Market socialism in retrospect SIMON GRIFFITHS London School of Economics I began in the 1970s with fairly ill-defined socialist beliefs that seemed naturally to entail an antipathy to markets as a means of economic co- ordination, a point of view which is I suppose fairly common. I was shaken out of it by encountering, in the middle part of that decade, various libertarian writings that set out polemically, but still powerfully the arguments in favour of markets. These arguments left me with two basic convictions. One was that the libertarian position in itself—the belief in a minimal state and economic laissez faire—was ill founded and untenable. The other was that the pro-market arguments found in libertarian writings were none the less strong in themselves and deserve to convince socialists. 1 ‘Socialism’, wrote Friedrich Hayek, is in its methods concerned with ‘the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of “planned economy” in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.’ 2 Hayek’s description of socialism, written in 1944, was largely uncontroversial. The connection between socialism and economic planning was generally taken for granted across the pol- itical spectrum for much of the twentieth century. 3 Nevertheless, within 40 years of Hayek’s account, several writers on the left of British politics had begun to debate the possibility of combining socialism with the unplanned economics of the market—arguments more commonly associated with economic liberals, con- servatives and the New Right, than with socialists. The attempt to combine markets with socialism achieved its most explicit support in the UK in the late eighties and early nineties, with the revival of ‘market socialism’, a theory which, defined generally, sought to combine social ownership of the means of production with the extensive use of market mechanisms in the economy. 4 By the mid-nineties the concept was much discussed in academia and in think tanks on the left of British politics. A decade later the term ‘market socialism’ is seldom heard. This article offers an explanation for the rise and fall of market socialism in the UK during the final decade of the twentieth century, and examines how the concept compares with older political traditions, particularly more mainstream forms of socialism. I exa- mine the concept through focusing on the work of one of its principal advocates: David Miller—currently Professor of Political Theory at Nuffield College, Oxford. From the mid-seventies until the mid-nineties Miller carefully constructed and ISSN 1356-9775 print=ISSN 1469-3631 online/06=010025-20 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080=13569770600704930 Contemporary Politics, Volume 12, Number 1, March 2006