Heilbroner’s Economic Means and Social Ends

Murray N. Rothbard’s book review, originally published in 1972 and reprinted in 2011, examines Robert L. Heilbroner’s edited collection Economic Means and Social Ends: Essays in Political Economics. The reviewed book gathers papers from two symposia held at the New School for Social Research in spring 1968 around Adolph Lowe’s proposed science of “Political Economics.” Rothbard moves from criticism of the collection’s celebratory atmosphere to an attack on its methodological and political premises, then develops objections concerning prediction, economic expertise, and ethical justification. His central claim is that Lowe’s instrumentalism replaces economic explanation with techniques for imposing rulers’ arbitrarily selected purposes.

The opening criticism concerns the symposium’s intellectual organization. Lowe introduces his position and replies to commentators, but the division between philosophers and economists leaves the relevant disciplinary questions inadequately connected. Rothbard argues that reverence toward Lowe further discourages searching criticism. These defects matter because, in his assessment, the supposedly new science offers little beyond an obscure restatement of socialist planning. He interprets Lowe’s demand for economic order as a demand to suppress the plurality of individual purposes: government must first cultivate agreement through propaganda and, where persuasion fails, impose the political economists’ goals through coercion.

Rothbard’s methodological objection is that instrumentalism tries to evade the constraints economic knowledge places upon power. Although Austrian praxeology and Anglo-American positivism differ, he regards both as recognizing economic laws. Lowe instead substitutes chosen ends and technological procedures for economic analysis. The decisive distinction is between technical feasibility and rational allocation:

And yet, pure technology can offer no guide to the opportunity costs that must be weighed in any sort of rational allocation of economic resources; for this, a relatively free price system must be allowed to function along with its corollary of private ownership and freedom of exchange of ownership titles to resources.

Prices, property, and exchange therefore enter the argument as conditions for comparing alternative uses of scarce resources, not merely as ideological preferences. Rothbard invokes Eastern European movement toward decentralized allocation as evidence against central planning. He also places Lowe within a longer tradition of intellectuals seeking to impose static order upon society. His appeal to Ludwig von Mises reinforces the claim that economic laws restrict rulers’ capacities regardless of their intentions.

The review’s most sustained extension concerns predictability. Rothbard distinguishes conditional scientific explanation—if specified conditions obtain, particular consequences follow—from forecasting what people will actually choose. He argues that economists confuse these activities when they treat quantitative forecasts as the test of scientific status. Changing knowledge, values, and choices prevent scientific foreknowledge of the economic future. Lowe recognizes forecasting failures but, Rothbard contends, draws the wrong conclusion: instead of revising his conception of economic science, he proposes making conduct predictable through political control.

For forecasting is not and cannot be a science; at best it is an art, and the best such “artists” are those who have a “feel” for the conditions of their particular markets.

This distinction allows Rothbard to recognize entrepreneurial judgment without surrendering his objection to scientific forecasting. Entrepreneurs and speculators make fallible estimates, while profits and losses select among their performances. Government lacks an equivalent discipline; its decisions are subject to shifting political pressures and discretionary edicts. Centralization consequently offers no guarantee of greater predictability. Beyond this institutional objection lies a challenge to predictability itself as a social ideal:

Such predictability would only be possible if men were will-less, robots and automatons; since they are not, their actions will ever be gloriously free from perfect predictability.

Rothbard treats uncertainty here as an expression of human agency rather than simply a planning defect. He also identifies an asymmetry in Lowe’s proposal: ordinary people would become predictable instruments, while the planners would retain freedom to choose society’s ends.

The next major section asks how economists may legitimately advocate policy. Rothbard does not prohibit economists from making value judgments. He requires them to state and defend an ethical system from which their prescriptions follow, rather than presenting personal preferences as conclusions warranted by professional expertise.

In that case, the economist simply becomes a propagandist, not of a defensible ethical system, but of his own unsupported caprice.

His hypothetical example of discriminatory burdens on Lebanese entrepreneurs exposes the problem: a policy goal cannot justify itself merely because an economist announces it. Rothbard explicitly acknowledges that his own condemnation of arbitrary judgments also rests on an ethical position.

The closing criticisms apply these objections to particular contributors. Rothbard accuses Lowe of confusing shifts in demand with movement along a demand curve; questions Gurwitsch’s appeal to Alfred Schütz without addressing Schütz’s affinity with Mises; and treats Carl Kaysen’s proposed controls as ideological prescriptions detached from the methodological discussion. Against Kaysen’s inflation-and-controls approach to Black unemployment, he proposes considering the removal of labor-market restrictions instead.

The review concludes with Frank H. Knight’s warning, quoted through Fritz Machlup’s contribution:

Any such conception as social engineering or social technology has meaning only in relation to the activities of a super-dictatorship, a government which would own as well as rule society at large, and would use it for the purposes of the governors.

This ending condenses the review’s governing concern: when society becomes material for expert-directed engineering, the distinction between knowledge and authority disappears. The review’s significance lies in its linkage of economic calculation, the limits of prediction, individual agency, and explicit ethical argument into a unified criticism of technocratic rule.