ABSTRACT
For the most part, economists have embraced a conceptual antinomy in their treatments of markets and states. Markets are treated as polycentric networks of human relationships, and with prices being essential for securing coordinated activity within that network. While there is disagreement among economists over just how well or smoothly that coordination takes place, nearly all economists deny the possibility of economy-wide planning without prices, as illustrated even by James Yunker’s (2001) treatment of what he calls pragmatic socialism. The situation is different when it comes to states and politics. States are treated as organizations that exist apart from those market relationships, and with states using planning to intervene into an economy. This conceptual antinomy is widely held despite widely divergent appraisals of the impact of such state intervention: where some think the state mostly corrects market failures, others think it mostly or even wholly creates market impediments. In either case, however, there is nearly universal agreement that state is to be treated as a unitary agent of intervention into an economy.
