerce as an amoral engine securing social cooperation by wholly impersonal means (wherein tender sentiments of sympathy, solidarity, and benevolence play no necessary role). … So even as Cornuelle extolled the scope and virtues of the independent sector, the force of his argument in the 1965 book was undercut by his unwitting retention of a narrowly conceived economy.
(2011, 3; emphasis in original)
In this paper I want to extend the discussion of what it means to study community – the kinds of organization and activity in Cornuelle’s “third sector” – when we drop the assumption that we inhabit a “modern” society split between blindly amoral commerce on the one hand, and charity and love on the other. What we really inhabit, I contend, is a single, mixed, underdetermined, and often confusing world in which people and institutions attempt to structure an uncertain future in overlapping and sometimes contradictory ways. They may do that in modes we label “commerce” or “family” or “charity,” but those are cleanly separable neither in their effects nor in their motives.
A corollary of lifting the aprioristic assumption of a modern society with institutionally separate spheres is that we can no longer assign moral values to entire sectors. A basic move in modernist1 thought has been to try to divide society into spheres with distinct motivations (or propensities) and to let the alleged motivation of each sphere define its moral character. Instead, I propose to start with observable networks of inter-relation and obligation, without assuming ethical essences.
To deepen this distinction, I pull apart two different accounts of how community is made, a “holist” account, in which a large, discrete “culture” shapes all its members, and a more bottom-up “intersubjective” account, in which people hash out meanings for themselves. In the next section I expand on the “holist” understanding of community, bringing in Hayek to make the stakes clear. After that, I develop the alternative “intersubjective” account of community-making, and then work out some of its implications.
This paper emphasizes knowledge. My guiding question, introduced in the next section, is how social individuals understand each other, whether as customers or suppliers, borrowers or lenders, colleagues, co-religionists, kin, neighbors.
How is community possible?
David Hume ([1748] 2006) and Immanuel Kant ([1783] 1949) raised a fundamental critique of the conditions under which we can claim that our ideas correspond to things in the world. The critique applied as much to social as to scientific knowledge: How do we understand each other? How do individuals within any society interpret their social environment? This is a question not just about the knowledge of social scientists but, more profoundly, about how any and every human being copes socially: How are we able to understand our social surroundings (including our economic milieu) well enough to function properly in them? What is the relationship between the social world outside our heads and our internal understandings of that world?
On the whole, British political economy looked for psychological propensities (e.g., Smith [1759] 1976, [1776] 1979) and institutions (chiefly markets) that minimized the interpretive problem individuals faced. Instead of having to figure out too much, we could rely on certain standards and patterns of behavior in the people we had immediate dealings with, and markets would fill in the rest, releasing us from having to perceive or understand people and material conditions at a distance. While Smith valued friendship, remember also his jaundiced view of associations of workers or capitalists in The Wealth of Nations, and his lack of interest in religious institutions: his Stoic social ontology did not leave a problem for community to solve.2
It was left to Romantic3 thinkers and their descendants to further develop theories of community. They tried to solve the Hume–Kant problem differently. If society is already in our minds, then we avoid the problem of the correspondence of external phenomena to our internal ideas about them.4 How might society already be in our minds? Either it made our minds, or our minds made it. The first argument stresses the hegemony of a larger cultural unit that people are born into. The second argument stresses the active engagement of people in making lives together and hashing out meanings among themselves: they know their society because they have made it. It is vital to my argument to distinguish the two resulting conceptions of community and knowledge, which I will shorthand “holist” and “intersubjective.”
The holist conception assumes a discrete cultural whole into which people are born and raised as social human beings, which provides their basic categories of thought. It emphasizes common lore, shared religion, and standard processes of making people into fully acculturated members of a given society. This is a foundational idea in cultural anthropology: if you live among the X people long enough, learning their language and joining their rituals, you gain insight into the common X culture, a structure of meanings and understandings that make their lives together thinkable, possible. Culture is unitary, discrete, and bounded (from other cultures). While the transmission of X culture may involve priests and teachers, they are the servants of the culture rather than its masters. In the stronger versions of this concept of culture/community, particularly the stereotype of “traditional society” that served as a foil for Enlightenment thinkers and modernization theorists, the common culture not only facilitates communication and knowledge, but actually does much of people’s thinking for them.
Hayek5 relies on this conception of culture when he writes of “tradition” as a set of understandings and practices that shape thought and understanding:
What we call mind is not something that the individual is born with … but something that his genetic equipment … helps him to acquire, as he grows up, from his family and adult fellows by absorbing the results of a tradition that is not genetically transmitted. Mind in this sense consists less of testable knowledge about the world, less in interpretations of man’s surroundings, more in the capacity to restrain instincts – a capacity which cannot be tested by individual reason since its effects are on the group. … It may well be asked whether an individual who did not have the opportunity to tap such a cultural tradition could be said even to have a mind.
(1991, 22–23)
In Hayek’s account, world history has been the scene of competition among multiple cultural/moral traditions. Each tradition is a sort of social operating system, preceding and shaping the individuals brought up in it. The successful traditions secure wealth and power for their societies, who out-compete inferior systems. He borrows Herder’s notion of separate cultural universes, but not Herder’s cultural relativism. In Hayek’s story, “tradition” has been pluralized and given an evolutionary dynamic: laissez-faire capitalism is the winner, while socialism is revealed as dangerous atavism cloaked in reason, a regression to the most primitive of traditions which more advanced traditions have overcome.
But even those advanced traditions have only contained collectivism, not extirpated it:
Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once.
(Hayek 1991, 18; emphasis in original)
Has any literary modernist ever written with more plangency about our divided selves? Not only do we inhabit distinct spheres, but the spirit of each threatens to annihilate the other! In Hayek’s world there are households, little islands of the truly primitive, there is the private sector, humming away on the basis of inherited principles it does not fully understand, and there is government. That’s it.6
Richard Cornuelle saw the thinness of this imagination. But he kept the underlying modernity, the distinction between commerce and community, postulating a robust human propensity to “serve” that would distinguish community both from the cold amorality of commerce and from the dangerous atavism of the Hayekian micro-cosmos. He is at pains to describe a “third sector” peopled by sensible, rock-ribbed American individualists (Cornuelle 1965, 1983). But, trapped by the dualism of asocial commerce versus community, he is unable to develop a clear account of the knowledge that this third sector produces, one that would address the critiques that Hayek and Friedman raised about philanthropy (Garnett 2010). Much of his recommendation boils down to a call for the independent sector to become more independent and self-confident, coupled with a recurrent complaint that government, in attempting to address social problems itself, has sapped private initiative.
Cornuelle is most persuasive when he points out that the broad philanthropic sector shares some of the characteristics that commend free enterprise. It gives individuals – including individuals with limited means – the capacity to act directly in the world. It encourages experimentation. It is large, diverse, and unmanaged.7 Note that none of these insights depend on the idea that the philanthropic sector is imbued with a different spirit than the business world. If anything, they point in the opposite direction.
To recapitulate my argument: I have distinguished two broad responses to the Hume–Kant problem of social knowledge, those of British political economy and those of the Romantic theories of community. I have further pulled the Romantic theories apart into two traditions, holism, described above, and intersubjectivism, elaborated below. The larger argument is that we should favor the intersubjectivists if we want to build on Cornuelle’s work, not least because they can dispense with the modernist assumptions just described.
Intersubjective accounts
For the ground-level alternative to the holist approach to community, think about someone you know well. You will never have direct access to their mind, nor they yours. But you know from experience that prolonged interaction can generate workable and even subtle shared understandings.
What I am calling the intersubjective concept of community and knowledge starts with two propositions about interpretation. The first is what Isaiah Berlin calls “expressionism” in his discussion of Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder:
Expressionism: The doctrine that human activity in general, and art in particular, express the entire personality of the individual or the group, and are intelligible only to the degree to which they do so. Still more specifically, expressionism claims that all the works of men are above all voices speaking, are not objects detached from their makers, are part of a living process of communication between persons and not independently existing entities.
(2000, 176)
This concept covers much more than acts of speaking and writing. It says that all activity that brings us into contact with other people is expressive: the way we hold our bodies, our dress, our gestures, our acts of care or violence, the work that we do with others. It also points to what people produce – goods, services, art – as interpretable expression.
The second, related proposition is that to be socially human is to be an interpreter of these expressive acts. Interpretation, here, is not a simple matter of turning codes into clear signals. The concept of interpretation is instead hermeneutic, which is to say that we understand expressions not by decoding them into something else, but by working out their relationships to other expressions. Precisely because there is never an authoritative “clear” message that is encoded, but instead a mere circulation of signs, interpretation may be contested and uneven. We have all had the experience of being misunderstood, of discovering that we have transmitted a message we did not intend. Sharing a “culture” is not enough to prevent this. In other words, to be shaped by culture is not the same thing as to be determined by it or have it do your thinking for you.
So, in the intersubjective conception, to be a social human being is to be a maker and interpreter of meanings. To be a social human is to (try to) understand and (hope to) be understood. These meanings are not just words, but also movement, dress, the exchange of food, acts of care, commercial transactions. The intersubjective approach is embodied, as we might say in contemporary academic language, because it speaks to all the ways that our common lives as physical beings influence each other through interpretation. Further, in a robustly intersubjective social ontology, people are not just idly communicating but building communities of interpretation through their efforts to engage with others and develop ties.
Here is the critical argument: precisely to the degree that you emphasize people’s embodied and long-accustomed closeness to each other, the ways they get used to each other, learn to read each other, share parts of the physical world, provide for (or thwart) each other’s needs and desires – precisely as you emphasize this, you move away from a holist, top-down notion of culture. The simplest way to distinguish the holist and intersubjective versions is to ask whether people are substitutable in roles. In the most basic version of holism, one acculturated member of society X is as good as another, and once members of it are culturally shaped (learning the language, undergoing coming-of-age rituals and so forth), little further maintenance is required because culture does the work of interpretation. In the basic intersubjective version, by contrast, ties are personal and take ongoing work by the individuals involved: you cannot switch people in and out of roles. If I am hit by a bus a colleague could take over my class the next day, but not my family relationships.
A key logical distinction: if you start with the holist account of community, it is easy enough to fit intersubjectivity into that account as a mechanism by which the whole reproduces itself, or reveals itself. Romantics like Hamann and Herder saw a fundamental reality like God or the nation manifesting itself through a thousand daily details of food, poetry, gesture, and speech: the intersubjective was merely a channel for the manifestation of the whole. More materialist social scientists (Giddens 1979; Bhaskar 1979; Geertz 1973) have explained the transmission and stability of large cultural wholes as the result of the work of individual meaning-makers who, in the pursuit of their individual projects, unwittingly reproduce the larger system. An intersubjective account of community is not necessarily inimical to a holist account. But if we give up the impulse to fit all actions into structural reproduction, then we can see that the intersubjective account does not logically imply holism. The intersubjective conception can point instead toward a rhizomorphic (Deleuze 2013) social organization of extended root systems, shaggy networks, and possibly significant patterns of exclusion even among people who live close together.
To put it another way, I do not deny the existence of languages, religions, regional cuisines, systems of etiquette, or other cultural phenomena that exist on much larger scales than personal networks. What I am questioning is the central explanatory role that such systems/structures have in so much social analysis. I contest the reduction of ground-level intersubjectivity, in many holist accounts, to a mere feature or expression of large systems or structures. Such reduction is clear even today in the anthropological literature on intersubjectivity (Jackson 1998), which, for all its nuance, still sees the intersubjective as pointing to the whole – as symbolizing it, manifesting it, helping people think about it. In a similar way, Austrian intersubjective theorists Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright retain the idea of “culture” as a social operating system working at the national level and influencing economic outcomes as a bounded and discrete national whole. Their hermeneutic sophistication shows up in their effort to distinguish their approach from crude theories of culture by arguing that each national culture is a complex and dynamic thing, not a set of fixed inherited values. But the hermeneutics are still subsidiary, in social-ontological terms, to the holist theory of culture. (Chamlee-Wright and Lavoie 2000, 65).8
Entangled lives
How important are these shaggy networks, these rhizomorphs of personal connection that the field of the intersubjective brings to view? There is no killer argument here: committed modernists are confident that they can explain this meso level either from the bottom up (as the result of individual maximization) or from the top down (as a consequence of structure). I can only hope to persuade by reference to observation and experience, highlighting the elements of social life that are brought into view when we take the intersubjective as a ground for analysis. In addition, it may be worth pointing out that one reason the world appears modernist is that data has been built that way: the concept of measurable “population,” for example, rests on the command to the census-taker that people be assigned uniquely to bounded “households,” rather than larger kin networks, so that the work of making family units in and through the practices of intersubjective relations across familial units disappears from view (Danby 2012). I use the metaphor “entangled” for two purposes: first, as an opposite of “separate,” of the modernist assumption of separate spheres; second, as a way of signposting a social ontology in which people and institutions invest significant effort building and maintaining specific ties to specific other people and institutions.
Entangled individuals
We inhabit multiple social frameworks at the same time. We live in large kin structures, networks of friends and colleagues, firms and organizations, religious communities, and other more diffuse nets of affiliation, at the same time and in the same place. We produce care services and goods like family dinners. Even in “business,” we develop social ties within firms as well as to customers and suppliers (Granovetter 1985). Graduates of US business programs are counseled to network directly and electronically, to develop and cultivate ties. Aside from these observable facts, I appeal to the reader’s internal experience of love, responsibility, even guilt and individual conflict. It may be possible to set up our lives so that we owe nothing to anybody. But most of us go to great lengths to establish ties of long-term, open-ended responsibility, including the production of new socialized human beings. It is a rebuke to economics, orthodox or heterodox, that it has so much to say about idle pleasure-seeking but lacks a theory of responsibility.9
Entangled firms
There is a broad classical tradition, going back to Adam Smith and notably including Allyn Young (1928), which emphasizes relations of complementarity between enterprises, rather than theorizing units as exclusively competitive. In Brian Loasby’s (1976, 1998, 1999) work, firms have internal organizations that take into account the ongoing uncertainty of their business, and they also enter into a variety of formal and informal relations and understandings with other businesses. Inter-firm relations are not limited to market transactions and contracts; substantial complementarity exists between businesses (1998; see also Granovetter 1985). Loasby vastly expands the more traditional Austrian emphasis on market signals, and by his approach to the day-to-day and year-to-year work of a firm he also begins to challenge the idea that firms themselves are neatly bounded or independent entities. The more one moves in the direction of networks or sets of relations, whether between households, between firms, or between households and firms, the less free-standing the nodes of that network become. This does not imply that businesses are solidaristic: the same kinds of tensions, imbalances of power, and betrayals that occur in families happen between firms. But we end up with a richer and more consequential range of business interconnection than either the neoclassical imagination of firms as arms-length market transactors, or more structural imaginations in which firms form part of a single capitalist bloc. Relatedly, there is a large and fascinating literature on family firms (e.g. Oxfeld 1993; White 1994; Yanagisako 2002) that suggests that kin ties are routinely useful for providing finance and recruiting labor, particularly for small businesses.
As I have argued elsewhere (Danby 2004a) this interconnection and complementarity comes into much clearer view if we start with the post-Keynesian insight that in contemporary economies most consequential transactions are forward, not spot, and that, as a result, both individuals and firms live enmeshed in obligations to others. This fact does not tell us what the institutional or ethical character of these meshes of obligation are, but it opens up an object of investigation that is obscured if we assume that such an economy can be modeled as though it used only spot transactions, or that some automatic level of state or cultural machinery takes care of undergirding these long-term ties between economic units. I start with Shacklean priors that the future is radically underdetermined, and that it is made through the interactions of individual efforts to plan and structure it – not all of which, of course, succeed. But I keep the point, emphasized by some critical realists (Lawson 2003, 2012), that people pull off a great many of their plans: planning matters. Recognizing that the future is uncertain, people typically make efforts to build robustness into their plans – one reason to diversify and enlarge our social networks.
Entangled knowledge
Carol Gilligan (1982) reinterpreted the result, in studies of ethical reasoning among children, that girls resisted applying universal principles to ethical dilemmas, and instead inquired about the particular social relationships in which ethical problems arose. Gilligan argued that rather than showing a failure to rise to abstract reasoning, this approach demonstrated alternative and arguably more sophisticated approaches to social reality. Instead of abstracting the problem away from specific social ties, she showed that female respondents typically took into account the effect that different possible resolutions of a dilemma would have on those social ties. Theirs was a situated, socially curious, and socially minded response. Gilligan’s results support an intersubjective social ontology: it is not so much that the female respondents were peculiar or essentially feminine (an interpretation Gilligan herself has resisted) as that they were simply more aware of the social reality around them (Larrabee 1992).
What the literature on care has illuminated is the extensive, ongoing labor of building social connections: those connections do not spring into existence on their own or maintain themselves without work; they are not simply given to us by tradition (or by the state or any variety of social structure, for that matter).10 And this labor, as I have argued elsewhere (Danby 2004b), is remarkably consistent across social realms: we find it in business, in government agencies, in volunteer organizations, among friends, in kin systems, in households. Because this labor is often self-concealing, we may fall into the error of thinking that it is “natural” or a mere reflex of a larger structure or tradition. Networks have to be consciously built and maintained. Culture or tradition or the state may give you tools and categories, and may thwart or enable certain kinds of connection, but they do not do the work of making them.
Holist accounts tend to portray the culture or tradition as the unit that does the important thinking and coordinating. This is evident in nineteenth-century Romanticism, in Levi-Straussian structural anthropology, and in Hayek’s account of tradition in Fatal Conceit.11 Consider Hayek’s “Most knowledge – and I confess it took me some time to recognise this – is obtained not from immediate experience or observation, but in the continuous process of sifting a learnt tradition” (1991, 75). This extraordinary statement may summarize Hayek’s own intellectual practice. But in his determination to drive away the evil spirit of planning, Hayek has also tossed out the functions of attention, inquiry, discovery, and reflection that accompany entrepreneurial action – functions that also accompany independent sector action in Cornuelle’s account.
Entangled ethics
Neither business, nor community, nor family, nor any other category, is inherently virtuous or vicious. Modernist arguments tend to assign moral values to entire sectors: for example, Romantic anticapitalism disdains all business as selfish and crude and celebrates community as loving and whole. One can invert these values to make the opposite argument. There is an enduring (and endearing) Whiggishness in Cornuelle that praises both and hopes that with the right allocation of tasks we will achieve the best of both worlds in a prosperous and caring society. (For examples, see 1965, 106–124, 1983, 173–189.) His is a world with very little active evil. I do not want to dismiss the ethical, but to argue, on the contrary, that the work of ethical analysis has barely begun.
It is an obvious and unavoidable consequence of the intersubjective approach that we will find uneven patterns of connection, including outright exclusion. Note that this insight disappears if we see the intersubjective as mere training, as nothing but our point of access to a larger “culture” or tradition that all its members share alike. (This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the reactionary use of the concept “culture,” which turns it into a warm sea in which all can bathe, rather than a system of distinction, exclusion, and power.) It is for this reason that feminist philosophers like Claudia Card (1990) and Sara Ruddick (1995) have resisted the idea of inflating “care” into a general ethic, arguing that whatever the benefits of care, it also lends itself to exclusion and domination. Close, even loving, familial ties can be power-laden and exploitative; feudalism functioned through personal ties and individual relationships. Organized crime works along personal and often familial connections. It is futile to expect any concept of “community” to provide the moral high ground, the ethical purity, the wholeness and love that we imagine we have lost in the modern world. The trope of recovering something lost is powerful, and recurs in Cornuelle’s work, but it leads us into simplistic categorizations.
Conclusions
I have argued for a robustly ground-level, intersubjective, interpretive social ontology and sought to distinguish it both from high modernity (pure Gesellschaft, an atomistic society) and from the holist, traditionalist conceptions of “culture” as a single, bounded system that strongly shapes individual members. Dropping the modernist assumptions of holism and drawing on the feminist, Austrian, and post-Keynesian insights about the close concatenation of people and firms, we are led to an unevenly networked world. This is an alternative account of how community is made, and how knowledge functions within it.
The anthropologist James Ferguson writes (1999, 207) that “the ethnographic project of ‘cross-cultural’ interpretation has too often assumed coherent and semiotically pure communities, systems of shared meanings within which signification and interpretation are unequivocal and unproblematic.” Mulling over the confusing scene in a Lusaka bar, he asks,
But what happens if we replace the archetypal image of the anthropologist dropped into the middle of a culturally homogeneous village community with that of a crowded, noisy city street scene, where different languages, different cultures, diverse social microworlds, and discordant frames of meaning are all thrown together in the normal course of things? Here there is much to be understood, but none of the participants in the scene can claim to understand it all or even to take it all in. Everyone is a little confused (some more than others, to be sure), and everyone finds some things that seem clear and others that are unintelligible or only partially intelligible …
Neat lines between the locals who know what’s going on and the foreigner who doesn’t proved hard to maintain on the Copperbelt, where everyone seemed to be coming or going, where nearly everyone spoke of their home as some place other than where they lived, where languages and cultures ran together in a cryptic hodgepodge to which no one seemed to hold any definitive interpretive key. Miscommunication and partial communication were not simply temporary obstacles in the methodological process of the ethnographer but central features of the “authentic” cultural experience.
(1999, 207–208)
Could this be what the world is like? Is it possible that the world has never been tidy or transparent, and that we have been over-impressed by twentieth-century efforts to make it appear tidier than it is (Danby 2012)? A robust intersubjectivity that is not yoked to the assumption of cultural homogeneity opens up a wider sphere of action and difficulty. Interpretation is necessary; interpretation is difficult. People may have reasons “not to establish a bond of communication but to rupture it” (Ferguson 1999, 210); there may be a politics to unintelligibility and to refusals to interpret.
But if we cannot depend on one or another unified “culture” to make us happy, whole, or prosperous, we also open much greater scope to individual action, and action by smaller groups. Once we drop the modernist assumption that individuals have limited ability to build their own worlds, and bring into view extensive individual efforts to craft their social surroundings, philanthropy (like entrepreneurship) becomes less odd: like many of our actions, it is an effort to shape our surroundings with uncertain results.
Cornuelle’s work brought into view a large, shaggy, and diverse “independent sector,” not always intelligible to others or even to itself, and indeed strengthened by the fact of its internal diversity: part of his lament about the governmentalization of this sector is that a wide range of different projects are brought under a single state logic and thus pulled out of their own quirky circuits of knowledge and action. These are insights upon which we can continue to draw, even if we drop the modernist frame.
Notes
1 Modernism is essentially the idea that human history follows a path from cozy, primitive “tradition” to dynamic, alienated “modernity.” I present a more extended description of modernist thought in Danby (2009). It should be emphasized that the underlying modernist template can generate a wide range of stories. Thus Friedrich Hayek, Fredric Jameson, Anthony Giddens, and Naomi Klein are all modernists in that they accept that this is the fundamental story of human history, although they assign different ethical values to the sphere of commerce.
2 See Fitzgibbons (1995). You can see the Stoic ethic of accepting an uncaring universe, and not unduly troubling each other, as a criticism-in-advance of Romanticism. There is a fascinating further discussion of this difference in John Stuart Mill’s 1840 essay on Coleridge (1950), in which he distinguishes the kinds of phenomena (in particular, nationalism) on which a thinker like Coleridge has an advantage over political economists.
3 By which I mean the tradition of Goethe, Hamann, Herder, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Romanticism for our purposes is essentially the doctrine that accepts the modernist story that history moves from traditional to modern, but laments it (Berlin 2001).
4 Pribram (1983, 209). See also Winch (2009) and Waterman (2003) for discussions of Romantic political economy.
5 For more on Hayek’s relation to the Romantic School see Caldwell (Bruce Caldwell 2004) and Hayek’s own discussion of Herder (Hayek 1991). See also (Mirowski 2002, 234–241).
6 Hayek’s account is thus an ingenious modification of the standard modernist story that depicts human history moving from close traditional community (Gemeinschaft) to distanced modernity (Gesellschaft). He retains the idea that the inevitable loser in human history is sentimental Gemeinschaft (the “micro-cosmos”). But in his account, the winner is another tradition of similar antiquity, that of commerce and enterprise.
7 See (Cornuelle 1965, 31–33, 96–101; 1983, 21–32) on the creativity, adaptability, and close-to-the-ground nature of the independent sector, all keys to his overall argument for its superiority to government.
8 For example, “The issue in economic comparative advantage is not which country, say Mexico or the US, is better in more things, but which of each culture’s strengths are those most suitable for it to focus on” (Chamlee-Wright and Lavoie 2000, 65). The entire chapter is written as though it were reasonable to treat national cultures as discrete wholes.
9 Nel Noddings (2003) is one of the most persuasive theorists of the kind of “care” that is not generalizable to an abstract principle but is only meaningful when it is personalized and specific. Important work has been done in feminist scholarship in care (Irene van Staveren 2001). The key point in relations of responsibility and care is that the well-being of specific other people matters: this is larger than the individual, but much smaller than “society” or any large-scale structural constraint (Danby 2004b).
10 This meso approach to care provides a robust, Austrian-friendly, critique of macro-scale policy. Again, see Nel Noddings (2003), who is particularly eloquent on the point that “care” for an individual is quite a different thing from “care” for any large abstraction.
11 One could make the same criticism of “Volume-1 Marxism”: your position in the class structure tells you what to do.
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