Chapter Four, Freedom, Reason, and Tradition; The Constitution of Liberty

ISBN 0-226-32084-7, University of Chicago Press | 1960 | Friedrich A. Hayek

[KC Burke]

I have four words for us: Optical Character Recognition Software.

I want it, I just don't need it.

[tpaine]

"Names then, aren't all that important; principles are."

Exactly. -- And one of my problems with Hayek is the way he uses names ['rationalist', - 'evolutionist' ] far to often, instead of stressing principle. -

That, and his method of writing in long, strung out, hard to decipher thoughts... I'll try to illustrate by spacing the below... IE:


"--- While the rationalist tradition assumes that man was originally endowed with both the intellectual and moral attributes that enabled him to fashion civilization deliberately,--

-- the evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error;--

-- that it was the sum of experience, in part handed from generation to generation as explicit knowledge, but to a larger extent embodied in tools and institutions which had proved themselves superior—institutions whose significance we might discover by analysis, but which will also serve men's ends without men's understanding them.

The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man's more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed not could control.
They were very far from holding such naïve views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the "natural goodness of man," the existence of "a natural harmony of interests," or the beneficent effects of "natural liberty" (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase).
They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest.

Their problem was "that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own."

It was not "natural liberty" in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure "life, liberty, and property," which made these individual efforts beneficial. ---"
_________________________________

Thus, liberated a bit from Hayeks dense style, we can see that his 'rationalists' do indeed realise that 'self-interest', -- [his "self-love" just above], -- is the ~real~ basis for 'promoting the public interest'.

In other words, -- everyone wins by protecting maximum rights to life, liberty, and property, -- even at the expense of ignoring some of the orderly institutions demanded by the 'evolutionists'.

[KC Burke]

In the later half of this chapter he makes some points in direct agreement and also, in counter-point to what you are saying. If I get the time to add them this week, I will ping you.

Remember, english was his fourth language as I recall.

[betty boop]

KC Burke, to me your post (and subsequent remarks) is a thing of very great beauty. It comes late in the day for me. So I do need to "sleep on it," hopefully to speak with you again in the morning.

Thank you, KCB. May God ever bless you.

[missileboy]

Thanks much - will enjoy reading it.

[Askel5]

“was based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many: it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men. For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great a genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions for the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time.”

Memory. Critical.

That's why I smart somewhat at choosing either between the Gallic (I'm read: "revolutionary") precepts and those of the Anglican (I read: "Reformation").

There's that same hulking black hole of anti-Catholicism where memory ought to be. Catholicism has never held itself out to be the "third way" between any pair of competing ideologies (socialism and capitalism), philosophies or faiths.

But without the Church's clarity and gift for reconciling not only the horizontal nature of man (as equal in dignity) but also the vertical nature of man (as individual and a part -- always -- of one hierarchy or another as patterned on the Family that is the basis of human society), it's absolutely true that quests for Mythic Liberty will necessarily end in either totalitarianism or anarchy as he says.

(Thanks for the post ... I'll keep reading.)

[Askel5]

I've read it a couple times but I refuse to believe I'm understanding part 3. Can you thumbnail that for me?

[Askel5]

Really interesting read, KC. Thanks again for the flag. I did laugh out loud at a couple lines.

I may go post it among the atheists for whom wry (and bitter) irony has supplanted all notion of the paradoxical.

[Dumb_Ox]

"One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion"

I worry that this is too empty a notion of freedom; while there is certainly some value in negative liberty, without more positive content, such as that which a good ethical system can provide, anomie threatens.

What's more, it seems to me that a freedom that is the absence of coercion must treat law as solely a check upon license. Law is for the wicked, liberty is for the good, and as Lincoln so pithily said, one cannot have a right to do a wrong.

(But now the question: what about laws that make one drive on the right side of the road? They are coercive, and a restraint on the liberty of the good. Yet they are also necessary for an ordered liberty. Hmm.)

They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful.

Republican Rome and Democratic Athens, to which Hayek favorably alludes, both failed to survive. If I may reverse Plato's schema in the Republic, and use men as metaphors for states, both Christ and Socrates failed to survive. How is survival to be a reliable measure of political regimes in our fragile, mortal world?

It is not necessary that the reasons of the institution should be evident unto us. It is sufficient that they are instituted laws that give a certainty to us, and it is reasonable to observe them though the particular reason of the institution appear not.

How shall we evaluate the reasonability of the institution without knowing the particular reason?

I suspect an answer presents itself in this Stanley Hauerwas essay:

I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment.

Alisdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneaology, and Tradition further reflects on the importance of tradition in the formation of ethical(and thus political) reasoning, while further outlining the problems of overleaping rationalism. I do not know what Hayek has to say on this topic, though I'm certainly looking forward to learning.

[unspun]

Not Locke, nor Hume, nor Smith, nor Burke, could have argued, as Bentham did, that every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty. Their argument was never a complete laissez faire argument, which, as the very words show, is also part of the French rationalist tradition and in its literal sense was never defended by any of the English classical economists. They knew better than most of their later critics that it was not some sort of magic, but the evolution of well constructed institutions, where the rules and privileges of contending interests and compromised advantages would be reconciled, that had successfully channeled individual efforts to socially beneficial aims. In fact, their argument was never antistate as such, or anarchistic, which is the logical outcome of the rationalistic laissez faire doctrine; it was an argument that accounted both for the proper functions of the state and for the limits of state action.

Right on. "Proper functions," whodathunkit?

An objectivist totalibertarian would tend to try to grind this intuitively obvious idea down to meaninglessness. But "anti-state" doesn't quite give that view justice, to me. That view would set up government by state tribunal to inflict such an extreme version of "liberties" upon a people that it would severely oppress, in an inside-out fashion (until the inevitable coup rises from chaos, Rouseau begets Robespierre, as Ahrendt and Schaeffer point out).

[Bonaparte]

Nice scanners are practically dirt cheap these days. Thanks for all your hard work. Great article!

[Sam Cree]

I also find that following Hayek's writing requires quite a bit of concentration, I had supposed that might be partly due to his foreign birth, or maybe just from his being a professor and economist. I am sure he could have had an even greater influence had he written in language that the "ordinary Joe" could handle with less effort.

Nevertheless, as he remains one of my primary inspirations and heroes, I remain grateful for his existence and his thinking.

[KC Burke]

Re your #26 and the Catholic path....have you read Orestes Brownson? It is my understanding that his later work his helpful in resolving that path of showing a solid weld between the conservative tradition and RC. See the ISI book store for the right book of his, in his youth he wrote some off the wall stuff.

[KC Burke]

As to part 3....I believe that Russell Kirk changed his wording of his first principle from beleif "in a Transcendant Moral Order" to "an Enduring Moral Order" to be able to encompass the seemingly agnostic Hayek and others with whom he felt a solid unity in the Old Whig camp.

This number 3 is Hayek's Mechanism or substitute for the active Divine, IMHO. Later in this chapter, and in following chapters, he addresses moral belief and ethical foundations. Here he is simply showing his unity with Burke on the issues of sophisters.

[KC Burke]

I worry that this is too empty a notion of freedom; while there is certainly some value in negative liberty, without more positive content, such as that which a good ethical system can provide, anomie threatens.

Sub-chapter 6 deals with that, or at least makes his first start until later in the book.

[KC Burke]

he does quote another in saying "Gallican liberty is sought in government...

This is a condition or contradiction I see for much of the rationalist approach.

[cornelis]

Alisdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneaology, and Tradition

His Gifford Lectures. Very informative.

[annalex]

Thank you for the effort. Excellent read; moreover, you mentioned to emphasize precisely the points I would have emphasized also.

I believe that as we witness a failure of constitutional republican government to safeguard freedom, a social theory that acknowledges, with the French, the objective and universal character of natural rights, and, with the British, the critical role of traditional well-constructed institutions of government, will emerge.

[KC Burke]

I believe that as we witness a failure of constitutional republican government to safeguard freedom, a social theory that acknowledges, with the French, the objective and universal character of natural rights, and, with the British, the critical role of traditional well-constructed institutions of government, will emerge.

Man-oh-man, there is a fruitful speculation worthy of its own thread sometime.

I would say that a small synthsis is possible. It exists in the Natural Law doctrine and applies only to animating the Legislative force.

[amom]

I see I have been given a homework assignment. ;-)

Thanks for thinking of me.