528 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW SEPTEMBER The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to eco- nomics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and most of our cultural inheritance,and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science.As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection,"It is a profoundly erroneous truism,repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches,that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing.The precise opposite is the case.Civilization ad- vances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."This is of profound sig- nificance in the social field.We make constant use of formulas,symbols and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess.We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up. The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it)after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it.Through it not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utiliza- tion of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible.The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization.It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible.Had he not done so he might still have de- veloped some other,altogether different,type of civilization,something like the "state"of the termite ants,or some other altogether un- imaginable type.All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it-such as particularly the extent to which the indi- vidual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill. VII It is in many ways fortunate that the dispute about the indispensa- bility of the price system for any rational calculation in a complex society is now no longer conducted entirely between camps holding different political views.The thesis that without the price system we