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WHILE SOCIETY IS BECOMING MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE WAY WE ARE USING UP OUR NATURAL RESOURCES AND DESTROYING THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE OF NATURE, THERE IS A LACK OF DOING ANYTHING EFFECTIVE ABOUT IT. THE AUTHOR ASSERTS THAT THIS DIFFICULTY EXISTS BECAUSE ANY EFFECTIVE ACTION WOULD CONTRADICT THE CONCEPT AND INSTITUTION OF INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY. THIS WILL HAVE TO BE SOLVED BY OUR POLITICIANS.

Professor Carmichael's critique appears to demolish my reading of Hobbes so completely, and contains such minute reasoning, that readers will be apt at least to carry away the impression that there can be no smoke without fire. In this case, there is. As I shall show, Carmichael's most confident judgments, and his essential arguments, are without foundations.

I am grateful to Professor Wand for devoting so much space to my "conceptual apparatus." I should have been more grateful if he had got it more nearly right. His criticism of my concepts, particularly of the central concept of powers, is so wide of the mark that one wonders about his concept of criticism. The puzzle is how he can pronounce with such assurance his "grave charges" that my thought is confused and misleading. The answer I shall suggest is partly (a) that he has not paid attention to my definitions, and partly (b) that he has tried to fit my argument into a conceptual framework – his own – which he assumes has some absolute validity. Perhaps (b) accounts for (a): he was perhaps unable to read what I wrote because it does not fit his conceptual scheme. Let me take in reverse order his criticisms of the three concepts he deals with.

Professor Crowley's "Comment on Professor Macpherson's Interpretation of Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom" is beguilingly titled. But my article was not an "interpretation." Interpretation is an exercise which, as Professor Crowley rightly implies, involves reading some assumptions into the text that is being interpreted. What I offered, on the contrary, was logical criticism of quite specific arguments of Friedman's, criticism which did not depend on speculation about his unstated assumptions. It is Professor Crowley who offers an interpretation, both of Friedman and of me, based on speculation about our assumptions. It is interesting, but it does not constitute the criticism of my arguments that Professor Crowley thinks it does. I have no quarrel in principle with speculation about assumptions: I am the last person to deny the usefulness of reading between the lines where that is necessary to clarify a text. But Friedman's text is quite clear. I thought mine was too: at least I addressed myself directly to Friedman's. Professor Crowley does not address himself as directly to mine. His criticism is sometimes not a criticism of what I wrote, but of what he, diverted by his own speculations, thought I must have meant (or of what he would have meant if, inconceivably, he had written what I wrote).