Freedom, Minds, and Institutions
The book is built around the idea that total central planning
is logically impossible. Instead of starting from individuals
and their rights, it uses indirect methodological individualism
and takes the impossibility of total planning as the basis from
which it reaches until the fundamental plans, the individual
plans.
Individual plans, as plans for action, do not isolate human beings.
Connections develop as a natural consequence of human
actions. Individuals exchange goods or develop common plans
for complex actions. Each connection has a weight that helps
individuals to compare it with alternative connections.
Working from the bare, abstract concept of a plan and its possibility
conditions, the book makes room, in the end, for a richer
structure, the network of individuals. It emphasizes the fact
that any central intervention in such a web of interactions is
bound to be arbitrary.
While the central total or piecemeal planning is lost in the
maze of complexity, liberty is a sophisticated, rational way to
cope with complexity.
Mihail Radu Solcan
University of Bucharest
Department of Philosophy
http://www.fil.unibuc.ro/~solcan