Celebrating Israel Kirzner’s Unique Œuvre

~ Frederic Sautet ~

Celebrating Israel Kirzner’s unique œuvre is one of the great things that happened at the end of the 2009 with the publication of the first volume of The Collected Works of Israel Kirzner. They are edited by Peter Boettke and me and published by Liberty Fund. Pete and I have been working on this 10-volume series for a while with the gracious help of Liberty Fund’s Colleen Coughenour, Laura Goetz, and Patti Ordower, and ex-GMU student Rosemarie Fike. We are very pleased to see the publication of the first volume which is the re-edition of Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View published in 1960. The volume includes an introduction to the book and to the series by the editors, as well as the four papers that make the “Becker-Kirzner debate,” which took place in the Journal of Political Economy in 1962 over the meaning of rationality and action in economics. The next volumes in the series should be coming out every six months with the next three being stand-alone books. We have also arranged Kirzner's papers and articles thematically in subsequent volumes so as to offer a useful tool for the fast growing number of researchers interested in his work.

The Economic Point of View is a great book, and deserves to be better known as are the more recent books that Kirzner has published. It was Kirzner’s dissertation and his project was to define economics. The book, however, is much more than just a definition of economic science. It takes the reader in a detailed voyage over the evolution of the discipline and its core concepts. While it is true that Adam Smith had established many of the fundamental ideas that lay at the foundation of the discipline as it stands today, it is also true that economics has witnessed a long evolution made of many debates ranging from economics as the science of the accumulation of wealth to economics as the science of constrained optimization. A lot has happened since Smith’s times and Kirzner explains the subtleties of this evolution and establishes economics on the sound footing of Misesian methodological subjectivism and methodological individualism. What came to be established after Smith and made the core of 19th classical economics is the idea that there “prevails in the succession and interdependence of the market phenomena an inescapable regularity” to use Mises’s words. Paris gets fed, as Frederic Bastiat would say, and the way economists tackled this idea is what Kirzner's book is fundamentally about.

For those of you who are not familiar with the 1962 discussion between Gary Becker and Israel Kirzner, I strongly recommend those articles. Kirzner had just written The Economic Point of View and was ideally placed to respond to Becker’s article on rationality in markets, which basically argued that market outcomes would still be “rational” even if individuals were not. Kirzner shows that Becker in fact implicitly assumes some form of rationality in action and that he can’t escape the rational choice paradigm when he discusses the nature of market outcomes. In doing so, Kirzner affirms the strength and the logic of the Misesian approach.

The book prefigures the work that Kirzner will accomplish in the following decades and especially his unique œuvre on the nature and role of entrepreneurship in the market system. A recommended read for 2010!

Comments

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

who wrote this blog post?

[Peter Boettke]

Dan,

Why so snarky?

[Josh Hall]

I picked this up at the ASSA meetings and highly recommend it. Like all LF books, it is beautiful, but the decision to put the Becker/Kirzner debates at the end was excellent.

[Alexandre Padilla]

I agree with Frederic, Kirzner's book is excellent and I also see it as a great exercise in History of Economic Thought. I also read the debate between Kirzner and Becker that some could consider as another illustration that the driving force of the Austrian Economics movement was engage in scholarly debate over key issues in the economic discussion at the time. It is very interesting to read because I almost could argue that Kirzner's position (which, I believe is inspired by Mises's views on the concept of rationality) is a good response to the behavioral economists who have used experiments to challenge the mainstream approach of rationalism. I have pretty much all Kirzner's books but I think I am going to order the collection because I like LFB collections.

[Mario Rizzo]

I am thinking more and more than Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurship is inconsistent with the view of praxeology Mises explicitly develops. A deductive or axiomatic system (even in words) does not capture the idea of alertness.However, I do think alertness, a non-praxeological idea, is a necessary prerequisite for a praxeological approach to economics. But the two are different.

Somehow in all of this Kirzner seems to have forgotten the role of deduction in praxeology. Insofar as praxeology is different from Robbinsian economizing it is not a deductive system. I see no way around this.

I think if a person reads in quick succession The Economic Point of View and, say, Perception, Opportunity and Profit, this should become clear.

[Peter Boettke]

Mario,

Isn't the answer to your puzzle the very Mises-Hayek synthesis that Kirzner pulls off so that the entrepreneurial perspective is grounded in praxeology but not confined to it? In short, Hayek pushes through Mises's rhetoric while retaining the argumentative structure.

See "Economics and Knowledge" --- where he argues that the pure logic of choice is a necessary, but not sufficient component to understanding the market process. The problem that Kirzner runs into, then, is not being sufficiently Hayekian in the essay in Perception, Opportunity and Profit where he tries to counter Hayek's 1937 paper. But I think that is because Kirzner thought it was an either/or choice between Mises or Hayek. I don't think it was --- Hayek admits that Mises's pure logic of choice is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The pure logic must be complemented with institutional analysis.

Yes, as Kirzner argues we are alert to that which is in our interest to be alert to, but what is in our interest to be alert to is a consequence of institutional context.

In short, I don't think someone reading The Economic Point of View and Perception, Opportunity and Profit should see incoherence, but instead an exciting research program with open ended questions on the nature of human action and the entrepreneurial market process. In fact, what they will read is a rigorous and thoughtful mind grappling with the tough questions of price theory and our understanding of the market system.

Pete

[geoffrey]

Any indication on a timeline for the rest?

[Sinclair Davidson]

Backtrack feature doesn't seem to be working.

http://catallaxyf.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/israel-kirzner/

[Ugg Boots]

Boy! What have I done? What luck!