This review was published in Policy in 2011.
A review of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy by Mark Pennington, Edward Elgar Publishing 2011
The UNSW academic Martin Krygier draws a useful distinction between the ‘methodological’ and the ‘normative’ aspects of political ideologies. The methodological aspects are theories about how the world works, while the normative aspects are theories about which values are most important. The two have a complex relationship. The normative ideal of socialism, equality between people, continues to resonate even though socialism is methodologically discredited, its institutions overwhelmingly thought ‘not to work’. The methodological ideas of conservatism (Krygier’s example) about the unanticipated and often unwelcome consequences of radical change provide useful insights, even for people who might find conservatism’s ‘normative’ aspects, such as support for religious values, unappealing
Mark Pennington’s book Robust Political Economy puts him in the school of classical liberal thought that emphasises methodological claims. Mainly following Friedrich Hayek , Pennington focuses on the institutional implications of limited human cognitive capacities and, to a lesser extent, limited moral motivations. The strands of classical liberalism or libertarianism that make normative rights-based arguments are largely absent from his book, while the normative arguments of left-liberalism, as found in the work of John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin, are present but criticised on methodological grounds. Pennington’s liberalism is one that starts with Adam Smith and David Hume, rather than John Locke.
Andrew Norton 