Papers by Laurent Dobuzinskis
Studies in public choice, Dec 31, 2022
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Critical Review, Mar 1, 1992
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University of Toronto Press eBooks, 1996
Twenty-one Canadian political scientists examine policy studies in the country from the beginning... more Twenty-one Canadian political scientists examine policy studies in the country from the beginnings of the field to speculations on future directions in research. The discussions describe influences and theoretical departures based on work investigating government, public administration, and politica
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Final Version Submitted to University of Toronto Press
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Moral Discourse in the History of Economic Thought
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Springer eBooks, 2002
ABSTRACT Modern liberal democracies have been shaped by several currents of thought. Since the fa... more ABSTRACT Modern liberal democracies have been shaped by several currents of thought. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it has become commonplace to underline the liberal half of the liberal democratic hybrid. The globalization of trade and financial transactions has superimposed upon political liberalism, with its emphasis on the discourse of rights, a neoliberal (i.e., market-oriented) economic dimension. However, the democratic half has also been the subject of much attention recently. In several countries, notably France and the United States, the democratic ideal has been reframed in explicitly republican terms. But civic republicanism is given a very prominent place in political and intellectual debates on the future of the nation-state taking place in several other countries, including Australia, Ireland, and Germany.2 (The qualifier “civic” adds little to the meaning of republicanism but it distinguishes it from the ideology of today’s Republican party in the United States with which it has little in common.) Republicanism is a somewhat elusive notion but it can be defined rather succinctly in terms of a commitment to the common good (res publica) and to a particular way of reaching that goal, namely, self-government. Self-government implies equal access by all citizens to public institutions, and participation in deliberative politics. However, these simple words are subject to a wide variety of interpretations, some of which reflect concerns with the effects of globalization.3 In the German context, see, for example, Habermas (1998), Delbrück (1994) and hagedorn (2000). For example, see Dagger (2001); Habermas (1998).
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Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1990
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The Failure of Financial Regulation, 2019
This chapter provides a supportive account of the hypothesis advanced by “Austrian economists” th... more This chapter provides a supportive account of the hypothesis advanced by “Austrian economists” that the crisis was the outcome of “malinvestment,” that is, overinvestment in the housing sector in response to ill-considered regulatory measures adopted by the US government. In other words, it was less a case of a “market failure” than a “government failure.” Not only a lack of regulation but also misregulation can distort markets. The problem stems from the “knowledge problem” first analysed by F.A. Hayek: policy makers often fail to estimate the complexity of the market processes they attempt to control. However, appearing to ignore a problem, for example, by allowing “too big to fail” (TBTF) entities to fail, is politically unfeasible. Hence the cycle of conflicting policy goals and contested regulatory reforms that continue to produce uncertainty in the Western world. This chapter concludes by underlining the risks involved in paying too little attention to the complexities inherent in financial markets.
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Propriety and Prosperity
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The objective of this paper is to introduce the need of a new understanding and conceptualization... more The objective of this paper is to introduce the need of a new understanding and conceptualization for Urban Planning in the global south, with a special focus in the Latin American and Colombian context. It will study emergent transportation networks, always structurers of the urban space, as a lens to observe how informality, inverse urbanization and emergent orders can help understand the nature of cities in the region, and the global ‘south’ in general, together with the need of new ways of looking at them. The emergence of spontaneous, and decentralized, forms of order construction will be analyzed within the lines of New Institutional Economics (NIE). Here it will be discussed that the nature of institutional failure and the emergence of informal governance mechanisms adds to the debate of urban mobility planning and urbanism in general. Hypothesizing, whether informality, ingrained in Colombian cities is an expression of a reality of the impossibility of centralized planning f...
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Over the last three quarters of a century, the discourse on economic and social policy has oscill... more Over the last three quarters of a century, the discourse on economic and social policy has oscillated between two polar opposites: an interventionist approach and a free market-oriented one. The former led to the establishment of the Keynesian welfare state and was dominant in the post-war years, but the latter gained much ground beginning in the 1980s, forcing defenders of the welfare state to retreat into a more defensive position. In the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, however, these two visions are once again sustaining vigorous debates in the global public arena. Economists in their role as policy advisers and public intellectuals, in other words as ‘experts’, have participated actively in such debates; the gains made by (what its critics call) ‘neo-liberalism’ were due, in no small measure, to the growing prestige and influence of Austrian economics. The experts’ discourse tends to be a historical and arguments are often phrased in terms of supposedly ‘cutting edge’ theoretical...
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Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1978
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What is so Austrian about Austrian Economics?, 2010
Today, there is no academic or sociocultural context in which Austrian Economics (AE) is describe... more Today, there is no academic or sociocultural context in which Austrian Economics (AE) is described as being dominant. AE is and remains, for better or for worse, a heterodox current. In the United States, however, but probably nowhere else in the world, AE is heterodox without being ...
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Propriety and Prosperity, 2014
As is well known, Adam Smith spent about two years in Europe, most of it in France. It was in fac... more As is well known, Adam Smith spent about two years in Europe, most of it in France. It was in fact during his stay in Toulouse that he began to work on what became The Wealth of Nations (WN);1 but what proved decisive for the deepening of his understanding of market processes were his encounters in Paris with Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron d’Holbach), Claude Helvetius, Jean d’Alembert, Andre Morellet, Jacques Necker, and especially his discussions with Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Franc;ois Quesnay.2 (Quesnay was universally regarded as the leader of the so-called Physiocrats, who also included Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Riviere, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, and Turgot — but the latter did not rigidly subscribe to the core dogmas of that school.) Although no one denies that Smith was profoundly influenced by these encounters, the question of precisely what debt Smith owed to these thinkers is not central to my purpose here. It is, indeed, a controversial one. Roberts (1935), for example, argued that Smith drew heavily from the writings of Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert whom he would have known through later writers; Du Pont de Nemours and the Marquis de Condorcet, on the other hand, suggested that anything of value in Smith’s WN could be found in what Turgot had written (Groenewegen, 1968, p. 271). But this question is probably impossible to answer categorically, partly because Smith’s manuscript notes were destroyed after his death. To talk about an intellectual debt is to put the matter in terms that are too narrow and could be of interest only to erudite biographers.3
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Canadian Political Science Review, 2008
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World Futures, 1990
ABSTRACT: What happened to the positivist vision according to which the natural and social scienc... more ABSTRACT: What happened to the positivist vision according to which the natural and social sciences could become the source of verifiable knowledge that could serve to subjugate nature to the imperatives of an ever expanding economy, and to guide society toward a rational ...
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Social Indicators Research Series, 2002
Unprecedented levels of instability and uncertainty have been generated by the complexity of even... more Unprecedented levels of instability and uncertainty have been generated by the complexity of events and trends in the contemporary global political economy. To a large extent, at the crux of this instability is the growing political salience of various forces and activities that appear to transcend and impinge not only upon existing political boundaries and forms of economic production and distribution, but also on the values that underpin social institutions and existing modes of social and cultural differentiation. These activities include, but are not limited to, the phenomenal growth in global trade and private capital flows, increased pressures for financial liberalization and the growing instability of national currencies, increased cross-border flows of people and ideas, and the growth of transnational social movements as well as in various illicit activities associated with transnational organized crime.
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Power in the Global Era
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There has been much talk in recent years about not only income inequality but other forms of ineq... more There has been much talk in recent years about not only income inequality but other forms of inequalities as well. The most often cited explanations of the (re)emergence of populism in almost every country are variations on the theme that an increasing number of people resent what they perceive as a widening gap between the “elites,” whatever this term is supposed to mean, and the mythical “people”. Depending on whether the current populist rhetoric originates on the left or the right of the political spectrum, the dreaded “elites” stand for the wealthy (the “1%”) or for the cosmopolitan urbanites (the “anywheres” as opposed to the “somewheres”). As Mikayla Novak (2018, p. 15) notes, some classical liberals consider inequalities to be a normal state of affairs and, therefore, not a problem that needs to be addressed. But—and I would argue quite rightly so—Novak claims that classical liberals ought not to turn away from on-going debates, and indeed they have something important to sa...
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With the constant negotiation and renegotiation of political arrangements between levels of gover... more With the constant negotiation and renegotiation of political arrangements between levels of government in Canada, federalism and intergovernmental relations are never stagnant. From time to time, new political circumstances bring about sudden policy changes which redefine the federal partnership, perennial problems are cast in a new light as new solutions emerge. What used to be obvious no longer is, and unsuspected opportunities open up which political entrepreneurs can seize upon. In this context, the question raised at the workshop "Common Ground: Renewing the Federal Partnership in Quebec and the West," held in Vancouver in March of 2007, was whether the election of the Conservative government, among other factors, has created a new climate for renewing Canadian federalism and, more specifically, whether Quebec and the western provinces will be able to work out their past differences in a new atmosphere of cooperation around issues of mutual interest. Overview With the...
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Papers by Laurent Dobuzinskis