Similarities Between Mill Dewey And Hayek

Democratic community cannot function properly without its members making informed decisions. Mill, Dewey and Hayek propose different mechanisms by which the dispersed knowledge of a community might be collected. Mill introduces arguably the most efficient scheme of collecting knowledge in a large state. Hayek was focused on the daily running of businesses, which therefore required more specific details and argued that aggregation of information will result in details being lost. Dewey focused on the different circles outside of government in life which also require policy but are at a smaller scale which involves more stakeholder involvement. Let’s first look at Mill’s idea of of accruing knowledge for an entire nation. Only then it can be seen that the different mechanisms outlined by different authors have clear benefits and drawbacks depending on the scale and situation in which they are implemented. In Considerations on Representative Democracy Mill claims that representative democracy is the best form of government. Importantly,

Everyone has knowledge that nobody else does. Society must, in order to utilize its resources, develop a way to collect local knowledge and not just universal knowledge. Hayek uses the price system to solve this. “[P]rices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan.” He uses the example of tin and its substitutes saying that if the price of tin rises and people will economize on the fact unknowingly. “The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all” (The Use of Knowledge in