1st Edition

Hayek Versus Marx And today's challenges

By Eric Aarons Copyright 2009
    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    264 Pages
    by Routledge

    The aim of the book is to stimulate the realignment of political, theoretical and philosophical thinking that is now beginning in response to global warming. The author provides an examination of the theories of the most prominent social philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries – Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek. He does so in the belief that the work of these two thinkers, in their commonalities and differences, successes and failures, contain important indicators of the content of a social philosophy suited to today’s conditions.

    The book proceeds in the context of the failure of the attempts by followers of Marx, having achieved political power, to realise the objectives they took to issue from his theories, on the one hand, and of the earlier successes, but now emerging failures of the neo-liberal philosophy of Hayek to cope with the with the environmental outcomes of those very successes, on the other. In doing so, the book will incidentally critique postmodernism, because of its claim to be ‘Theory’ as such, which for a generation impeded genuine theoretical and philosophical work.

    Introduction 1. The Two Social Philosophers 2. Market Virtues – and Limitations  3. Reason, Rules, Spontaneity  4. The Clash of Spontaneous Processes  5. Dialectics and a New Paradigm  6. Built in Marx’s Name  7. Social Justice  8. Morality  9. Human Nature 10. Law and the Rule of Law  11. Freedom, Coercion, Property  12. Politics, Democracy  13. Marx and Methodology  14. Hayek and Methodology  15. The Primacy of Values

    Biography

    Eric Aarons is the former Secretary of the Communist Party of Australia. His many published works include his memoirs, What's Left? - published by Penguin Books in 1993.