The Mirage of Sodcial Justice

...First, unlike a real game, we enter the economic "game" on radically unequal terms...

...No doubt he enjoys some satisfaction from scoring points off an old antagonist, Hans Kelsen, whose "positivist" theory of law he evidently loathes beyond measure...

...For all the power of her mind and personality, she might have been no more than another Simone de Beauvoir, full of trendy glooms and grievances, had she not been so out of phase with her surroundings...

...The question remains: is the free market compatible with democratic government...

...These unhappy reflections arise from reading the new book by one of our century's greatest political economists, P r o f e s s o r F.A...

...Then she became an agricultural laborer on the same grounds...

...certainly we are no longer able to think r i g o r o u s l y about real-world economic phenomena...

...Everything had in fact been returned except one book and Hadassah magazine...

...Volume 3 is scheduled to appear as The Political Order of a Free Society, a title which, had I not read the present work, would have aroused expectations of a masterpiece, a true summa of this Nobel laureate's maturest thought...

...Napper, astonished to learn we were still at the airport, informed me that we were in "the lock-up" and promised to look into the case at once...

...One assumes he figures that philosophical treatises of the sort at hand may help to persuade men of the desirability of abandoning their present course and returning to the disciplined way of the market...

...BOOK REVIEW Simone Well: A Life SimonePdtrement / Pantheon / $15.00 Anne Crutcher In a sense, it is because she was such an anachronism in her own time that Simone Well is still news in ours...

...We felt immersed in a sea of hatred and fear...

...Law " i s " this-or-that, he often says, when in fact he means that, ideally conceived, law would be such-andsuch...

...The demand for "social justice," he remarks, seems in particular to have been embraced by a large section of the clergy of all Christian denominations, who, while increasingly losing their faith in a supernatural revelation, appear to have sought a refuge and consolation in a new "social" religion which substitutes a temporal for a celestial promise of justice, and who hope that they can thus continue their striving to do good...

...Today we may or may not be standing on the threshold of a new Dark Age, but I count it as wholly justified when exasperation gets the best of us as we listen to the croaking of intelligent, highly educated frogs who ought instead be helping us to check the wiring and screw in new light bulbs...

...Then it became a determination to eat no more than the ration in Nazi-occupied France...

...She was inclined by nature toward discourse on eternal abstractions, toward mortifications of the flesh, and toward an overpowering concern for human suffering...

...Hayek may well argue, of course, that his concern in this book is with principles and that these are unaffected by the developments I cite...

...We are thrown into it as gladiators into an arena, and for stakes as high as survival itself...

...Both religious and secular issues are addressed...

...and appears to be even more tedious than its successor...

...Among the several fatal flaws in Hayek's analogy let me cite only three...

...Second, we normally have free choice as to whether or not to participate in a real game...

...A sample copy may be had for $1...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 23 Consider one of the central propositions of the entire book, Hayek's insistence that "the impersonal process of the market...is a procedure which...in all important respects (except that normally it is not pursued solely as a diversion) is wholly analogous to a game, namely a game partly of skill and partly of chance...

...some respects the most troubling, because it betokens so broad and impenetrable a blind spot in Hayek's conception of the social order...

...We were brought to the British Airways desk at about 5:20 p.m...

...His chapter entitled " ' S o c i a l ' or Distributive Justice" contains a number of splendid insights, of the kind we have come to expect from our premier free-market theorist...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, Hayek's discussion of the market order itself is not very helpful...

...But of course he offers no evidence or reasoning to support that gentle hope...

...Hayek appears to understand this, especially in the following passage: But a government dependent on public opinion, and particularly a democracy, will not be able to confine such attempts to supplement the market [i.e., minimum welfare for the needy] to the mitigation of the lot of the poorest...

...While Simone P~trement does not think her friend willed her death, she admits that it was the logical outcome of years of not eating, coupled with other self-imposed hardships...

...But it was not until the Great Depression of the 1930s that Washington began to concern itself with the poor and to enact income support programs of one sort or another...

...to suggest otherwise is as heartless as it is false...

...Yet even this insight is marred by the faulty, clearly aprioristic, historical account which leads up to it...

...and spent a full hour there until a group of five men appeared, forming a protective circle around two small plastic bags which contained--not explosives, but the items that had been confiscated the previous night...

...One wonders what he thought he was adding, in this new book, to the substance of those great essays in political economy, The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty...

...At 6:20, we were taken by a border guard to the outermost boarding area of the airport and there made to wait, with him, in sub-freezing temperature, until 8:30, when we were put on the plane to London...

...May we eat...

...That is true and important, though I should have been happier if he had at least sketched in the dynamics of the process rather than merely referring to the driving force of principles, a highly speculative agent at best...

...The subtitle of the preceding section reveals the fallacy: "From the care of the most unfortunate to the protection of vested interests...

...Finally, it was to live on as little as the prisoners in concentration camps...

...As we were led through the snow, my wife showed me that every single snowflake fallen on my dark coat was a perfect, six-pointed figure, the ubiquitous star of David...

...Emphasis added...

...A/1 games are played within a delimited space according to known or ascertainable rules by a fixed group of players who have assented to those rules, and while it is in progress the game is a world unto itself...

...Ironically, it was only in the last two years that she began moving toward the church that would have been so natural a context for her preoccupations in another era...

...24 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization...

...The coroner ruled it suicide by voluntary starvation...

...My wife asked, might she use the bathroom...

...So the sense of Hayek's proposition remains true --once a democratic government starts handing out goodies it will find it almost impossible to refrain from widening the circle of beneficiaries--but the actual historical process he has got backwards...

...Various points of view are represented...

...Hayek...

...At 2:00 he told me that the matter was more complicated than he had thought because the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs was involved and considered ours a "quasi-criminal" case...

...She was, of course, cast in the mold of a 14th-century saint of the more intellectual sort--a Catherine of Siena, if you will...

...Born into a Anne Crutcher is an editorial writer for the Washington Star...

...A year's subscription is $6...

...Moreover, a number of separate but greatly portentous developments have occurred in that interim the consequences of which cry out for analysis...

...As it was, a temperament from an alien moral milieu animated the mind and will, and it was given to Simone Well to see and bear witness to verities not commonly understood by the best people during her lifetime...

...Write: New Oxford Review, Dept...

...the three together were not...

...By the measures it takes it will produce opinions and set standards which will force it to continue on the course on which it has embarked...

...You'll find quality articles and reviews by such well-known people as: John P. East John Lukacs Jeffrey Hart Thomas Molnar John H. HalloweH Paul Seabury Donald W. Treadgoid Harold L. Weatherby Frederick D. Wllhelmsen Moreover, you'll encounter many exciting younger writers, for example: Richard Bishirjian, A. Lawrence Chickering, Justus D. Doenecke, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Paul B. Henry, A. James McAdams, Steven C. Munson, and Dale Vree...

...At 4:55, two Intourist women and two border guards came to the door of our room and told us we had "five minutes to pack and leave for London...

...And the problem with that is that defenders of the free enterprise system are all too likely to draw the wrong moral from a story that has not quite yet arrived at its ddnouement...

...Hayek / University of Chicago Press / $10.00 Karl O'Lessker It was Gregory the Great or one of his early successors who likened philosophy to the croaking of frogs...

...and most of us would vehemently decline to enter a high-stakes game of pool with Minnesota Fats or a foul-shooting contest with Pete Maravich...

...But in the market "game" no such choice exists...

...For certainly the title of the work under review promises, but does not deliver, the kind of thinking we so badly need and which Hayek is so superbly equipped to offer us...

...We were, of course, never allowed to eat, to use the bathroom, or to get our unused vouchers endorsed for refund...

...First the non-eating was explained as a desire to share the sufferings of the oppressed around the world...

...Not chaos, exactly, but perhaps closer to it than to the ordered patterns of anything we should rightly call a game...

...Or to put the matter rather differently, I am inclined to believe that while the House of Philosophy has ample room for the Is, the 0ught-to-be, and the Perhaps, it has none at all for the Wouldn't-it-be-nice-if parading around as the Higher Reality...

...And he speaks of the motives and intentions of "lawmakers" who, in their disinterested quest for justice, never have existed and almost certainly never will...

...Contact was always difficult because nobody would give him or us the phone number of the lock-up, so that I had always to run a sort of gauntlet in order to phone him, which I did at hourly intervals through the afternoon...

...Humanly speaking, there was no glimmer of light in all this darkness...

...There we sat for ninety minutes, having been denied permission to call the American Embassy or even to move about...

...E n t i t l e d The Mirage of Social Justice, it is Volume 2 of "a new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy," the full title of which is Law, Legislation and Liberty...

...Instead, so infrequently does his analysis touch the teeming earth of real men and women that one can only suppose he deliberately chose to round offhis distinguished career in this relentlessly academic fashion...

...BOOK REVIEW The Mirage of Social Justice F.A...

...Perhaps so...

...The only hint of them is to be found in Simone Well's statement that she was readier to die for the church than to enter it because "dying doesn't commit you to anything...

...My optimism nov~, however, is best described as guarded...

...Yet we did see a sign from a realm not yet under Soviet control that the Jewish conspiracy may be more pervasive than even the KGB imagine...

...That burst of irritation was occasioned by the latest in a seemingly endless succession of fashionable semantic disputes in Imperial court circles in Constantinople--at a time when Western Civilization was crumbling and the Pope struggled almost alone to shore up its ruins against the enveloping darkness...

...A combination of radical politics and French patriotism supplied the framework through most of her life...

...My own view is, if political and economic principles require no reconsideration in the light of mammoth new facts, then they must be almost empty of content...

...It is in the opening chapters particularly that Hayek gives himself over with a kind of passionate abandon to pursuit of Perfect Definitions, slipping in and out of reality as a post-operative patient slips in and out of consciousness...

...Religion, culture, above all politics (to cite only a few of the myriad externals) penetrate and distort it almost, at times, beyond recognition--rather as if football players were able to jump into a soccer game, bringing their own rules with them and being careful only to avoid the baseball players who are taking batting practice at midfield and becoming increasingly restive under the taunts of hordes of officials who keep changing the rules...

...It goes without saying that no book by Hayek can be entirely worthless...

...Or, for that matter, in the years since 1943, when Simone Well died at 34...

...Perhaps Hayek was at all times clear in his own mind as to when he was being normative and when descriptive...

...She now surprised us by supplying the phone numbers of the American Embassy and (suddenly recovering her English) told us we could phone from the "transit hotel...

...Although we had a great deal of luggage with us, and had slept and eaten hardly at all since leaving Seattle, we were made to carry everything out of the building by ourselves--doors slamming on us all the while - - a n d then over the ice 200 yards back to the airport...

...But the rest of us may be forgiven for caring a great deal less about the definition of "law" than about the kinds of laws that have actually been passed...

...For in fact it was quite the reverse, at least in the United States and probably elsewhere as well: the Federal government's e a r l i e s t altruisms were directed toward the "vested interests," in the form of what we have come to call "distributive benefits" (primarily subsidies...

...The child born into a peasant or unskilled-laborer family has virtually no chance to compete in any meaningful sense with the child of a merchant or professional family...

...My own view, to the contrary, is that if indeed Hayek had any such instrumental aim in mind he would have done far better to give us a fully revised edition of The Road to Serfdom...

...The third fatal flaw in the analogy is in "To make these points is not to argue that it is possible or even desirable to establish a system in which everyone enters the competition for material goods on very nearly equal terms...

...This was a formidable task because she persisted in shouting to her cronies whenever I spoke, and the line itself was constantly crackling with noise...

...And this of course is the problem of reasoning from false analogy--as Aquinas pointed out some few years ago...

...And a few paragraphs later he adds the sober judgment that "the prevailing belief in 'social justice' is at present probably the 6~ ctnlt Attention: Traditionalists If you think it's time for cultural and religious traditionalists to have a magazine of their own, you'll want to try the New Oxford Revlew--a monthly published by Anglo-Catholics for an ecumenical audience...

...She wanted to know what it was like to be one of the factory workers she and her communist friends were so eager to help...

...to cite only four, consider the environmental movement, the proliferation of computers, the rise of multinational corporations, and the huge increases in the price of energy, especially of oil...

...The problem is this...

...At 11:30 we were permitted to buy breakfast (with dollars...

...Any two of these characteristics might be compatible," Hirsch insists...

...But the market "game" is simply not distinguishable in that sense from its environment...

...The death she did die may or may not have committed her to anything, but it was rich in medieval overtones...

...We met no upsurge of humanity or even humor in any of the Russians who dealt with us...

...The closest approach to a factually relevant sustained argument comes in the final chapter when he raises what must really be the fundamental question for inquiries of this sort: can the free market survive in a democratic system of government...

...cultivated Parisian Jewish doctor's family in 1909, she had to find 20th-century substitutes for the self-immolations the medieval Christian world would have made so convenient...

...She spent a year working in an automobile factory...

...Now, the business of earning a living may seem like a game to internationally famous university professors, but to the great mass of humanity, even in the relatively affluent West, it is in fact nothing of the sort...

...In my own judgment, the effort to do so would at best be self-defeating, at worst catastrophic...

...But proponents of the free market system ought at least have the grace to avoid false analogies which serve to demean the weak and congratulate the strong...

...A," 6013 Lawton Ave., Oakland CA 94618...

...At one point he even permits himself the pious belief "that 'social justice' will ultimately be recognized as a will-o'-the-wisp"--a recognition which would then presumably permit us to return to a much freer, if not altogether free, market...

...Since they were written, state interventions in national economies have proceeded apace in the so-called Free World...

...We were, however, never to see him because--so we subsequently learned from him--he was detained for two hours at the airport and told lies regarding our whereabouts...

...It is] certain to be driven on by the principles implicit in the precedents it sets...

...No, there will be time at the airport...

...Whether you're concerned about the eroding traditions of Western Civilization or the crisis of faith and practice in the churches, you'll want to become acquainted with the New Oxford Review...

...These began t'o appear as Public Laws in our earliest Congresses...

...The overwork which undoubtedly contributed to Simone Well's early death began as an understandable and attractive aspect of her radicalism...

...Unfortunately, however, he does not develop this enormously weighty proposition but returns instead to the kind of semantic querulousness that occupies most of the book...

...But why...

...Hayek seems unwilling to confront it squarely...

...My last call, at 4:45, was answered by Napper's secretary, who told me he had gone out to the airport...

...I f we so grossly misconceive those economic aspects of the total social order as to denominate them a "game," we simply lose the capacity for anything but a kind of arid technical analysis or hapless moralizing...

...The present work, instead, a hodge-podge of s c a t t e r e d aper~us amidst a desert of tedious semantics, will only bore the uncommited and exasperate the faithful--who, Lord knows, have quite enough to be exasperated about in the darkening world...

...It should not be surprising that these occur at points at which his attention skirts nearest the real world...

...When the books and religious articles were returned, we tried, despite the incessant screaming and badgering, to see whether anything was missing...

...Why, after a lifetime of the most trenchant analysis of the clear and present dangers of collectivism, has this great man committed his precious remaining years to so arid and unprofitable an exercise...

...But Hayek seems indifferent to the distinction...

...but he neglected to make the distinction clear to his readers...

...and at the very least we are entitled to wonder why the author felt constrained merely to reiterate a set of principles which he explicated so brilliantly nearly twenty years ago...

...The child of a profoundly secular environment, she had never prayed until 1941, and, even though, from then on, her intellectual and spiritual life was increasingly Catholic, she never actually entered the church...

...In another recently published book, The Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch argues that the three great commitments of nineteenth-century bourgeois society-to private property, to expanded participation in democratic government, and to income inequalities deriving from a market economy--were an inherently unstable set...

...Volume 1, into which I have only recently looked, is called Rules and Order, Karl O Zessker, professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, is senior editor o f The Alternatiye...

...What scruples kept her from it even Simone P~trement, her longtime friend and biographer, does not know...

...And if it is difficult to know what to make of a work of political philosophy that at almost no point has anything to do with politics, it is even more difficult to account for a discussion of economic philosophy-by a Nobel laureate in economics--that has only the faintest relevance to economics...

...At 12:15 the chief of Passport Control collected us and turned us over to the Intourist woman and the guard...

...All very strenuous The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 25...