Socialism’s Problems in Principle

The two sets of obstacles political economists must overcome in order to justify their preferred system are the practical and the principled. The former include all those difficulties attendant on implementing the system. Many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, as they say: there is a long and often painful path between one’s preferred system as it is conceived in theory, constructed though it may be with careful thought and due deliberation, and what happens when that system is applied to the “crooked timber of humanity,” as Immanuel Kant put it, out of which “nothing straight can be made” (1992: 46–7). In Part I, we investigated several of the obstacles facing socialism that together, I argued, bring the feasibility of any socialist-inclined program of centralized political-economic decision making into serious doubt. Yet one might think that practical objections should be explored only after the system itself—in its ideal form, as it were—is articulated and justified. One might believe, that is, that the moral or principled arguments should be brought forth and examined first, perhaps on the grounds that practical issues are relevant only if the principled have already been shown to be compelling. If so, this Part of the book should have come before the previous one.