The Ontological Limits of Market Coordination, A Radical Critique of Mises and Hayek from the Perspective of Finite Continuance

Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek developed influential accounts of market coordination grounded in subjective valuation, economic calculation, dispersed knowledge, and spontaneous order. Their work explains important features of economic interaction, including the informational functions of prices and the difficulties confronting centralized economic planning. This book argues that these explanations leave an ontological question insufficiently developed: under what conditions does an economic order preserve the capacities through which finite human beings can continue their lives, revise their commitments, and reorganize their circumstances when existing arrangements become unviable? Drawing on the philosophical framework of Finite Continuance, the book distinguishes coordinative adequacy from reconfigurative adequacy. The former concerns the capacity of institutions to coordinate decisions and allocate resources; the latter concerns their contribution to preserving the material, bodily, temporal, relational, and practical conditions of future agency. The distinction is developed through a critical examination of subjective value, economic calculation, voluntary exchange, dispersed knowledge, spontaneous order, externalized costs, and the temporal consequences of economic dependence. The book then formulates three evaluative concepts: reconfigurative capacity, the Threshold of Sufficiency, and reconfigurative adequacy. These concepts provide a framework for examining economic arrangements whose immediate coordination may coexist with the progressive depletion of the capacities required for future choice. The argument does not presuppose that markets invariably produce such depletion, nor that centralized planning offers a general solution. It establishes a broader criterion of institutional assessment: an economic order should be evaluated partly by whether those subject to its consequences retain sufficient capacity to continue, recover, refuse destructive arrangements, and choose otherwise. Keywords: Finite Continuance; Mises; Hayek; market coordination; reconfigurative capacity; future agency; economic freedom; institutional erosion; capacity debt; Threshold of Sufficiency; meta-capacity; non-domination