Quotes from “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom”

By Tom Palmer (1990)

• If one reads Aristotle on politics merely to find out what Aristotle thought, one does a disservice to Aristotle; one should read Aristotle’s Politics to learn about politics.#
  Hermeneutics
• Persuasion should be an integral part of our understanding of the market process because the preferences of suppliers and consumers are not data – merely the Latin term for ‘givens’ – to be fed into a vast calculating mechanism, thereby yielding a fully determinate result that was implicit in the initial conditions. Instead, the market exchange process is better illumined in the light cast by rhetoric, the art of persuasion (a constant and recurrent theme in Gadamer’s work). There was no ‘given’ demand for portable computers, digital laser-guided music systems, video games, pet rocks, or genetic engineering, to take but a few recent examples, before they were developed by inventor-entrepreneurs who ‘created’ (i.e. persuaded) the demand for them.#
  Methodology
• The process of civilization is, to a very large extent, precisely one of learning to ‘demand’ new things for which previous generations had no demand.#
  History

Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763)

• If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly on the natural inclination every one has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest.#
  Sociology

James Buchanan, “Order Defined in the Process of Its Emergence” (1985)

• Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently-existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post, in terms of ‘as if’ functions that are maximized. But these ‘as if’ functions are themselves generated in the choosing process, not separately from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange.#
  EconomicsMethodology

Harold Demsetz, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967)

• What converts a harmful or beneficial effect into an externality is that the cost of bringing the effect to bear on the decisions of one or more of the interacting parties is too high to make it worthwhile.#
  Economics