Abstract
There is no shortage of crises in the ecological (e.g. climate change), economic (e.g. the Global Financial Crisis), and socio-political spheres (e.g. the Arab Spring). While such crises are not new to the human saga, both the magnitude and frequency of these crises seem to be intensifying. The usual prognosis follows the public/private dichotomy, suggesting more or less government intervention (and the closely related variants of more integration and regime change). However, there are ‘islands’ of alternative analyses where crises result from scale distortion (organisational structures of states, markets and firms that are too large or too small) and scale entanglement (strong rather than weak ties between different scales such as the local, national and global). This paper attempts to synthesise this scale problematisation into one coherent school of thought. To this end, we introduce the complexity ansatz, which links complexity to symmetry (breaking), scale and collapse. To illustrate, the paper traces this ansatz in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Léopold Kohr and Jane Jacobs (HKJ). The thesis is that the moribund nation state needs to be relegated to a subsidiary role to evade collapse. Loosely coupled (fiscally and monetarily) autonomous city-regions should be the ‘eyes’ of socio-economic action.
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Notes
See for example Zajdenweber (1997).
This was kindly contributed by one of the referees.
For a non-mathematical introduction to scale see Herod (2011).
More generally, symmetry is used to simplify the analysis of complex problems. See Everstine (1987).
There is evidence of intellectual cooperation between Hayek and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the father of General Systems Theory. Hayek influenced von Bertalanffy’s Theory. For example, see Caldwell (2004).
The comparison between Hayek and Kohr on the original society can be enriched by injecting some of the insights from Engels (1972) on the origin of the state.
Kohr uses spontaneous in the normal sense: to indicate that the causal link is endogenous.
This is the usual process of production of scale where degrees of freedom are frozen (hence symmetry breaking) at lower scales to allow for the ‘macro’ to emerge.
For Hayek ‘equilibrium’ means ‘the general interdependence of all economic quantities, which has been most perfectly expressed by the Lausanne School of theoretical economics’. See Hayek (1933: n 42).
An interesting variation on this theme came recently under the GFC where governments bailed out collapsing private enterprises.
One can link this to the adoption of the MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) representation system from a mature Germany to a coming-of-age New Zealand, and how the same can be detrimental to the latter.
Albeit based on city-regions instead of Kohresque Kleinstaaterei.
Such subsidiarity should not be confused with the subsidiarity principle enshrined in EU legal apparatus such as the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 or the Treaty of Lisbon. The formulation in this paper puts sovereignty in the hands of cities rather than nation states. .
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Gussen, B.F. On the problem of scale: Hayek, Kohr, Jacobs and the reinvention of the political state. Const Polit Econ 24, 19–42 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-012-9130-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-012-9130-7