Politics and Economic Revolution
LINDBLOM, CHARLES E.
Politics and Economic Revolution The Economy, Liberty and the State. By Calvin B. Hoover. Twentieth Century Fund. 445 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Charles E. Lindblom Department of Economics, Yale...
...His explicit and implicit political theory aside, however, many readers will find that this book finally brings home to them the magnitude of a great economic revolution of the 20th century...
...Nor does he make much use of the distinction, important as it has become to political theory, between democracy and liberty...
...When Hoover tackles certain intricate questions of political organization, relying on his own sagacity and his skills as an economist without much assistance from modern political theory, his work is least satisfactory...
...The analyses of the Western economies, especially the American, are the best of the book...
...These may appear to be extremely small points...
...For the Western economies, his particular statement of the question is crucial, for it separates him from those who ask what liberties have disappeared along with the unregulated market without asking what new liberties have been gained...
...But I suggest that they reflect a disposition to treat the survival of liberty as though it were a relatively simple question of volition (of political leaders, the state or the party), and an inconclusiveness in his diagnosis of the strategically essential elements of democracy on which liberties hang indirectly and through which institutional economic change threatens liberty only indirectly...
...in some passages he goes far toward reifying the state...
...It also draws on the reports of a group of foreign economists who replied to 15 questions he addressed to each of them on changes in the roles of com petition and the state in their respective economies...
...Reviewed by Charles E. Lindblom Department of Economics, Yale University AFFIRMING THE THESIS that the difference between capitalist and socialist economy is less significant for our values than the difference between despotism and democracy, Calvin B. Hoover undertakes to com pare the economies of the Soviet bloc with those of the West...
...His story of the suppression of liberties in the Soviet bloc is not surprising, but it is noteworthy for his patience in searching for some significant elements of popular control in the people's democracies, long after many of his readers will have concluded that the search is futile, as indeed he finally agrees it to be...
...Although I would dissent on a few points, his characterization of institutional changes in the American economy is shrewd, judicious and well-informed...
...The problem," writes Hoover, "is the extent to which . . . growth of state power has diminished liberties formerly protected by capitalistic institutions and the extent to which this has been offset by the enlargement of other liberties...
...Whether or not one agrees with his conclusion that growth of state power in Western-style economies has not so far diminished liberty—a conclusion very persuasively argued—one will find Hoover's preoccupation with the facts of institutional change, rather than with highly subjective and scattered observations on liberty, refreshingly different from an older polemical tradition of writers like Hayek, Ropke, Mannheim, the "Chicago School" of economists and the doctrinaire Socialists...
...Government missions abroad...
...He treats the state as a monolith, for example, rather than a complex, internally divided structure...
...If one is willing to come down to earth, it turns out that a great deal about economy, liberty and the state can be said convincingly, and removed in large part from conjecture...
...largely, I think, be cause the scope for democracy and liberty when the power of the state grows is an open question in a way in which it is not in the East European economies...
...He does not trouble himself to ask whether they square with the doctrines of this or that "ism," but asks instead what scope they afford for freedom now and in the imaginable future...
...and he has meticulously inquired about the consequences of change for freedom, without recourse to formulas that try to dispose of the implications of market and state for freedom at a foolishly high level of abstraction...
...The volume is a "synthesis of many years and many books," a product of Hoover's previous studies of alter native economic systems, of his residence in Moscow and Berlin, of his repeated visits to the USSR, and of his participation in various U.S...
Vol. 42 • July 1959 • No. 28
