ABSTRACT
For many years, those writing on the economic and political issues raised by Marx and Hayek failed to explore how these two social philosophers might be dealt with jointly, presumably because they appeared to be so obviously and completely opposed to each other. One of the first to see the value in discovering possible overlaps and connections was New York scholar and author, Chris Matthew Sciabarra. His book, Marx, Hayek and Utopia,1 is a valuable contribution to the new thinking required if we are to make any progress in addressing the interconnected economic, social and ethical elements of today’s environmental crisis. Sciabarra deals with the purposes for which Marx and Hayek devel-
oped their respective projects. He takes both to be avowedly anti-utopian while believing visions of the future to be useful in promoting the aims for which they strove. They also made similar qualifications about the concept of such visions, maintaining that they could not depend on or include inherent impossibilities such as: believing that we can see with clarity a picture of the whole society; thinking that we can bypass the actual economic and social conditions necessarily existing at each stage of development; supposing that reason, applied through human effort, is capable of achieving anything it can imagine.
