The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

One of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice is the relation between ethics and economics or morals and markets. Recent decades (indeed recent months) have been witness to an intensification of concern regarding this problem, surely motivated in part by at least two increasingly prominent features of contemporary politics. On the one hand, we have seen the increasing intersection of ethical activity and economic activity in the context of various social movements including fair trade, environmentalism, and animal rights. On the other hand, we can observe the increasing disarticulation of morals from markets in the context of a variety of political projects often proceeding under the heading of free trade. These two tendencies often clash in terms of what might be called the "fair trade or free trade" debates. These debates reveal that these two central tendencies of contemporary political practice do not always sit well with one another. These practical developments and debates raise a number of theoretical issues that are of great moment for liberal democratic political philosophers.

In this article I propose a novel way of gaining a theoretical focus on these debates and the practical issues implicated therein. The novelty of my focus is enabled by adopting as my theoretical framework a combination of [End Page 151] work developed by an unlikely pair of liberal democratic philosophers who were both enormously influential on twentieth-century political theory and practice: John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. At first glance, Dewey and Hayek seem to be paradigmatic representatives of the two opposed poles of the fair trade–versus–free trade debates. Dewey's work has often been taken up by those who endorse Old Left labor politics or New Left participatory politics, while Hayek was decisively connected to the politics of the New Reagan Right. But such a caricatured Left-versus-Right contrast neglects important points of convergence between these two political theorists. By exploring these convergences, we can begin the project of establishing a common ground that would enable us to productively reframe debates currently framed in terms of a too-familiar opposition between fair trade Leftism and free trade Rightism.

The focal range elaborated in this article is undertaken from the perspective of a Deweyan democratic theory that aims to inflect a pragmatist conception of liberal democracy with beneficial insights articulated in the context of Hayekian liberal theory. The time is ripe for Deweyans to take another look at Hayek. That Hayek has been inexplicably neglected by pragmatists for so long is perhaps due to his being neglected more generally by the overwhelming majority of liberal democratic political philosophers, but we are now beginning to witness an increase of interest in Hayek among political philosophers more widely (among Analytics he offers an increasingly appealing counterweight to the long-standing rationalism of the Kantian liberals, while among Continentals interest is being stirred up by the long-awaited publication in English of Foucault's lectures on branches of American and German liberalism, on which Hayek was influential). In light of this more general increase of interest in Hayek it behooves Deweyans to take another look. In the end Deweyans may conclude that there is little of value in Hayekian theory. But such a conclusion must be justified at the end of inquiry rather than merely assumed at the outset. I think it in fact unjustified, and the effort of the present article is in part to show why.

My intention here is decidedly not to suggest that Deweyans ought to become wholehearted Hayekians or that fair tradeists ought to become unabashed free tradeists. I offer a more modest claim that Deweyan ethical democrats might benefit from certain strategies or techniques developed in the context of Hayekian liberalism. One way of cashing out the practical upshot of this proposed theoretical rapprochement would [End Page 152] be a suggestion for how the Left might co-opt some of the successful strategies and techniques originating on the Right. But I have already expressed some suspicion about divisive Left-versus-Right contrasts. So a better description of the proposal offered here may be put in terms of...