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Event Description:
When Friedrich Hayek referred to cooperative forms of enterprise, he expressed some scepticism. ‘Whether it is really in the interest of the workers that, if they are also to be capitalists, their investment should be in the same concern which gives them employment is at least questionable,’ he reflected. This paper challenges such scepticism on Hayekian grounds. It argues that taking Hayek seriously demands an endorsement of worker cooperatives.
For Hayek, personal freedom was a prerequisite for the effective use of knowledge in society. In defining what constituted freedom, he turned to the classical republican understanding of it as ‘the absence of arbitrary power.’ He grounds his critique of state intervention on precisely this understanding. For this reason, we can describe Hayek as a market republican. Yet while conscious of the dangers of public power, he does not mention the threat private power poses to freedom, the use of knowledge, and market competition. This puts Hayek at odds with earlier market republicans.
A full consideration of arbitrary private power requires us to examine the organisation and ownership of enterprises. A cooperative enterprise can be understood as a ‘republic in miniature’. Properly organised, it can replicate the constitutional protections Hayek calls for at the state level at the level of the enterprise. This, the paper argues, preserves the personal freedom Hayek prized and promotes better use of knowledge in society: Hayekians should support worker cooperatives.
Location: Bush House, Southeast Wing, SE1.05, King’s College London
About the speaker:
Dr. Sean Irving is currently a lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London. He is particularly interested in how republican ideas have informed economic thought. He seeks to recover and develop an ‘economic republicanism’ that looks beyond the binary of economic planning versus market competition. In his first monograph, he offered a new interpretation of Hayek as a market republican. He is developing work on how a reading of Hayek in this light can inform cooperative enterprise.
In his current book project, ‘Between Bosses and Bureaucrats: The Lost Tradition of Republican Political Economy’ (Princeton University Press), he shows how republican ideas informed an anti-oligarchic strand of political economy over the 19th century. In addition to tracing this strand of thought, the book makes a theoretical contribution by thinking about political economy within the republican framework of the mixed constitution.