ŏ Ŕ ō Ŝ Š ő ŞȜĻe Debate over
Calculation and Knowledge*
Peter Boettke and Roger Koppl join a discussion launched by Murray
Rothbard, Joseph Salerno, Jeffrey Herbener, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and
Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Ļose five contributors to theReview of Austrian
Economicsseek, as they say, to “dehomogenize” Ludwig von Mises and
F.A. Hayek, differentiating between their doctrines. Subtly or not so sub-
tly, these “chasmologists,” as Koppl calls them, often disparage Hayek.
In many writings Hayek portrayed social institutions—notably, lan-
guage, the common law, money, and the market economy itself—as “spon-
taneous” products of evolutionary processes. Ļough these institutions
were unplanned as wholes, they have benefited from a kind of natural
selection tending to weed out their most inexpedient forms, leaving their
relatively successful ones still in the running.
Salerno (ȀȈȈǿa) attacks these aspects of Hayek’s work. Some of
Hayek’s formulations, taken out of context, may admittedly seem exag-
gerated. Some disciples have indeed sometimes perverted Hayek’s ideas,
erecting the fact of or capacity for “spontaneous” emergence into a test of
*Originally entitled “Introduction to Papers by Boettke and Koppl,” from a “Sympo-
sium: Did Mises and Hayek Have Conflicting Views of the World?” Ļis paper comes
from Peter Boettke and Sanford Ikeda, eds.,Advances in Austrian Economics(ȀȈȈȇ):ȀȁȂ–ȀȁȈ.
Peter Boettke and Roger Koppl originally wrote their contributions for a session at the
meetings of the Southern Economic Association in Washington, NovemberȀȈȈȅ. Boettke
addresses the calculation issue specifically. Koppl probes beneath it, examining philosoph-
ical, psychological, and methodological aspects of Mises’s and Hayek’s work. Ļey both
find the positions of Mises and Hayek largely reconcilable.
My introduction, slightly modified here, summarizes points made by Boettke and
Koppl in the Symposium, by me in “Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge,”
Review of Austrian EconomicsȆ, no.ȁ(ȀȈȈȃ):ȈȂ–ȀǿȈ, and by Joseph Salerno, Jörg Guido
Hülsmann, Jeffrey M. Herbener, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and me in theReview of Aus-
trian Economics(ȀȈȈȅandȀȈȈȆ): vols.ȈandȀǿ. For the calculation-not-knowledge (Mises-
not-Hayek) side of this debate in its members’ own words, see their papers available at
http://mises.org/periodical.aspx?Id=5.
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