A Libertarian's Basic Repertoire

...it rouses man to emulate the deeds of earlier generations...

...To the Saint-Simonians can be traced: most of the significant socialist arguments against liberalism and capitalism...

...Rousseau, Mably, and others in the eighteenth century) went on to assert that the only hope for harmony, rationality, and justice in their own societies was that some new Legislator should come forward to undertake a new Grand Design...

...It does not teach indolent quietism...

...From this viewpoint, it is not surprising that Hayek by no means shares the animus of many other classical liberals and libertarians to traditions and "prejudices...

...every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as 'progressive' political views...

...Hayek is entirely of this spirit (beneath the extraordinary care and subtlety of his writing, excitement at the prospect of exploring and experimenting with new ways of living again and again breaks out in the content...

...Conceding that conservative writers have often shown a greater appreciation of the true theory of the growth of workable social institutions than have many liberals, he finds, nonetheless, that "the admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past...

...That one group of thinkers should at the same time be the authors of the idies-mires of all three of the present-day world blocs surely marks them as influential almost beyond belief...

...Hayek himself had already written in his essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism" that "the layman, perhaps, is not fully aware to what extent even the popular reputations of scientists and scholars are made by [the intellectual] class and are inevitably affected by its views on subjects which have little to do with the merits of the real achievements...

...For the highest kind of international recognition has now been accorded the acknowledged world leader of the party of freedom, the author of The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty...

...They discovered, as Hayek sums it up, that "our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions—all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct," and that "the origin of institutions" is to be found "not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful...

...It is a large and humbling task and, discouragingly, there do not appear to be many Hayeks in the future...

...Richard Weaver's frequently-cited dictum that "ideas have consequences" (or Keynes' statement that "the ideas of economists and political philosophers...

...It is crucial to recognize, however, that to the degree that coercion was involved in the origin and perpetuation of such arrangements, the argument for their superiority falls to the ground...

...After all, we are, as Hayek says, "the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution...

...Our institutions and customs thus condense the sifted results of infinitely more experiences, occurring under vastly more varied circumstances, than any arrangements which a single individual could hit upon...

...In particular, many classical and modern writers found that the institutions of ancient Sparta, which gave the appearance of having been custom-made to generate a certain type of human being (looked on as highly admirable), could only be explained as having been planned by a single great Law-Giver, whom legend knew by the name of Lycurgus...

...By around 1800 the prestige of the natural sciences was enormous, and rightly so...

...In reflecting on the role of tradition, Mises once wrote: "History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come...

...the advocacy of rule by a New Class of state-managers, technicians, and intellectuals (who today stand with their feet on the necks of hundreds of millions of working people in the Third World and elsewhere...

...For, in that case, the minds contributing to the institutions were essentially those of the coercers, and those coerced were used simply as agents and executors of the aims of the first, the potential contributions of their own minds being forestalled by force...

...This inner bond between conservatism and socialism may be less visible in the United States than elsewhere, since here those who call themselves "conservatives" sometimes share the libertarian position on economic questions (although even this is often not the case: witness, for instance, subsidy-crazed Southern Democrat members of Congress, who are termed "conservatives," one supposes, in virtue of their abiding faith in bloated defense budgets and their authoritarian "social" views...

...respect freedom, which prepares all good things...

...Hayek here is echoing Benjamin Constant, the great French liberal, who in 1814 wrote what to me seems like the final, wisest judgment on the question of "tradition" vs...

...consent to the fact that many things will develop without you...

...are more powerful than is commonly understood—indeed, the world is ruled by little else") was never truer than of the school of nineteenth-century French positivism...

...As Hayek puts it: "I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion...

...From now on, it will be more difficult to look upon libertarianism as an ideological oddity that surely must have died with Herbert Spencer...

...In this, Hayek's fundamental thinking is a rejection of what has been called the "Lycurgus myth" of the origin of social institutions, a conception fostered by certain eighteenth-century writers (Rousseau's Social Contract...

...Hayek has, incidentally, the fine habit of prefacing parts of his books with quotations from authors he loves—especially Tocqueville, Hume, Smith, and Acton—in this way manifesting his continuing effort to interweave his ideas in an organic tradition...

...But the underlying critical difference between the two other positions and the libertarian one, even within the American context, becomes evident when the issue of morality and law arises...

...But—why not...

...Much of Hayek's thinking in the field of social theory has revolved around the problem of the kinds and uses of knowledge in society...

...Although I do notbelieve he has ever specifically said so, it would not surprising if he had been led to reflect on this by his early interest in the question of the viability of central economic planning, raised in the 1920s by his friend and associate, Ludwig von Mises, and dealt with in the volume edited by Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning (1935), to which Mises and others contributed...

...They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavor will emerge...

...Most conservatives, for example, show no concern for the victims of the four hundred thousand arrests in the United States last year on charges involving marijuana...

...That is to say, what is now (valued) tradition was once free innovation and the fruit of the innovating mind...

...In other words, that a man should propose to himself a certain plan, take the steps necessary for its realization, and then find the plan realized is, in a certain sense, unproblematical, and stands in no special need of explanation...

...The similarities between conservatism and socialism are pointed out by Hayek (this is an old story, but a highly interesting and important one: its full presentation would involve outlining the influence of theocratic conservatives like de Maistre and Bonald on the SaintSimonians, and the attack by the British romantic conservatives on the new industrial system, as well as such later developments as "Tory democracy...

...Since "it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes," we have a striking likeness to the socialist, for both are "less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them," both regarding themselves "as entitled to force the value[s they hold] on other people...

...We really do have a world to win...

...Why then draw the line at an arbitrary date and, like frightened and despairing souls, suppose that the best we can do ever after is to shore fragments against our ruins...

...and confide to the past its own defense and to the future its own accomplishment...

...To take an example from language: although English and German may be presumed to be superior to, say, Vo/apilk (the artificial "language" with which its inventor, Johann M. Schleyer, enriched world civilization in 1879), there would be no such presumption in favor of, for instance, Orwell's "Newspeak" if it were to become current...

...We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage...

...that, in general, men, by pursuing their self-interest, further ends which were no part of their intention: these, on reflection, are certainly phenomena that need to be explained...

...This perspective—couched sometimes in terms of the superiority of the British constitution over the French Revolutionary constitutions, of market forces over State-directed mercantilism, of natural over artificial languages, or of similar contrasts—provided the basis for explaining those elements of social reality which "serve human purposes but are not of human design...

...This part of his work merits discussion in some detail...

...The myth that one or a few minds can consciously fashion a much more desirable social order than the "haphazard" and "anarchistic" kind heretofore prevailing became immensely more powerful when designing minds could draw upon the success of modern science...

...This earlier school had come upon the philosopher's stone of social thought: the idea of the spontaneous evolution of social arrangements through a trial and error process over long periods of time...

...Untutored men appear incapable of conceiving of systems of order, whether in nature or society, as anything but the product of conscious design and the fulfillment of a plan sketched out in advance and put into execution by a governing intelligence...

...Traditional customs are "the results of the experience of successive generations...

...Indeed, Hayek's selection came as a surprise to those familiar with the tendency of the international intellectual community to promote the reputations of its favorites often without regard to solid merit...

...Instead, our subject will be certain aspects of Hayek's social thought, as presented in his great book The Constitution ofLiberty (1960) and his extremely interesting and important work The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955...

...In the nature of things, to insist on clear reasons for inherited arrangements is, first of all, to demand the impossible...

...That, on the other hand, a Goethe or a Voltaire should find at his disposal an instrument—the language of a civilized culture—undesigned but almost miraculously suited to his needs...

...Hayek introduces this chapter with a pregnant passage from Lord Acton: "At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often have differed from their own...

...The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists isthat it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote," he writes in "The Intellectuals and Socialism," adding: "We must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination...

...Scientism," or modern positivism—the illegitimate extension of the methods of natural science to the study of human action—came into being (as Hayek shows) in Paris, in the circles of the Ecole Polytechnique...

...And, once a more efficient tool [for instance] is available, it will be used without our knowing why it is better, or even what the alternatives are...

...the idea of the need, in the contemporary world, for a hand-in-glove relationship between big business—especially the banks—and government (curious that the medium of Rockefeller power should have originated in the mind of a French scribbler who was at times so poor that he was on the point of starving to death...

...Why Hayek Is Not a Conservative For this reason, Hayek's emphasis on the value of tradition, on the need for the acceptance of rules whose rationality is not immediately demonstrable, and on the destructiveness of a certain type of "rationalism," is not to be understood as placing him in the same camp with conservatives...

...in a sense, Hayek's whole social theory may be regarded as a rejoinder to the sociological outlook underlying attempts to practice central economic planning...

...The Old Whig Tradition In sharp distinction to this line of thought, Hayek harkens to a totally different tradition of social theory, one developed particularly by English and Scottish thinkers of the late eighteenth century, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Edmund Burke, but already implied in the Whig tradition reaching back to the seventeenth century...

...To think that millions of other minds have also added the results of their experiences is an illusion...

...Instead, he observes that people do—and should—trust what is handed down to them...

...The classical liberal or, as we would now say, libertarian view (Hayek's term, "Old Whig," one must reluctantly object, is not likely to catch on), is rather "based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead...

...In the brief space available here, no attempt can be made to treat the whole of Hayek's work (a bibliography, as of 1969, can be found in the Festschrift for him edited by Erich Streissler, et al., Roads to Freedom), and his important contributions to economic theory, in the tradition of the Austrian School of economics, are outside our scope...

...here the style is only part of the man, and one suddenly remembers that this Austrian was also a mountain-climber...

...that money should come into existence to replace barter, or that conventions and codes of etiquette should arise to facilitate social intercourse, although no one planned it that way...

...That a few conservative writers are belatedly coming to the conclusion that marijuana ought to be "decriminalized" (to them it's important to keep the stigma attached) does not invalidate the point, but, on the contrary, confirms it, since it shows that freedom of drug use was never implied in whatever principles they may be said to have (as it assuredly is in libertarian principles...

...In fact, he has been at pains to distinguish his position from theirs, most clearly in the concluding chapter of The Constitution of Liberty, which he chose to entitle "Why I Am Not a Conservative...

...and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving opponents just grounds of opposition...

...The use of such a drug is a perfect example of a social institution which conservatives are not permitting to develop freely and spontaneously...

...and, most particularly, the view that it is the State's affair to transform society in accordance with the "findings" of positivist "social science...

...The issue, in other words, is not one of "tradition" against "progress" (or for or against "change," as people foolishly say), but of freedom against both coerced traditionalism and coerced innovation...

...The reason is that coerced traditional institutions are also essentially "invented" by only a few...

...Hayek suggests drawing on springs of enthusiasm mostly exploited up to now by the Left...

...Paradoxical as it may appear," Hayek asserts, "it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society...

...has some well-known passages in praise of Lycurgus, and this figure dominates the famous and chilling chapter "Of the Legislator"), and which may be said to be endemic to the human mind...

...progress": "Remain faithful to justice, which is of every age...

...It was then that what Hayek calls "the scientistic hubris" was born...

...We must be very careful, however, to understand what kind of traditional arrangements Hayek argues for...

...Hence arose myths, universal among primitive peoples and in the earlier stages of civilization, to explain not only the origins of the universe and the diversity of life, but also how the culture's moral code, religion, language, arts and crafts, etc., were all created by a god or superman...

...This whole conception, Hayek maintains, is not only childishly mistaken, but evades the core problem of the social sciences, which is to determine, as Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School, put it, "how it is possible that institutions which serve the common welfare and are most important for its advancement can arise without a common will aiming at their creation...

...By the way, The Constitution of Liberty, the high-point in a life of earnest and rather powerful thought, is dedicated: "To the unknown civilization that is growing in America...

...Significantly, many of those who accepted this myth (Plato in ancient times...

...The heart of his thesis is that received social institutions must by and large be presumed to contain in coded form more knowledge than a single individual or a few individuals are ever likely to possess, since they are produced by the cooperation over many generations of a very large number of minds...

...Yet I believe that Hayek, who deals with the story brilliantly in The Counter-Revolution of Science, proves that this is the case...

...We are the ones who, it happens, have a better understanding than anyone else of systematic freedom, "which prepares all good things" and is—more even than excellence or love—the meaning and heart of human existence...

...What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism...

...The great news was spread across the telephone network of North America, to numerous select points, creating joy wherever it was received...

...and second, to negate at least in great part their value, since it means condemning present generations to repeat that very trial and error process which produced those institutions...

...and Henri de Saint-Simon and his proteges molded it into a comprehensive theory, set forth its political implications, and then set it into motion as a history-shaping force...

...When on October 9 of last year it was announced that the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics would go to Gunnar Myrdal and F. A. Hayek, a person close to the Nobel awards committee was quoted as remarking that, "Hayek never expected to get it and Myrdal never expected to share it...

...the notion of central economic planning (which Marx and Engels, by the time they started writing some twenty years later, simply took for granted as the economic organizing principle of the future socialist society—hence their silence on that critical question...

...The reader may well be astounded by the claim that the greatest single political and social influence in the world today derives from a source of which he or she may have never even heard—namely Saint-Simon and his followers, especially Auguste Comte...