Foreword — Summary

This file is a brief foreword. Shackle’s scope is prefatory and conceptual: he frames Mr Shand’s book as a major survey of subjectivist thought, while also offering his own compressed statement of what subjectivism means for economics, knowledge, markets, prediction, and liberty.

The central thesis is that human affairs begin not with objective givens or mechanical causes, but with individual imagination. People act by forming rival possibilities in thought and choosing among them under uncertainty. Shackle’s subjectivism is therefore both epistemological and ontological: the future is not merely unknown, but partly made by choices whose consequences cannot be known beforehand.

It is amongst such alternatives, creations of his own thought, that he must choose.

This makes choice creative rather than merely calculative. The individual does not select from a fixed menu supplied by the world; possible actions arise through imagination. Shackle sharpens the point by denying any external source of choosable alternatives.

There is no other source from which rival, choosable actions can present themselves.

From this premise follows Shackle’s account of social order. The chosen actions of many individuals interdepend, collide, and generate results no one can foresee. The market matters because it disseminates knowledge after events occur, not because it abolishes uncertainty.

This means is the market, the spontaneously evolved facility for all-encompassing exchanges of goods.

Yet the market’s epistemic power is limited by time. It can reveal some consequences only once they have happened; actions directed toward the distant future remain beyond present verification. Shackle thus treats economics as a discipline of imagination, time, and unknowability, not as a science of complete prediction.

His first explicit implication is non-determinism. The individual is not a passive conduit of causes but a creative agent whose imagined possibilities enter history.

Subjectivism credits the individual with the power of the alchemist who can throw into his crucible whatever his fancy has invented but knows not what will emerge.

The alchemist metaphor captures Shackle’s distinctive move: invention is real, but its outcome is not mastered. Human action is productive of novelty and therefore resistant to deterministic closure. This leads directly to his second implication.

Secondly, therefore, subjectivism asserts that history-to-come is unpredictable.

The relevance of this claim is political as well as methodological. Central control cannot make human affairs finally predictable; it can only suppress the dispersed invention through which economic and social life renews itself.

Human affairs could not be made ultimately predictable by any centralised coercion, but the proliferant germination of ideas in millions of brains could instead be killed by it.

The foreword’s final movement turns from doctrine to commendation. Shackle presents Shand’s book as a wide-ranging survey of subjectivist themes, moving from Plato to Hayek, and especially strong on liberty. His praise is not neutral: he senses in the work a “drum-beat of conviction,” and he values it because it shows economics as inseparable from human agency, freedom, and imagination.

His book can provide endless suggestions for thought, reading and original work, and shows economics as an enterprise of mind going to the heart of human concerns.

The foreword’s importance lies in this condensation of Shackle’s mature subjectivism. It defines subjectivist economics as a theory of imagined alternatives, uncertain consequences, emergent order, and the moral necessity of freedom. Markets coordinate and reveal, but they do not eliminate futurity; freedom enables invention, but invention prevents prediction. Shackle’s core conceptual move is to make uncertainty not a defect in economic knowledge, but the very condition of human action.