Young Scholars STOREP Award 2016: Riccardo Evangelista

The Young Scholar STOREP Award (500€) is conferred to the author (a young scholar under 40 years of age) of the best article presented at the Annual Conference. The article can focus on any topic of relevance to the history of political economy or to the main theme of the Conference, but it can also discuss any issue in contemporary economic analysis and policy whose conclusions are spelled out in contrast or continuity with past theoretical standpoints.

The STOREP 2016 Award (XIII STOREP Annual Conference, Università di Catania) has been conferred to:

Riccardo Evangelista

author of:

Ragioni, negazioni e direzioni dell’intervento pubblico
Logiche del processo economico in Mises e Polanyi

Motivation

This paper analyses the views held by Karl Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises on the functioning of market economies, starting from their evaluation of the Red Vienna socialist experiment (which they witnessed in person), characterised by policies of public intervention, especially in the housing sector, which had severely constrained the action of market forces. Polanyi saw the Viennese experiment as evidence of the need of price regulation as means to a more equitable society, while Mises considered it as an illustrative example of the ineliminable inefficiency and ultimately failure of (any) public intervention.

The author presents a deep and reasoned understanding of how Polanyi’s and Mises’s incompatible views about this experiment can be explained by their opposite convictions on the virtues and vices of market economies and public intervention, and more profoundly, by radically alternative pre-analytical visions. While von Mises extended Menger’s notion of methodological individualism to the political sphere, making a case for liberalism as an objective rather than a means, and a value, independently from the historic-institutional context, Polanyi argues that the market form is a historical determined organization which is embedded in specific social contexts. Polanyi, on the contrary, believes that market laws cannot be understood nor, worse, be taken to operate independently from specific, historically determined circumstances. The author of The Great Transformation finds liberalism guilty of illegitimately substituting the part (the specific form market takes) for the whole (the different modalities societies adopts in coping with the problem of subsistence). Here are the roots of a deterministic conception of economic behavior, impeding understanding and possibilities of change.

The paper is very well argued and well documented, and it correctly places the ideas of the two authors in broad intellectual and historical frameworks, avoiding the temptation of schematism, thereby making a valuable contribution to the extant literature.