Great quote. I like your comment. Thanks
for drawing my attention to Hodgson’s (for me new) blog, and his
forthcoming book, which appears to focus on a topic that I find myself
rather preoccupied with.
At a time when I open up to the ideas of the left, I discover that
the left has spectacularly betrayed its great concerns and its clientèle
in the past 30 years (and, like the pope, borrowed green ideology to
lend religious oomph to its various postures). Why did this happen?
I feel like I’ve come too late to the party — the sensible ideas of
the left, like demand management and opposition to neo-liberalism and
their chief concern for the working population, are no longer
fashionable with them. It strikes me as vital that the left begin to
turn a critical eye to their own surprising vicissitude.
Also, I used to be a great admirer of Hayek; however, over the past
years, I have become disillusioned with him — to the point where I
almost look at Hayek as a charlatan. It is interesting how acceptance of
only a few key assumptions — for instance that a good society must be a
spontaneous order and conscious interference in that order must be
mostly detrimental — can blind a person to many important insights of
differing implications and make her inclined to take dubitable
propositions for deep insights by virtue of their fitting into an
expected pattern of explanations.
