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6 - The Logical Structure of the Economic World – the rationalist economics of Otto Neurath

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2009

Keith Tribe
Affiliation:
Keele University
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Summary

I agree with your view that the previous form of free economy … will not return, or if it does then heavily modified by financial or exchange considerations – not for any other. I will not shed a tear for if it should so turn out. But I judge the matter in a manner similar to Eulenburg … and regard plans for a ‘planned economy’ as dilettantish, objectively as absolutely irresponsible recklessness of a kind that can discredit ‘socialism’ for a hundred years, and which will draw everything that might be realised now into the depths of crass reaction. That is what I unfortunately see coming, and here lies the difference between us. I fear that you contribute to the increase of this danger, which you massively underestimate.

The World War of 1914–18 brought to a definite end the ‘long’ nineteenth century and inaugurated the age of modernity. Many who recognised this also assumed that nineteenth-century capitalism would be replaced by a new form of twentieth-century, planned economy; that the correlate of the modern world was an organised economy in which rational deliberation would replace profit and the market as the mechanism for the allocation of resources. The Russian Revolution was but the most advanced form of this development; radicals and socialists everywhere looked forward eagerly to the new world that was opening up, a world of social, political, and economic change in which the old constellation offerees no longer prevailed.

Type
Chapter
Information
Strategies of Economic Order
German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950
, pp. 140 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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