Jonathan Rée

Immanuel Kant​ was against revolutions. In 1793 he described them as the work of ‘political criminals’ and ‘injustice in the highest degree’. He accepted, on the other hand, that they sometimes turned out well: the Dutch had been lucky with theirs in 1579, for example, and so had the British in 1688. As for the French in 1789, it was too soon to say; but in one...

None of us can fully disengage from morality: even if we think of ourselves as free spirits we still want our lives to make a good story. But many are foolish enough to be impressed by the cynical bravado of Brecht’s Macheath: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (‘Feeding comes first, morals must wait’) – as if morality were a luxury that need not concern us, like fast cars or a top hat.

Markets offered a solution not so much to Adam Smith’s ‘problem of the division of labour’ as to what Friedrich Hayek called the ‘problem of the division of knowledge’. They were fundamentally a ‘mechanism for communicating information’, but unlike newspapers, which operate like a web, gathering and distributing information through a central hub, they function as a centreless net which allows us to ‘avail ourselves ... of knowledge which individually we do not possess’. Markets were, as Hayek put it with uncharacteristic exuberance, a ‘marvel’, co-ordinating economic decisions in ‘a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand’. They are, you might say, a device for pooling our ignorance. This way of looking at markets may not have been revolutionary, but it was genuinely illuminating, and Hayek would describe it as the only ‘discovery’ he had ever made, hoping it had finally disposed of that ‘skeleton in our cupboard’ – the fiction of ‘economic man’.