Books in Brief

Market Theory and the Price System, by Israel M. Kirzner (Van Nostrand, $6.95). The Keynes Mutiny of the depressed Thirties was not the only revolt against neoclassical economics: In 1933 Professor Edward H. Chamberlin of Harvard and Mrs. Joan Robinson of Cambridge separately reached the conclusion that capitalistic competition was not really competition at all, at least not as practically everybody had been thinking of business rivalry until then. In the Chamberlin-Robinson view, competition (save for wheat farmers and a few other limited cases) was rather impure, imperfect, oligopolistic, and downright—however incongruous— monopolistic . . . which Marx and Engels had argued all along. The Chamberlin-Robinson view still dominates contemporary economic thought, as a glance through the textbooks of Samuelson, Bach, and McConnell or a look into the applied anti-trust theory of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, will confirm. Most welcome, then, is this sharp, theoretical volume by NYU economics professor Israel M. Kirzner, a pupil of Ludwig von Mises, who does a much-needed job of recasting competition theory. The Kirzner study is based on the premise that under free enterprise and freedom of entry, competition is always a concomitant of entrepreneurship, even when the market (i.e., the consumer) elects a single entrepreneur. For even with a singlefirm industry, a single seller, in short any sort of Government privilege, even with a “monopoly” (if without franchise, subsidy, tariff, or other protection), potential competitors, let alone those with substitute products, watch from the wings for a misstep, anxious to replace a one-firm show which may let down the audience, the very sovereign consumers.

W. H. PETERSON

Featured Tags

Federal Trade Commission

Department of Justice

Market Theory and the Price System, by Israel M. Kirzner (Van Nostrand, $6.95). The Keynes Mutiny of the depressed Thirties was not the only revolt against neoclassical economics: In 1933 Professor Edward H. Chamberlin of Harvard and Mrs. Joan Robinson of Cambridge separately reached the conclusion that capitalistic competition was not really competition at all, at least not as practically everybody had been thinking of business rivalry until then. In the Chamberlin-Robinson view, competition (save for wheat farmers and a few other limited cases) was rather impure, imperfect, oligopolistic, and downright—however incongruous— monopolistic . . . which Marx and Engels had argued all along. The Chamberlin-Robinson view still dominates contemporary economic thought, as a glance through the textbooks of Samuelson, Bach, and McConnell or a look into the applied anti-trust theory of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, will confirm. Most welcome, then, is this sharp, theoretical volume by NYU economics professor Israel M. Kirzner, a pupil of Ludwig von Mises, who does a much-needed job of recasting competition theory. The Kirzner study is based on the premise that under free enterprise and freedom of entry, competition is always a concomitant of entrepreneurship, even when the market (i.e., the consumer) elects a single entrepreneur. For even with a singlefirm industry, a single seller, in short any sort of Government privilege, even with a “monopoly” (if without franchise, subsidy, tariff, or other protection), potential competitors, let alone those with substitute products, watch from the wings for a misstep, anxious to replace a one-firm show which may let down the audience, the very sovereign consumers.

W. H. PETERSON