In our first post on Locke, we talked about his examination of the concepts of ideas and sensations in Locke's thinking and the passive mind that copies or reflects external reality. Locke talked of value as being reflected as the external “use-value” of an item or object being outside of a person. At the same time, Locke talks of idea as being the internal sensation or reflection of that use value. Again, it is important to note that these ideas as reflected in use values will be the same for all individuals using reason.
From this point forward, Commons talks of moving from value to valuing. The verb valuing means that the human person is the interpretation and reinterpretation of those items of use value. Human beings think forward about what can be done with the objects. This the key reference to the valuing process that will be crucial to Commons project.
Commons also makes reference to the fact that Locke can’t deal with the concept of power. He could only view power through the concept of moving physical objects. For Commons , power is the reality that a human being choose between options. The choice is a reflection of power in that situation and a reflection of the Will. Commons is typically capitalizing the word Will because I think he wants us to understand the importance of that concept in his development of economic theory.
A long quote from Commons here, “Had he (Locke) applied his experimental instead of the introspective method to psychology, as he and his contemporaries had applied it to physics, then, instead of following a physical analogy for his explanation of the will, he might have observed that the Will—his idea of Power—is a process of repeatedly choosing and acting upon the best alternative actually accessible at the time. These alternatives are also continually changing in their activity, their meanings, and their relative importance. Nothing like this occurs in physics, optics, or astronomy. Converted into terms of Will, his meaning of Power is a functional relation between the whole of the living body and the external world, wherein the Will is itself a process of choosing between different degrees of power over the world and other people, according to those meanings and valuings which are the relative importance attributed to the available alternatives.” (pg. 19, IE)
Here, Commons is talking about a dynamic process where the human being is processing external information and turning that input through the valuing process into thoughts and sensations with an orientation towards future moves. Further, we can see that this valuing and choosing process may be altered over time and place in a dynamic motion.
Commons talks further about this process of dynamic choice, “This functional concept of a choice involves, indeed, also a physical process, but one entirely different from that of the science of physics. It involves, in one and the same act, the threefold dimension of performance, avoidance, and forbearance: performance, the exertion of physical or economic power in one direction; avoidance, the rejection of the next best alternative performance; and forbearance, the choice of a lower as against a higher degree of power in the actual performance.” (pg. 19, IE)
Overall, we see that Commons had a sophisticated theory, playing off of some of the ideas of John Locke in this case, of how human cognition took in information and used that information in a dynamic process to make decisions about choices and the use of power. This will be a critical foundation for much of Commons theory of institutional economics.
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