Reason before Nature: The Possibility of Education

Abstract

Perhaps the most overlooked fact about the modern drive for growth is that it involves the elimination of markets. That such a remarkable thing would go unnoticed or be ignored is not at all surprising when we realize that the modern ear has been trained to hear and accept only the contrary–namely, that growth is always the way of progress and a sign that markets are getting bigger and stronger. But the truth is that we are dealing with an expansion that seeks to depersonalize (de-particularize) market activity through the institutional structure and create a macro order minus a real, spontaneous micro order. At this writing, the political economy is everywhere working to set up the rules of production on a wider collective base, in which the starting point for all calculation and explanation is the distribution (think of the statistical curve), not the individual unit.