The Grounds of Planning PART I: John O’Neill on the Socialist Calculation Debate

What does it mean to plan an economy rationally—and who gets to decide what counts as rational? In part one of this series on planning, Jacob Blumenfeld speaks with political economist and philosopher John O’Neill about the socialist calculation debate and its legacy. Starting from Otto Neurath’s plans for socialization and in-kind calculation, the conversation revisits the classic critiques of planning advanced by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, while questioning the very assumptions about rationality, value, and knowledge on which those critiques rest. Against the idea that markets, money, and prices provide a neutral or exhaustive measure of social reason, O’Neill reconstructs a forgotten strand of the debate—one centered on value pluralism, incommensurability, and the material conditions of human need. The discussion ranges across ecology, intergenerational justice, expertise and democracy, pseudorationality, and the limits of formal and instrumental reason, drawing on figures such as K. William Kapp, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, and Otto Neurath as well. Rather than asking whether markets or planning “won,” the episode asks what was lost when rationality was reduced to optimization, information, and price signals, and how alternative conceptions of planning might help us think through today’s ecological and social crises. But before the interview begins, Rahel Jaeggi and Jacob Blumenfeld discuss the “Grounds of Planning” workshop from December 2025, organized by the Centre for Social Critique, and some of the key themes concerning needs, rationality, and democracy.