Catallaxy or

catallactics Catallactics is a theory of the way the free market system reaches exchange ratios and prices. It aims to analyse all actions based on monetary calculation and trace the formation of prices back to the point where an agent makes his or her choice ...

is an alternative expression for the word "economy". Whereas the word

economy An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...

suggests that people in a community possess a common and congruent set of values and goals, catallaxy suggests that the emergent properties of a market (prices, division of labor, growth, etc.) are the outgrowths of the diverse and disparate goals of the individuals in a community.

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...

was the first person to define the word "economy" as ‘the art of household management’. As is still a common method of explanation today, Aristotle tried to explain complex market phenomena through an analogy between a household and a state, take for example the modern analogy between the national debt of a country's government and a simple consumer's credit card debt. Aristotle used a common Greek word 'oikonomia' that meant "to direct a single household," and used it to mean the management of an entire city-state. The word catallaxy aims to provide a more accurate and inclusive word for the market phenomenon of groups of households, in which participants are free to pursue diverse ends of their own. After being discussed by

Ludwig von Mises Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (; 29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and Sociology, sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberali ...

the term catallaxy was later made popular by

Friedrich Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek ( , ; 8 May 189923 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian–British economist, legal theorist and philosopher who is best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Haye ...

who defines it as "the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market". Catallaxy may also be used to refer to a marketplace of ideas, especially a place where people holding diverse political ideologies come together to gain deeper understanding of a wide range of political orientations. Catallaxy also becomes a new dimension in software design and

network architecture Network architecture is the design of a computer network. It is a framework for the specification of a network's physical components and their functional organization and configuration, its operational principles and procedures, as well as commun ...

. Eymann, T., Padovan, B.and Schoder, D. in a Conference Paper at the 16th IFIP World Computer Congress, Conference on Intelligent Information Processing, Beijing/ PR China, August 21-25, 2000

References

{{reflist Austrian School Self-organization de:Katallaxie es:Catalaxia fr:Catallaxie pl:Katalaktyka ro:Catalaxie ru:Каталлактика

See also

References