2023-11-04 06:12:19
“The new economists do not say, like the old ones, that the State is a necessary evil or a cancer. (…) On the contrary, the State has a double mission: to ensure freedom and to provide its cooperation for social progress. It is a mistake to believe that the role of the State diminishes as civilization progresses. It only changes its nature.”
This is how Alejo Peyret expressed himself, more than 150 years ago, in one of his numerous columns dedicated to discussions regarding the best ways to organize that nascent Argentina to which he had arrived two decades earlier and with which he had fallen in love forever.
Note the adjective “old.” Peyret refers in this way, in 1860, to the preachers of laissez faire, laissez passer who were already considered “orthodox” at that time. And he refuted them with empirical data of the time: “In England, where industrial freedom completely reigns, it is where the intervention of the State is most often called for to repress the abuses of the powerful (…) Is it not proof that the economic doctrine of absolute freedom does not bring a solution?
Could this be the reason why in the 20th century they called themselves “neoliberals”? Did they need to somehow renew the way of presenting postulates that were already out of fashion in the 19th century?
The unknown philosopher. Alejo Peyret is a figure in Argentine history as little remembered as he is attractive. He was a philosopher in action, organizer of the first immigrant colonies, creator of libraries and mutual societies, translator and disseminator of Proudhon, pioneer of social economy, promoter of cooperatives, promoter of technical and physical education, defender of the rights of women, equitable access to land and the separation of the State from any religion.
He was born in France in 1826 and emigrated to this region following the failure of the revolution of 1848. He was summoned by General Urquiza and settled in Entre Ríos, where he taught at the Colegio del Uruguay and collaborated in newspapers in the region. He was also a professor at the National College of Buenos Aires, where he inaugurated the scientific teaching of religions and was the protagonist of many controversies of great repercussion at the time. He produced an abundant philosophical, essayistic and literary production that is still dispersed, in a few books and countless collaborations in various newspapers of the time.
Peyret was a unique philosopher. He developed a synthesis that, reviewed today, is as original as it is surprising: in part because it advances points of view on discussions that are still current. But above all because it brings together perspectives that, at that time, although they were present in different thinkers, were not found in the same philosopher. For example, the literature identifies him, erroneously, as “positivist.” However, Peyret questioned the main thinkers of positivism, starting with Auguste Comte, and reproached them, among other things, for what we today call “Eurocentrism.”
Perhaps that is why it is claimed by different and opposing currents.
The paleoliberal retrotopia. Zygmunt Baumant left two finished books when he died. In one of them, Retrotopia (Paidós), he refers to a curious contemporary reaction to the retrotopias.
Something of this appears in the Argentine far-right candidate Javier Milei, today with a chance of becoming president of the Nation. His preaching of absolute freedom in the field of economics has no counterpart in social and cultural issues, in which, every time he opens his mouth, an alarming authoritarianism appears. A kind of neoliberal neofascism like that of Jair Bolsonaro, with its own characteristics.
A fervent admirer of the ideas of the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” philosopher Murray Rothbard – among other theorists whom he often cites, such as those of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises –, Milei recites statements by these thinkers as if they were indisputable truths. would be treated. It does so by attributing to them a “scientific” character that ignores (deliberately or out of ignorance) that, as Mario Bunge pointed out, these postulates were never corroborated from the methodology of science, inaugurated by the prominent liberal philosopher (this one, seriously liberal) Karl Popper.
Milei’s philosophical ideas can be described, more appropriately, as “paleoliberalism”, an expression used in the Anglo-Saxon academic fields where they emerged. I say appropriately because these are old, archaic ideas that express a past to which not only would it not be advisable to return but, most likely, there is no possibility of doing so in democratic societies.
This archaic character of Milei’s ideas appears when recovering Peyret’s texts.
What is paleoliberalism. Although Milei perceives himself to be, indifferently, liberal, libertarian, minarchist or anarcho-capitalist, the ideas he expresses – included in the program presented to the Electoral Justice – are the traditional ideas (“archaic”, Peyret would say) of orthodox economic liberalism, neoliberalism, neoclassical economics, or whatever you prefer to call that perspective of which the Austrian School is only an extreme wing.
This current is highly questioned in the epistemic debates of political philosophy and current economics. But what are the main points supported by traditional economic liberalism, today known as “neoliberalism”, and which in Peyret’s time was summarized in the slogan laissez faire, laissez passer, with physiocratic roots? The aforementioned Mario Bunge included this current among pseudosciences and characterized it by showing the statements that underlie his main postulates:
a) the only objective of economic activity is private benefit;
b) the market regulates itself, that is, it is always in equilibrium or close to it, so any intervention will have a detrimental effect on it;
c) natural resources are inexhaustible or replaceable;
d) human beings are basically selfish and at the same time economically rational;
e) all individuals try to maximize their expected utilities;
f) the means of production, commerce, transportation, communication and finance must be in private hands;
g) prices rise and fall with demand in a free market;
h) the best social order is the one that has the freest market and the best market is the one that can grow without limits;
i) businessmen have no moral obligations because commercial activity is virtuous in itself;
j) The State should only protect the interests of those who already own private property once morest those who do not own it.
In his little book Pseudosciences, what a scam! (Laetoli), Bunge maintains that these postulates lack evidentiary evidence, in Popperian terminology “they have never been corroborated with evidence”, and on the contrary, in his work Political Philosophy (Gedisa), he cites numerous scientific studies that refute them, among them which includes the work of Nobel Laureate in Economics Elinor Ostrom.
Disproved a century and a half ago. But what is interesting is to find that Peyret, in his texts from 150 or more years ago, anticipated these analyzes and refuted those pseudoscientific ideas of orthodox economists. And he did so with arguments very similar to those of the great Argentine philosopher (who did not know his work, by the way).
Peyret maintained in 1870 that “political economy is still far from being a science” and mentioned “an entire school of new economists” (among whom Èmile de Laveleye stood out) who came to demonstrate that “the truths of that science are not dogmas as intended by the orthodox, the entire English school, Adam Smith and his successors such as Ricardo, McCulloch, Say and the entire Manchester sect of free traders, which is the one that has most logically expounded the dogmas of the ancient creed.
According to that creed, he explains, “man is considered a being who always pursues his private interest; Driven by that motive, good in itself since it is the principle of its conservation, he seeks what is useful to him and no one can discern it better than himself. Let it therefore be free from the obstacles that the State opposes, let universal and unrestricted concurrence operate; By that providential law, order will be established spontaneously. The legislator does not have to deal with the distribution of wealth. ‘Let it be, let it happen’, as Gournay said in the last century. The statesman remains with his arms crossed. The world is heading toward its end.” Peyret assured that it was a false theorization: “From this philosophical doctrine, economists deduce general principles applicable to all peoples, at all times, because they are absolutely true.”
And he assured that for the new economists (the new ones… from the 19th century!) it was very clear that things are not like that. “The political economy was essentially cosmopolitan; He ignored the division of peoples and considered humanity as a single family. Such was the ancient doctrine that the new economists come to criticize. The man, they say, has more than one motive. Next to selfishness, there is the feeling of collectivity, sociability, which is translated by the formation of the family, the commune, the State. (…) It turns out, then, that the aphorism that man acts under the rule of a single motive, individual interest, is false. ‘The constant and general facts of human nature’ from which he wants to deduce economic laws, are an imaginary concept…” he assures.
These considerations by Peyret are more than a century ahead, even using similar terms, to approaches such as that of Mario Bunge, for whom the fact that this theory has remained intact for more than a century -despite the significant progress of other branches of social science – constitutes a clear indicator that it is pseudoscientific.
Bunge also assures that “laissez faire is not an isolated ideological motto: it is the logical consequence of two dogmas that are maintained uncritically, despite the changes in economic reality since Adam Smith (1776) published his great work ”. In another work, Bunge assures that experimentation has shown: a) that the motivations of human beings are multiple and varied, and are not limited to interest or calculation of individual benefits; b) that experimentation has refuted the central dogma of standard economic theory: that all human beings are incapable of feeling compassion or empathy and therefore born enemies of equality or cooperation; c) that it is not true that we have to choose between the so-called free market and the State: research shows a multitude of cases of successful management of common property resources of all kinds in a diversity of societies, developed and underdeveloped.
Precisely this successful social management that the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom studied (which we discussed in a previous note) is what appears in the conception of a Social State that Peyret maintains: “The governmental idea,” he says in one of his first journalistic texts, must follow “the same downward progression (…) The government reduced to being, in the future, only the administration, the person in charge of managing society”, while all the other resources – the production of wealth, commerce, industry – They are managed directly by the community.
The most dangerous pseudoscience. A few days ago, an interview by Jorge Fontevecchia, in a conversation with a journalist, delved into the experience of a small city in the United States where a “libertarian” experiment was carried out, and its total failure. Peyret, a century and a half ago, referred to other experiences that showed, already in his time, the opprobrious results of putting into practice the dogmatic ideas that Milei presents today as novel: all of Europe had been that extreme “liberal” experiment.
Our author said: “Poverty is no longer only the result of man’s vices; this might be corrected. It is actually an organic evil of society, an inevitable consequence of the free play of economic forces. The laissez faire, laissez passer proclaimed by the disciples of Adam Smith and JB Say has produced an immense industrial and commercial anarchy of the type that reigned in the Middle Ages (…). And, as if history had to repeat itself endlessly, from the heart of this chaos a new feudalism arose, a financial aristocracy of which the stock market is the rock castle, and whose dominions are the railways, the canals, the banks, the loans, “factories, in a word, all kinds of privileges and monopolies.”
This description of the ultraliberal Europe that Peyret had abandoned is dated 1860. It is not true, as can be seen, that freedom advances in the sense in which Milei presents it. On the contrary: it goes back to a past that in 1860 was already undesirable.
Peyret added that “selfishness drives men to iniquity and plunder” and the mission of setting limits “is the responsibility of morality first, and then of the State, the organ of justice.” But he also pointed out that, although their only motivations are not economic, “human beings are not perfect, and therefore the free play of the market, the unleashing of interests, does not produce harmony but rather antagonism.” And he gave examples from his time: “This is demonstrated by England, where industrial freedom completely reigns, to the point that it is there where the intervention of the State is most often demanded to repress the abuses of the powerful and protect the weak.” (…) Isn’t it proof that the economic doctrine of absolute freedom does not bring a solution?” he asks.
It is also interesting to note that Peyret – whom today we would characterize as a democratic socialist – did not hesitate to consider himself, among other things, as a “liberal.” But not in economics. And as another sensible liberal, Guy Sorman – a global epigone of liberalism – has pointed out these days, the dogmas held by fanatics like Milei are very far from an authentically liberal conception of society, which becomes clear when its profound authoritarianism is confirmed. in any other area other than the economy.
Peyret, on the contrary, would understand that for there to be freedom in society, a regulatory State is necessary, to which he adds the need to democratize it, precisely to prevent it from exceeding its functions. His rejection of these postulates, which he already defined as “archaic” in his time, exhibits a spirit related to those that Bunge used more than a century later in his challenge to the scientific pretensions of economic orthodoxy.
For the end I left another coincidence between Peyret and Bunge: he did not hesitate to describe orthodox economics as the most dangerous of pseudosciences, due to its social consequences. Peyret, in 1870, in a text titled “Economic Science,” stated, as if he were facing Milei: “It is a dangerous error to believe that it would be enough to disarm the State and free men from all obstacles for order to be established.” And he concluded: “Official economic science needs to be completely remade” because “it starts from a false starting point.”
It is unusual that, a century and a half later, these dogmas and “dangerous errors” reappear in the speech of a presidential candidate. Unusual and worrying.
*Graduate in Philosophy and journalist. He is a member of the journalistic and cultural cooperative El Miércoles, from Entre Ríos.
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