Abstract
This paper compares and contrasts the hermeneutic turn advocated by Don Lavoie in his 1985 essay on “The Interpretive Dimension of Economics” with the ontological turn that was gathering momentum amongst other groups of heterodox economists at about the same time. It is argued that an explicit focus on ontological issues can complement and support the ‘interpretive turn’, most notably by helping to show that the charge of nihilism that is sometimes levelled against Lavoie and his followers is unwarranted. The argument is illustrated by a case study of one of the inspirations of, and contributors to, Lavoie’s project, namely Ludwig Lachmann.
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Notes
As one commentator wrote of economic methodology prior to the 1990s, ‘A Popperian dominance, a kind of Popperian mainstream in economic methodology has prevailed (Mäki 1993: 5).
On this view, science is a spontaneous order generated by the rivalrous activities of scientists who, subject only to the tacit norms of civilized debate and conversation, compete for grants, appointments to prominent positions, and publications in prestigious journals (2011). For more on this, see Lavoie (1985: 76–87, 247–65).
Lavoie was a student at New York University when Lachmann began visiting the Department of Economics there in the late 1970s, and came directly under his influence at that time (see, for example, High 2006: 11–12). Lavoie subsequently chose to explore hermeneutics in his contribution to the Kirzner volume honouring Lachmann (Lavoie 1986), and edited collections both of Lachmann’s essays (Lavoie ed. 1994), and also of essays on hermeneutics (Lavoie ed. 1990). For an insightful comparison of Lavoie and Lachmann’s approaches to hermeneutics, see Prychitko (1994).
Lavoie expresses the essence of this point in his own account of the coordinative powers of the market, when he remarks that the rationality of the market process is ‘necessarily a social product … [t]hrough the interaction of intelligent beings in a social context, the society as a whole attains a kind of “intelligence” that is far greater than the sum of its parts’ ([1986] 1995: 125).
Arguably, the powers of human agency by which Lachmann sets such store are emergent properties of the structured arrangement of neurons that constitutes the human brain, for it is only when those neurons are organised into the structures characteristic of the brain that agentic phenomena—such as the capacity to formulate plans and develop expectations, and the ability to act in a purposeful, creative and imaginative fashion—arise (Hodgson 2000: 57–70; Lewis 2010).
For a similar distinction, Rizzo (1990: 14–15).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Emily Chamlee-Wright, Jochen Runde and Virgil Storr for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Lewis, P. Far from a nihilistic crowd: The theoretical contribution of radical subjectivist Austrian economics. Rev Austrian Econ 24, 185–198 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-011-0143-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-011-0143-7