From a 'Classical' Liberal:
AYRES, C. E.
From a 'Classical' Liberal The Constitution of Liberty. By Friedrich A. Hayek. University of Chicago. 570 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University of...
...Whereas Road, notwithstanding its parade of historical analogy, was largely undocumented, the references and footnotes to the present volume fill 116 pages of fine print...
...But if he were to work his way through the whole book, he might be somewhat puzzled...
...His mind was formed under the influence of what is known to economists as "the Austrian school," of which indeed he should be considered a distinguished member, perhaps the most distinguished now living...
...Thus, monopoly is brushed under the rug along with "other minor problems...
...On the contrary, he explicitly identifies himself as a "classical" liberal, "an unrepentent Old Whig— with stress on the 'old,' " and we must remember that it was the Old Whigs who opposed the (Tory) Factory Act of 1837 and the earliest efforts of workers to organize trade unions...
...All Hayek's opinions are scrupulously consistent with this pattern...
...Are excerpts such as these unfair...
...Ever since the days of Karl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, that school has been the world's most rigidly doctrinaire exponent of the glories of free competition and the ineffable significance of price equilibrium...
...No one would deny that the creation of free institutions is difficult...
...But the coercion that alarms him most is that exercised, as he sees it, by trade unions...
...Indeed, ". . . the regular cause of extensive unemployment [i.e., that of the 1930s] is real wages that are too high...
...Moreover, strong unions ". . . tend to become a deterrent to investment—at present second only to taxation...
...Not only vigilance is the price of freedom...
...In its preface he himself described it as "a political book," and so it was...
...He is against rent controls, dubious about public housing and slum clearance, and sternly condemns "the administrative despotism to which town planners are inclined to subject the whole economy...
...Rousseau to the contrary notwithstanding, men are not born free...
...For it is unquestionable...
...By the same token he is against public education ("The very magnitude of the power over men's minds that a highly centralized and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitate before accepting it too readily") and argues that a different distribution of the funds now devoted to public education would enable parents to finance the education of their children in "schools of their choice...
...He would find, for example, that where Hayek is disposed to be tolerant of even the wildest follies of the very rich on the ground that they contribute to "the development of the art of living," he is staunchly opposed to progressive taxation, because he doubts "whether a society . . . which does not regard the acquisition of a fortune in a relatively short time as a legitimate form of remuneration for certain kinds of activities, can in the long run preserve a system of free enterprise...
...Nevertheless, the doctrine is the same, despite the unquestionable sincerity of the author's dedication to liberty...
...In a sense, yes...
...What does concern him in this connection is the tyranny of the antitrust laws...
...Hayek concedes ". . . the right of voluntary agreement between workers...
...Thus, "Whatever true coercive power unions may be able to wield over employers is a consequence of this primary power of coercing other workers...
...I mention these matters because a great many readers have reached maturity since 1944, and because the present book is a sequel to, or perhaps I should say an expiation of, The Road to Serfdom...
...Hayek makes no secret of this...
...A great deal of money had been made during the war and was now available for promoting "good causes," and what better cause than distributing The Road to Serfdom...
...It is part of the strength of civilized society that, by such voluntary combination of effort under a unified direction, men can enormously increase their collective power...
...But of course all union action is bad, since unions can raise the real wages of the employed "only at the price of unemployment...
...But as we have learned to our sorrow, "the simple and obvious system of natural liberty" is neither as obvious nor as simple as it seemed to the classical economists...
...In the fall of 1944, when the book was published, the tide of war was unmistakably turning, and a great many people, especially in this country, were beginning to chafe at wartime regulations...
...Whereas Road was a small book, The Constitution of Liberty is a large one...
...It was also a prodigiously successful one...
...A number of circumstances combined to make this possible...
...Meantime, reactionary influences which had been in eclipse throughout the '30s were beginning to reappear...
...In the first place, the moment was just right...
...to withhold their services," a little reluctantly, to be sure, and with definite reservations...
...Written in England, it had an enormous sale there, but an even larger one here: The original edition went through several printings, and the Reader's Digest published a condensed version which, after being distributed to its millions of readers, was issued as a separate pamphlet and distributed free by various organizations...
...The difference between a free people and a slave state is not the difference between organization and no organization...
...He is against all social security, which ". . . puts a strait jacket on evolution and places on society a steadily growing burden from which it will in all probability again and again attempt to extricate itself by inflation...
...Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University of Texas FRIEDRICH HAYEK is best known to the reading public as the author of The Road to Serfdom...
...Here was a book which condemned not only wartime regulations but all regulations and did so not only on principle but by "proving" with a dazzling display of historical and literary scholarship that the very regulations by which businessmen had so long been irked (indeed, ever since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887) were the root cause of totalitarian tyranny, markers on the road down which the Western democracies had been marching all unknowingly for half a century or more, a road which leads more and more inescapably to the enslavement of mankind to the Tyrant State...
...As Chamberlain of course knew, Hayek is an Austrian expatriate...
...But the most important contrast is the difference of approach...
...What is most abominable about unions is their infringement of "the freedom of the individual to join or not to join a union...
...These opinions all spring from principles, and it would be unfair to cite them without reference to the principles which give rise to them...
...There is no evil in the power wielded by the director of some great enterprise in which men have willingly united of their own will and for their own purposes...
...The Old Whigs did very well in the struggle against the divine pretensions of Stuart kings...
...they achieve freedom by organization...
...The determined reader would find that Hayek is deeply concerned about coercion, as of course befits a devotee of liberty, but he might be surprised to learn what Hayek considers to be its most disastrous manifestations...
...But it takes more than doctrines to make men free...
...In spite of conspicuous differences, the theme is the same...
...Whereas Road was negative, Constitution is affirmative...
...Indeed, if any reader were to begin by reading the concluding chapter (called "Postscript") entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative," or if he were to leaf through the book reading only the extraordinary series of quotations from the world's greatest thinkers with which various chapters are introduced, he would certainly conclude that the author is a genuine and passionate devotee of liberty...
...continuous effort is also required...
...In his foreword to The Road to Serfdom, John Chamberlain identified Hayek with "the great Manchester line," but that is not quite correct...
...And when policy creates a state of affairs in which, as is true of some enterprises in the United States, large firms are afraid to compete by lowering prices because this may expose them to anti-trust action, it becomes an absurdity...
...I am seriously alarmed at the arbitrary nature of all policy aimed at limiting the size of individual enterprises...
...It is rather the difference between tyrannical institutions and liberating institutions...
...the present one is dedicated to the glorious ideal of liberty...
...The earlier book was concerned with the horrid consequences of statism...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 25
