Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty"
Thatcher famously exhorted, regarding this book, that “this is what we believe”. Given the utter vacuity, pompous idiocy, and utopian sociopathy of the text, this is no surprise.
Hayek’s entire universe, from first principles to the more “practical” policy positions of the last chapter, is organizing around securing an essentially limitless autonomy for the capitalist class under the name of “liberty”. However, he is not content to simply let liberty fly as a suitable watchword for his project, largely because his own conception is a rather heterodox formulation presented as a chimeric bastard of utilitarian freedom, Whiggish politics (referring to himself on pain of duress as an “Old Whig” with emphasis on the old), and lukewarm positivism. The first chapter, “The Value of Freedom” (freedom and liberty used throughout rather interchangeably) begins by laboriously defining freedom as “the possibility of a person’s acting according to his own decisions and plans, in contrast to the position of one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another”. This is the core antagonism of Hayek’s thought, presented as a strictly formal distinction between the realm/polity/party of freedom and “authority”/”coercion” which may appear in either socialist, conservative, or liberal guises (this triad itself making up the entire of Hayek’s consideration of the political landscape). At the same time, Hayek is careful to confine liberty to solely exist as an individual ‘gift’, so to speak, bequeathed by a society which operates under the “rule of law”. He is quick to point out that though “freedom and wealth are both good things” we must ignore “all the appeal which the word ‘liberty’ carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth”. In fact, ‘the good’ isn’t a criterion of liberty either: “[i]t is true that to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks”. All in all, the central point is that coercion on the part of a government must be minimized to the greatest degree possible; that is to say, it must appear only as “general, abstract rules” the content of which is “discovered” by “independent courts” who decide on a particular case. This is, thus far, probably unsurprising given the average received knowledge about Hayek’s ideals and those of his acolytes. However, there is a fascinating marshalling of the tenets of Enlightenment liberalism, even and especially those pertaining to the more universal, species-centric elements of the same, entirely in the service of maximizing the operational latitude of the “idle rich” to consume with abandon. Here, progress, in its most naive form as transhistorical winds from the past, is recast as a bipartite “growth of knowledge and the growth of civilization”, which, fine. However, Hayek’s sociopathy prevents him from understanding either as a general good; instead, he remarks that “the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends” - that is, man is born stupid, servile, docile; it is only through an exceptional foresight, willingness to shoulder risk, and willingness to “go fast and make mistakes” in an unknown arena that man elevates himself and thereby the species. The solitary check on these individuals is identified by Hayek as “responsibility”, but not in a legal sense; essentially, this is the recognition on the part of an individual as one in a sea of “reasonable beings” which “bear the consequences of their decisions” - basically, the law is a suggestion and the outcomes of those decisions, which may be technically illegal, can be explained away ultimately and satisfactorily by an appeal to Reason. But even this responsibility “does not mean that we are accountable for our actions to any particular persons” other than laying “ourselves open to censure”. Individual responsibility is only intended to “make us use our own knowledge and capacities to the full in achieving our ends”.
The playfulness of Hayek’s categories of economy, politics, culture, technology, society etc (or rather the utter and unspoken primacy of economy over all others) ultimately means this exceptional man, a one-man avant garde, is over the course of the book revealed to be an abstract subject singularly responsible for technological development, the creation of knowledge, the advancement of the arts, etc. Society and civilization are a story here of singular individuals with the rest of us on their backs, acting out blindly and alone (“the process of the advance of reason rests on freedom and the unpredictability of human action”); the indeterminacy of such is regrettable, maybe, but at least they’re free - and besides, the only greater evil than coercion is social stagnation. “It is because we do not know how individuals will use their freedom that it is so important. If it were otherwise, the results of freedom could also be achieved by the majority’s deciding”. If there is a community of risk-takers to be found, it is in history (but not like that)! History for Hayek is a thin gruel of received knowledge and forgotten secrets which nevertheless inform all activities; unable to displace collectivity and species-being totally from the picture, he ejects it from the present into a historical time. Luckily enough, by secret mechanisms, the advances of the avant garde eventually become the advances of the entire society: “a large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things”. It is this sourceless evolution which compels history forward, redistributes novelties and makes them into necessities, which elevates some and annihilates others:
But, more often than not, major discoveries merely open new vistas, and long further efforts are necessary before the new knowledge that has sprung up elsewhere can be put to general use. It will have to pass through a long course of adaptation, selection, combination, and improvement before full use can be made of it. This means that there will always be people who already benefit from new achievements that have not yet reached others.
This is also a problem of computation, of course, and Hayek repeatedly claims that no one person could possibly employ the entire of economic, scientific, etc knowledge in a fruitful way (precisely why this could not be solved collectively is unknown). Having extirpated the state and its ability to do any long term planning, the human mind is woefully unprepared or unable to undertake long term planning, or even employ “reason in the ordering of social affairs”. Instead, Hayek’s entrepreneur relies on common sense imbued by traditional knowledge, a sort of hybrid of brutally hilarious reification that presents habitus as Wikipedia, lived experience, and collective unconscious all at once. Obviously, this invocation of tradition and fealty (over and above the teachings of “science”) to it suggests a gradualist obsession with limits when the question of changing society is approached; to be sure, changes should never happen under his model of jurisprudence based entirely on the rule of law and the reduction of the state in all its vast institutional existence to the legal status of a single private citizen (albeit one which nevertheless is required to provide security, make war, and build roads).
Finally, when Hayek turns to “practical” matters like housing, the already flimsy conceptualizations he relies on fails. It’s not even worth going into it. He decries the provision of housing as a public good because it would not allow prices to naturally seek a minimal level, and further for not allowing mobility and allowing the possibility of multigenerational property, which chapters before he had identified as crucial for the creation of his capitalist avant garde. Dignifying his positions seems like a full time job on its own.