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Subject Area: Political Theory

Hayek and Shackle - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Winter 1982, vol. 5, No. 4 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Hayek and Shackle

One objection to Hayek's view may be worth addressing at this point. There is much in Hayek's account of the business cycle, as in his more general account of spontaneous social order, to suggest that he believes economic discoordination results always from institutional factors, so that at any rate large-scale disequilibrium would be impossible in a catallaxy of wholly unhampered markets. Against this view, Hayek's brilliant and largely neglected pupil, G.L.S. Shackle, has argued67 that the subjectivity of expectations must infect the market process with an ineradicable tendency to disequilibrium. It must be allowed that, if we accept Hayek's view of equilibrium as a process in which men's plans are coordinated by trial and error over time, there can be nothing apodictically certain about this process: conceivably, under some conditions of uncertainty in which hither to reliable expectations are repeatedly confounded, large scale discoordination could occur in the market process.

Three counter-observations are in order, however. First, nothing in Shackle's argument tells against the point, defensible both on theoretical grounds and as an historical interpretation, that in practice by far the most destabilizing factor in the market process is provided by governmental intervention. Secondly, and relatedly, it is unclear that the kind of disequilibrium of which Shackle speaks—disequilibrium generated by divergency in subjective expectations—could amount to anything resembling the classical business cycle, which is more plausibly accounted for in Austrian and Hayekian terms as a consequence of governmental intervention in the interest rate structure.

And thirdly, it is unclear that Shackle's argument shows the presence in the market process of any tendency to disequilibrium. What we have in the market process is admittedly a ‘kaleidic’ world, in which expectations, tastes, and beliefs constantly and unpredictably mutate. Yet, providing market adaptation is unhampered, what we can expect from the market process is an uninterrupted series of monetary equilibrium tendencies, each of them asymptotic—never quite reaching equilibrium—and each of them soon overtaken by its successor. In this kaleidic world there may well be no apodictic certainty that we shall never face large-scale, endogenous discoordination, but we are nevertheless on safe ground in preferring that the self-regulating tendencies of the process be accorded unhampered freedom and that governmental intervention be recognized as the major disruptive factor in the market process. We are on safe ground, then, in discerning in the tendency to equilibrium in the market process the formation of spontaneous order in the economic realm.

Hayek's Constitution of Liberty: Ethical Basis of the Juridical Framework of Individual Liberty

[67.] G. L. S. Shackle, Epistemics and Economics: a Critique of Economic Doctrines, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.