  |
Freedom and Reform Available from
Liberty Fund or from Amazon.
25 years ago, Liberty Fund, Inc., Indianapolis, provided a new edition of Frank Knight's Freedom and Reform, a collection of essays that was originally published by Harper & Brothers, New York, in 1947. Today, Frank Knight is widely known as one of the founders of the Chicago School, together with Jacob Viner, and as a teacher of some eminent economists, including Nobel Laureates James Buchanan and George Stigler. Born in 1885 in McLean County, Illinois, Knight studied at Cornell University and became known to a wider audience by a seminal study on Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. In 1928 he received a call from the University of Chicago, where he taught and studied economic topics and methodological questions. A staunch defender of free markets throughout his lifetime, Knight died 35 years ago, in 1972. Freedom and Reform is a collection of essays. In a way it is a consecutive volume of a former collection that he had published in 1935, titled Ethics of Competition. Freedom and Reform consists of 15 essays. Some of them are elaborated review articles on eminent thinkers of his time, including John Dewey. This shows that Knight was broadly interested, but it also shows that the collection was not meant to be an anthology devoted to one particular subject. Probably the most important essay, which is the longest one too, is the one on Ethics and Economic Reform (first published in Economica, N.S., vol. 6). This is not to say that the other essays would not deserve careful reading. Knight wrote in very clear prose and he was an outspoken opponent of the misuse of language (p. 15). He viewed it to be a most fatal mistake of the utilitarians to confuse freedom and power in order to maximise freedom for all. To him it was clear that freedom has to be defended as a goal in itself, not merely as an instrument for wealth creation. Though Knight believed in the power of voluntary interactions, he doubted that liberalism could do without a state and laws (p. 61). "The liberal state is essentially 'The Law.'" (p. 75) Knight believed in the rule of law, and he believed that things could be clearly ordered in clear-cut categories. Thus he warned against mixing spheres. For instance, he declared that philanthropy was an ethical question of its own, which could not be generated out of the (morals of the) market. "Certainly the use of income, or especially the matter of obligation in its use, belongs to a completely separate ethical problem field, and constitutes a different branch of ethical science or inquiry." (p. 70) As I said earlier, Knight used a very clear prose and used to put things in their proper places. His sentences were simple but not simplifying. His gift to see things clearly gave him the opportunity to expose "the fallacies, nonsense, and absurdities in what was passed off as sophisticated-scientific discourse" (p. xi), as Buchanan expressed the "social function" of Frank Knight. Knight was not a dreamer and did not believe that his fellow-men were ones who believed that people were not free because they had little power. "Our ordinary citizen, again, feels no coercion in not being able to buy an object which he does not have money enough to pay for (…)." (p. 15) Nonetheless, Knight had not a narrow economic view of liberalism. "Liberalism is also a "faith", a faith in the world and in man. It views the world as an environment in which it is possible progressively to achieve a better life, in terms of truth, beauty, goodness, and enjoyment; (p. 471) In fact, Knight viewed it to be a severe mistake to distinguish economic freedom from other kinds of individual freedom. "The truth is rather that the economic sphere of action is inseparable practically, and even theoretically, from other spheres, and the contrary position, in the form of the "economic interpretation," is one of the worst fallacies, or vices, of current thinking." (p. 63). How true this was, not only in his days, but also in ours. – Hardy Bouillon
Previous Feature:
Hayek's
The Constitution of Liberty |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |