Musgrave and the Idea of Community

Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values: Revisiting the history of welfare economics, edited by Roger Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard and Tamotsu Nishizawa. Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming, May 2021.

26 Pages Posted: 24 Nov 2020

See all articles by Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

Université de Lorraine; Centre Walras-Pareto, Université de Lausanne

Date Written: October 5, 2020

Abstract

Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) is the architect of modern public finance. Born and educated in Germany before he moved to the United States in 1933, Musgrave was a widely read intellectual who fought throughout his long career attempts to narrow down the scope and the methods of economics. He had always been critical of what we now call welfarism, and more generally of strict methodological individualism. This chapter reviews the history of Musgrave’s connection with the idea of community. Musgrave’s limited opening—often implicit—for the idea of community provides a basis for an alternative conception of welfare. He came to realise the importance of a social or communal frame late in his life and left readers with cursory remarks to ponder upon. Musgrave never fully articulated a coherent vision of what the idea of community belonging might entail for a democratic theory of the government’s budget. Yet, securing an ontological status for societies or communities, besides individuals, allowed him to theorise a larger scope of public interventions than other economic models of the state. It provided a new meaning to his concept of merit wants. This reframing of merit wants as ‘community wants’ is explained by the revival of moral and political philosophy in the 1970s and occasions to revisit older German theories.

Keywords: Richard A. Musgrave, John Rawls, merit goods, merit wants, public goods, methodological individualism, community, communitarianism, public finance, public economics, history of economics

JEL Classification: B29, B30, B41, D60, H10

Suggested Citation

Desmarais-Tremblay, Maxime, Musgrave and the Idea of Community (October 5, 2020). Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values: Revisiting the history of welfare economics, edited by Roger Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard and Tamotsu Nishizawa. Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming, May 2021., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3724801

Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay (Contact Author)

Université de Lorraine ( email )

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Centre Walras-Pareto, Université de Lausanne ( email )

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