Crosscurrents

Entrepreneurship and the Market Process

In his latest book, The Meaning of Market Process: Essays in the Development of Modern Austrian Economics (New York: Routledge, 1992), Israel M. Kirzner continues to work on a research program that he began in the first seven chapters of his Market Theory and the Price System (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1963). During the years between these two books, Kirzner published several other works on the same theme of entrepreneurship and the market process. Foremost among them is the pathbreaking Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Other important works in this research program include Perception, Opportunity, and Profit (University of Chicago, 1979), Discovery and the Capitalist Process (University of Chicago, 1985), and Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice (Basil Blackwell, 1989).

All but one of the essays constituting this most recent book have been published elsewhere. However, it is a positive assistance to those wishing to do their own research in modern Austrian economics to have these essays gathered together in one handy volume. In his original contribution to the volume Kirzner enters into the perennial Austrian debate over the question of equilibrium: does the market process lead the economy toward equilibrium or is the future so radically uncertain as to make the usefulness of even the concept of equilibrium meaningless? Kirzner, following Roger Garrison’s lead, defends a middle ground: uncertainty plus an equilibrating process.

In the remaining sections Kirzner offers the reader his usual subtle and penetrating insights. In section two he devotes several fine history-of-thought pieces to the work of Menger, Mises and Hayek. Section three deals mainly with the problems surrounding knowledge. Finally, in section four, Kirzner tackles some difficult problems of markets and justice. For those who wish to follow up the issues presented by Kirzner, the book also contains an excellent bibliography.

Las Casas Revived

Those who have not read Bartolome de las Casas have a real treat in store for them. Las Casas, a Dominican priest, spent the better part of his adult life defending the Indians of the New World, especially against the ideas of Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a Cordoban theologian. The recent republication of las Casas’s In Defense of the Indians (Northwest Illinois University Press, 1992) should be welcomed by all who care about the universal rights of people regardless of their cultural heritage.

In 1550 las Casas answered Sepulveda’s charges and arguments in his famous response before a group of distinguished theologians at the Council of Valladolid. As Martin E. Marty puts it in his short but valuable Foreword to the Defense, to Sepulveda “the Indians were pagan, savage, apelike, worthy of death and hell.” Sepulveda therefore defended waging all-out war against the Indians. Martin continues, “Las Casas fairly shrieks: ‘The natives are citizens, capable of nobility and never to be killed or enslaved.’ ”

Las Casas’s Defense is perhaps the foremost articulation of universal rights theory set forth in the early modern period and one of the most passionate ever penned. His presentation reminds one of the much later writings of Paine, Garrison, and Spooner. To leave las Casas out of the intellectual history of rights theory would be a terrible discredit to an original mind and to the origins of western political theory.

Those interested may wish to read the Defense along with several other books by and about las Casas. First is las Casas’s own The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), in which he recounts the horrible treatment of the Indians that he witnessed firsthand in the Americas. Second is the mammoth collection edited by Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, Bartolome de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work (Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), in which a dozen las Casas scholars present essays on all aspects of las Casas. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is Lewis Hanke’s brilliant All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Hanke offers the reader a superb history of the background of this important dispute.

Algernon Sidney: Republican or Liberal?

On 7 December 1683, Algernon Sidney—having been convicted of treason in an irregular judicial decision—was beheaded on Tower Hill in London. One observer reported that there were many, already looking upon Sidney as a martyr, “who made such haste after his Execution to get Handkerchiefs dip’t in his blood.” Thus began the historical fame of Sidney, whose name kept company with that of Locke in the pantheon revered by Whig and American Revolutionaries. But where Locke’s star never fell, Sidney has been comparatively neglected since the eighteenth century. Until recently, there had been little modern scholarship on Sidney and no modern edition of Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, the work of political thought responsible for his trial and conviction.

This neglect is being remedied by a revival of interest in the man whose writings provided a justification of rebellion against tyranny as well as the motto of the State of Massachusetts.

(Manus haec inimica tyrannis/einse petit placidam cum libertate quietam. The hand, always an enemy to tyrants, seeks a little peace under liberty.)

Thomas G. West has edited a modern edition of the Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990), while Jonathan Scott has authored an impressive two-volume biography of Sidney. In Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Scott seeks to resolve the historical Sidney from the overlay of Whig propaganda which created Sidney the Martyr. In addition, Alan Houston has reexamined Sidney’s significance for early American political thought in Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

The revival of interest in Sidney comes as yet a further installment in the debate about republican political thought that has been raging in Anglo-American scholarship since the 1970’s when the independent scholarship of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J.G.A. Pocock suggested that there was a republican presence in the presumed-liberal political thought of the American framers. While much effort has gone into refuting the so-called “republican thesis,” many of its critics have mistakenly lumped together the works of Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock to create an anti-liberal straw-man. The refreshing thing about the works of both Scott and Houston is that while decidedly revisionist they offer a more sophisticated than usual treatment of the nuances of republicanism, thereby enhancing our understanding of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century political thought.

Scott’s biography is thoroughly researched and well written. Scott provides an in-depth account of the facts and events of Sidney’s life, including his military, Parliamentary, diplomatic, and revolutionary careers as well as his relationships with various members of both sides of his illustrious family. Scott draws upon Sidney’s published and unpublished writings—including the Court Maxims (only recently discovered and attributed to Sidney by Blair Worden)—to paint a picture of Sidney’s republicanism. Under Scott’s brush, Sidney emerges as more of a “Good Ole Cause” republican than as an Exclusionist Whig. Scott suggests that Sidney would have stood closer to the political and intellectual tradition represented in Europe by French monarchomachs such as Philippe du Plessis-Mornay (a family acquaintance) and in England by John Milton and Henry Vane, Jr. Yet Scott emphasizes, too, Sidney’s determination to be his own man and to speak his own mind on political and moral issues of the day.

Scott elaborates the nature of Sidney’s English republicanism and differentiates it from that drawn by J.G.A. Pocock from his studies of James Harrington. Marchamont Nedham and Sidney drew their Machiavellian principles more from Machiavelli’s Livian Discourses than from The Prince. Furthermore, Scott elucidates the presence of both a Platonic and a skeptical flavor in Sidney’s thought. According to Scott, Sidney divided his world into a Platonic realm of permanence and perfection and a skeptical realm of mutability and variety, and held that the gateway between these worlds was unlocked by “the liberty which God created in us.” Though it would have been preferable for Scott to discuss Sidney’s assertion against Filmer that there was no necessary form of earthly government without the use of the concept of relativism, which runs awkwardly up against the Platonic themes, his work adds another layer to our understanding of the nature of republicanism and its role in seventeenth-century politics.

Houston’s book extends this layer into the eighteenth century and across the Atlantic to the American colonies. His book is primarily a study of Sidney’s political thought which puts forth as Sidney’s major themes liberty and slavery, virtue and corruption, and constitutionalism and revolution. In addition, Houston assesses Sidney’s impact during the American Revolution. Like Scott, Houston concludes that Sidney’s republicanism is not of a Harrington variety, but Houston goes still further to “cast doubt on the widely held view that there existed a distinct and coherent ‘republican’ language of politics in revolutionary America that was distinct from and in tension with Lockean liberalism.” (pp. 224-5)

This perhaps attributes too much autonomy to the political “languages” described by Pocock. Pocock has asserted that there are constructed over time in a political culture particular, coherent languages in which political discourse is most frequently conducted. This argument does not suggest that one political language will necessarily predominate but rather affirms that an author may incorporate elements of several “languages” as his argument demands. The influences of classical republicanism are undoubtedly present in the writings of the American founders, so scholars would better serve the interests of historical knowledge if they sought not to deny the influence of a republican “language” in American political discourse, but instead tried to understand both the sympathies and tensions between republicanism and liberalism, as well as their distinct features.

Houston’s work takes a step in this direction, even if it is guided a little too much by the existing debate. Scott’s biography makes a similar step from the deeper past of the seventeenth century when the seeds of a future liberalism were being sown by Whigs. Scott believes that the story of Sidney’s life and thought “invites us to think about the relationship between the two [republicanism and whiggism]. Sidney reminds us that there was a relationship—or rather several—but that it was in no way straightforward.” (p. 353) Now that Sidney’s Discourses are again readily available, perhaps we will begin to consider our political heritage with increasing discrimination and care. Sidney, neither liberal nor classical republican in the sense that Pocock has invoked, but certainly republican and an important figure of Whig hagiography, may yet have much to teach us about ourselves.

Collections Newly Available

Thanks to several recent publications, scholars will now find it easier to obtain collections of important works from classic authors in the history of classical liberal thought. In addition to the above-mentioned republication of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses, Liberty Press has also republished a collection of John Calhoun’s essays, under the title Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, edited by Ross M. Lence, and a collection of William Graham Sumner’s works, edited by Robert C. Bannister and entitled On Liberty, Society, and Politics (both Indianapolis, 1992). Added to these is an excellent collection of the political writings of Lysander Spooner, entitled The Lysander Spooner Reader (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1992). This collection contains, among others, the classic Spooner essays “Vices Are Not Crimes” and “No Treason.”

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