Markets & Society
I was delighted to see an email in my inbox last week announcing the launch of a new academic journal, Markets & Society.
The journal, published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, is focused on promoting interdisciplinary research grounded in mainline political economy. Mainline political economy is an approach to studying social systems that follows in the tradition of Adam Smith.
It has three core tenets:
There are limits to the benevolence that individuals can rely on and therefore they face cognitive and epistemic limits as they negotiate the social world.
Formal and informal institutions guide and direct human activity.
Social cooperation is possible without central direction.
Scholars who embrace mainline political economy believe that “agents possessing both the capacities and the failings of the typical human being can work together to achieve individual and collective goals by relying on the emergent and human-devised rules of conduct.”1
Much has been written about how the approach of influential social scientists operating in the mainline tradition, including Nobel Laureates Friedrich Hayek and Elinor Ostrom, overlaps significantly with and complements the approaches of modern systems and complexity scientists.2 3 4 For this reason, I think it’s important for systems theorists studying the social realm to pay close attention to work in this field.
So far, I’m enjoying how the papers included in the journal’s first issue strike a balance between offering a robust defense of classical liberalism and challenging modern classical liberals to question their assumptions, seek opposing viewpoints, and pursue ambitious and innovative research agendas.
You can download the entire first issue of Markets & Society, or just individual papers, for free at this link.
Boettke, P. J., Haeffele-Balch, S., & Storr, V. (2016, September 28). Mainline Economics | Mercatus Center. https://www.mercatus.org/hayekprogram/research/books/mainline-economics
Lewis, P. A. (2017). The Ostroms and Hayek as Theorists of Complex Adaptive Systems: Commonality and Complementarity (SSRN Scholarly Paper 2940972). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2940972
Oliva, G. (2015). The Road to Servomechanisms: The Influence of Cybernetics on Hayek from the Sensory Order to the Social Order (SSRN Scholarly Paper 2670064). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2670064
Lewis, P. A. (2015). Systems, Structural Properties, and Levels of Organisation: The Influence of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy on the Work of F.A. Hayek. (SSRN Scholarly Paper 2609349). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2609349