Friedrich Hayek has been accused of many things. His fans have eulogised him as the greatest 20th-century philosopher of classical liberalism, as a deep thinker who exposed the innate flaws in planned economies and who provided the intellectual foundation for the reform programmes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
His detractors have called him an apologist for the dictatorship of General Pinochet, the inspiration of today’s ethnonationalist hard right and who provided the intellectual foundation for the (evil, neoliberal) reform programmes of Thatcher and Reagan.
But I do not know anyone, friend or foe, who has ever accused Hayek of being a good writer.
This is particularly evident in his epic work, ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’. Published in three volumes over six years from 1973 to 1979, with the writing process beginning over a decade before, as you might be able to guess from the book’s sprawl, repetitiveness and occasional inconsistency.
Even Hayek at his best was unlikely to win any prizes for fluency of prose. ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ is not Hayek at his best.
Take the following, fairly typical, Hayekian sentence, which opens the section titled ‘General Welfare and Particular Purposes’, from chapter seven of the book:
Though the maintenance of a spontaneous order of society is the prime condition of the general welfare of its members, and the significance of these rules of just conduct with which we are chiefly concerned, we must, before we further examine these relations between rules of individual conduct and welfare, briefly consider another element of the general welfare which must be distinguished from one in which we shall mainly be interested.
Is this the worst piece of writing by an influential 20th-century philosopher? No, I’ve read Judith Butler. But does it make you desperate to slog through another 600 pages of this stuff? You tell me.
However, as Eamonn Butler points out in a new guide to ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs this week, a book can be great without being good.
There was certainly much to learn from ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ when it was published. And unfortunately, it has only become more relevant since.
The core theme of the book is the idea of ‘cultural evolution’. This is the notion that the social structures and conventions around which civilisation is built are not the product of a particular government or leader, but have emerged through centuries of trial and error. They have survived because they have helped the communities which have adopted them survive and prosper.
In this, Hayek shared something in common with conservative writers from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott. But there are differences in emphasis. Individual freedom was central to Hayek’s notion of cultural evolution. He had already argued in ‘Why I am not a conservative’, his epilogue essay to ‘The Constitution of Liberty’, that too many conservatives were willing to embrace the arbitrary and coercive power of the state in order to achieve their preferred ends at the expense of individual freedom.
He was also not arguing for a blind adherence to the status quo. Challenging norms and experimenting with different ways of doing things is, in Hayek’s view, essential if we are to respond to challenges that emerge over time. But this process should be based on trial and error by individuals or groups of individuals rather than imposed through state force. If the experiment is successful and helps those embracing it to lead prosperous and happy lives it will, Hayek argues, spread naturally through society. The intervention of the state interferes with the Darwinian mechanism by which the best ideas spread.
By assuming the state knows best and seeking to impose change and enforce it through increasingly coercive bureaucracies. Hayek argues that when activists or elites attempt to reengineer society in the interests of ‘social justice’ (a term he seems to have particularly despised), the results are certain to fall far short of their hopes due to the innate limits of human knowledge.
Worse than this, they risk destroying exactly the sort of social and cultural institutions that allow for experimentation and spontaneous improvement.
The most extreme examples of this process might be the agricultural collectivisation efforts of successive communist governments in the 20th century, which destroyed both the incentive structure and the base of tacit knowledge on which peasant agriculture functioned. But there are more subtle ways this can operate.
In many European countries, including the UK, increasingly tight employment regulations attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to the workplace, with governments determining more and more aspects of an employment contract. Hayek would not have objected to the emergence of a general social convention around, say, ‘the right to disconnect’ or flexible working, but it should be the product of experimentation and success by firms, not bureaucratic decrees.
Similarly, the tendency to address the issue of carbon emissions through plans, targets and industrial policy. Hayek was not opposed to the idea that the state should play a role in regulating or taxing the negative externalities created by various forms of pollution, but to set out targets in exact percentage terms on the number of electric cars or heat pumps would strike him as the height of hubris.
‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ carries a crucial message for a time when centrist politicians are more committed than ever to managing economies and people and when the hard Left and hard Right are dreaming of tearing everything down in pursuit of their own grand schemes built on state coercion. Now is a good time for a lesson in humility.
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