Market advocacy can rest on despair about alternatives rather than genuine conviction

Evidence

Neither “freedom nor truth can be treated as an absolute,” he wrote. “They confl ict with beauty and morality and other values, and with one another, necessitating ‘marginal’ comparison and compromise, and correct proportioning.” He concluded that a social system that prioritized the market above all else would become imbalanced and prone to collapse. This should not be taken to mean, however, that he believed that any other system could solve the per sis tent tensions between a society’s moral and material welfare. … “Trying to look as deep as possible into fundamentals, I feel that both the radicals and conservatives are right,” he wrote. “On the one hand, the old system had got to where its workings could not be tolerated, and there is absolutely no use in thinking of going back to it. On the other hand, it just doesn’t seem real to me that any convention of the best minds could do much in the way of designing a new system to order.” … Knight saw his world as consisting of desperately bad alternatives, which allowed him to advocate the market system despite a distaste for its effects and a growing conviction that it was pi loting itself toward collapse. “I’m very curious as to what alternative to the profi tsystem you can think of that wouldn’t be worse,” he wrote to a colleague two de cades later. “I’ve been trying to think of one for a halfcentury or so, without success.” He demonstrated the radical’s capacity to lament the inadequacies of the present world and to yearn for a better one, but he lacked the ability to believe that the necessary options existed or that the desired changes might come to be. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that Knight’s ‘market advocacy’ in the 1930s was actually a reluctant, desperate choice among bad alternatives, not principled endorsement.
• XREF: Connects to the tension between radical critique and conservative resignation that recurs in mid-century intellectuals (e.g., other members of the MPS milieu and later ‘end of ideology’ debates). — connects to: Market advocates failed by criticizing reform without articulating their own positive vision — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 85; The market advocacy developed into a closed self-referential tradition in economics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 154; Economists’ conflicted interests drive their advocacy of carbon markets — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 928 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Knight’s position - refusing both return to an intolerable old system and belief in designed alternatives - captures a distinctive intellectual stance that defies the radical/conservative binary.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s activist stance contradicts its own claim that markets naturally triumph #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 202
• Neoliberals disagree sharply among themselves about what a market is #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 151
• Economists’ conflicted interests drive their advocacy of carbon markets #corroborates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 928
• The market advocacy developed into a closed self-referential tradition in economics #complicates (0.70) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 154