ABSTRACT
A possible milestone may have been achieved in 1992 when the American Economic Association published John Roemer and Pranab Bardhan’s article “Market Socialism: A Case for Rejuvenation” in the Summer issue of its Journal of Economic Perspectives. Aside from a handful of articles on the theory of cooperative production in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Association had not published any important work on market socialism since Abram Bergson’s article on Oskar Lange’s market socialist proposal (“Socialist Economics”) in the 1948 Survey of Contemporary Economics . Implied in the concept of market socialism are very serious questions concerning the economic and ethical legitimacy of the capitalist status quo. Such questions were more natural during the ravages of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Lange’s proposal was first put forward. By the time Bergson’s essay appeared in 1948, these questions were rapidly evaporating. Two factors may have been at work. The Second World War thoroughly eliminated the excess capacity problem of the Great Depression, and Keynesian anticyclical policy has effectively precluded any repetition of the problem in the postwar era. In addition, the rapid postwar rise of the Soviet Union to the status of chief menace to Western civilization greatly inhibited socialistic dissent within the United States and its First World allies.
