ABSTRACT
Patsy Healey’s Collaborative Planning draws on wider movements within social science, which advocate the extension of Habermasian deliberative models of democracy in public decision-making. Collaborative planning offers a critique of bureaucratic decision procedures and a reassertion of the case for radical forms of social democratic planning as an alternative to the market models put forward by the ‘New Right’. This chapter welcomes Healey’s Habermasian critique of technocratic planning, but argues that the sceptical attitude towards competitive market institutions is based on a misreading of the intellectual case for private markets. This is shown most clearly by the lack of attention paid to the work of leading classical liberal thinkers such as Hayek and others in the so-called ‘Austrian School’.
