SEARCH Foundation
Media Alert
Veteran Socialist takes on neo-liberalism &
climate change sceptics
Launch of Eric Aarons' book, Market versus Nature : The
Social Philosophy of Friedrich Hayek. (Australian Scholarly
Publishing)
by Age journalist, Kenneth Davidson
6 for 6.30pm Fri May 2, 2008
New International Bookshop, Trades Hall, Melbourne
Veteran Australian socialist Eric Aarons takes on neo-liberalism and climate change
sceptics in his latest book Market Versus Nature: The Social Philosophy of Friedrich
Hayek (Australian Scholarly Publishing).
Now in his 90th year, the former joint national secretary of the Communist Party of
Australia, argues that to meet the global warming crisis we need to radically change
our economic ideas.
"Free markets promise endless economic expansion that will cost the earth - literally,"
he says.
"The short-term price of fossil fuel is cheap, according to the market, but we will pay
an incalculable price in the long term. This book challenges the ideas of high priest of
free market theory, Friedrich Hayek, whose ideas have held sway with governments
around the world for decades."
Hayek (1899 -1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher
renowned for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against
socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-twentieth century. He shared the Nobel
Prize in Economics in 1974 and also received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1991. He is considered to be one of the major forces of change from the dominant
interventionist and Keynesian policies of the middle part of the twentieth century to
the more market-friendly, less state-control and neo-liberal policies after the 1980s.
Aarons takes as his starting point the path-breaking report on global warming by Sir
Nicholas Stern which argues that "climate change is the greatest market failure the
world has ever seen". He then tackles Hayek whose obsession with the virtues of
capitalist pricing, he says, has blinded him to its catastrophic environmental
ramifications.
Hayek "could recognize the crucial nature of the environment in the abstract, but
could not incorporate it in his theory of society," Aarons says in his book.
Aarons asks, "Was it because embracing it would point up issues that the spontaneous
market, with its drive for gain, its inability to embrace anything that did not have a
price, and its promotion of universal pursuit of ‘better satisfaction of material needs',
was inherently capable of dealing with? Was it because recognition of this fact would
prompt people to learn and apply the available knowledge about environmental
limits? For that would undermine one of Hayek's foundational standpoints - that
social phenomena were essentially ‘the result of human action, but not of human
design'."
Aarons proposes no magic solutions himself. The necessity to reject grand narratives
is one of the few points on which he agrees with post-modernists. He does, however,
urge people - and their governments - to act on global warming.
"I believe that a determined response to the present challenges can be a liberating and
uplifting experience in a populace, that under neo-liberalism, has become rather self-
centred. Australians are the only people in the world with custody of a whole
continent, and tackling our problems on this scale could inspire people, especially the
young, with ideals other than themselves, engendering a movement both truly
patriotic and international in its scope," he writes.
Hayek reputation lives on fictionally. In Halting State, a 2007 novel by Charles
Stross, the police are called into investigate a robbery at Hayek Associates, an on-line
game company describing itself as "a diversified economics consultancy and market
maker". It's a crime with a difference - it happens in a virtual world and involves a
bank heist carried out by a band of orcs and a dragon. Would Hayek have appreciated
the humour?
Senior columnist with The Age, Kenneth Davidson, will launch Market Versus
Nature at 6pm for 6.30pm, Friday May 2 at the New International Bookshop, Trades
Hall, corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets, Melbourne. In his spare time, Davidson
co-edits Dissent magazine. He won a Walkley Award 1977 and a National Press
Club/Ford Australia Award for Canberra Press Gallery Journalist of the Year in 1980.
A committed Keynesian, he is a staunch opponent of economic rationalism.
Eric Aarons was a joint national secretary of the Communist Party of Australia from
1976 to 1982. He is a sculptor in stone, wood and other materials and lives in a bush
setting at Minto on the outskirts of Sydney. In 2002 his life-sized granite sculpture of
the now extinct wombat-like diptrotodon was unveiled at Campbelltown's Art Gallery
by Roy Slaven and H G Nelson. Aaron's previous books include Philosophy for An
Exploding World (1962), What's Right ? (2003) and a book of memoirs, What's Left?
(1993).
More info: (ph) 9662 3744. Interviews: Eric Aarons on 02 9820 3826 or
erica2@bigpond.com. He will be in Melbourne May 1-4 and available for interviews (c/-
Carmel Shute on 0412 569 356)
Australian Scholarly Publishing RRP $34.95 9781740971850 150pp PB
Australian Scholarly Publishing, PO Box 299, Kew, VIC 3101
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