I have taken of late to damning "Totalitarian Rationalistic Democracy". I have taken of late of popping off to other posters with, "you haven't read the fourth chapter of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty." I have taken of late the habit of finding I am more concerned with a compadre's principles than their "ideology", that short-hand magic answer thing I love to deride.
We hurl around the names and snippets of these giants of conservative thought and sadly, allow commentators of today's political media to invoke them as well, all without knowing the depth and breadth of their very thought.
So the next time that someone tells you about the famed "libertarian" F. A Hayek's condemnation of "statism", his belief in pure ideology and contempt for tradition, his reliance upon Mill's simple principle and such other simplistic stuff meant to reinforce his position, link them to this thread.
Likewise, when condenming those who stridently talk of non-coercion, mention libertarian principles with a fond tone or who fail to say the word "conservative" with the right tone of reverence, you might want to observe that often classified among them is a great friend to "custom, convention" and all that.
Hey, I didn't know that Thomas Sowell (one of my heros), equally condenming of ideology, the Unconstrained and rationality in A Conflict of Visions descibes himself to interviewers as a "libertarian"
Names then, aren't all that important; princples are.
1 posted on
02/04/2003 6:56:26 PM PST by
KC Burke
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To: Bonaparte
2 posted on
02/04/2003 7:00:53 PM PST by
KC Burke
To: KC Burke
!
4 posted on
02/04/2003 7:04:57 PM PST by
cornelis
To: KC Burke
all without knowing the depth and breadth of their very thought You say it with earnest and you say it well.
11 posted on
02/04/2003 7:26:27 PM PST by
cornelis
To: betty boop; VadeRetro
natural selection, Marbles.
12 posted on
02/04/2003 7:30:15 PM PST by
cornelis
To: JasonC
It would hardly be unjust to say that the rationalistic approach is here opposed to almost all that is the distinct product of liberty and that gives liberty its value It takes a while for people to recognize this. They are obliged to read European writers, including the oldest of them, if not because our thought world is by and large their product. I read Levinas and learned from his struggle against rationalism.
15 posted on
02/04/2003 7:41:34 PM PST by
cornelis
It would hardly be unjust to say that the rationalistic approach is here opposed to almost all that is the distinct product of liberty and that gives liberty its value Whew!
19 posted on
02/04/2003 7:48:53 PM PST by
cornelis
To: KC Burke
"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 superiorinstitutions 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'.
22 posted on
02/04/2003 8:01:38 PM PST by
tpaine
To: KC Burke
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.
To: KC Burke
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.)
26 posted on
02/04/2003 10:02:44 PM PST by
Askel5
To: KC Burke
I've read it a couple times but I refuse to believe I'm understanding part 3. Can you thumbnail that for me?
27 posted on
02/04/2003 10:13:35 PM PST by
Askel5
To: KC Burke
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.
28 posted on
02/04/2003 10:19:51 PM PST by
Askel5
To: KC Burke
"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.
29 posted on
02/04/2003 10:23:30 PM PST by
Dumb_Ox
To: KC Burke
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).
30 posted on
02/04/2003 11:02:04 PM PST by
unspun
(Locke rocks.)
To: KC Burke; cornelis; Askel5
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.
38 posted on
02/05/2003 8:30:24 AM PST by
annalex
To: KayEyeDoubleDee; William McKinley; HumanaeVitae
I forgot to ping this to you last week.
55 posted on
02/08/2003 2:58:26 PM PST by
KC Burke
To: KC Burke
***snore***
More mental self-abuse from the FR utopian contingent, which is more interested in living pursuant to the theories of the dead than in the world of the living.
67 posted on
02/13/2003 5:26:45 PM PST by
Chancellor Palpatine
(those who unilaterally beat their swords into plowshares wind up plowing for those who don't)
To: KC Burke
...its benefit cannot be appreciated until it is already old. Yes, KC. And when it is "old," then the "rising generation" will have (on the "liberal" view) sufficient reason to despise the benefit, transmitted to them from the venerable human past; and to exchange its own particular fancy into the place of the yet "older" conception of order, personal and public.
In the propagation of this particular predilection of human thought, the demonstrably nefarious, standard Left-Progressive educational and communicational tactics seem to be critically inhospitable to human welfare over time; yet at the same time, such seem largely to have been given a "free pass" by the American public.
IMHO, the American public really needs to understand how this particular process of (abstract) thought undermines personal authority and liberty -- assuming the American public still cares about such things, which were the reasons undergirding our national founding in the first place.
If this sounds "judgmental" or harsh," please just chalk it up the the fact that I had a bad day, today. May God grant a better one tomorrow.
80 posted on
03/23/2003 5:06:45 PM PST by
betty boop
("We did the right thing, and we did it in the service of mankind. " -- H. Kissinger, 22Mar03)
To: KC Burke
As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.
I see that Hayek has already been where I was going with my thoughts earlier today, KC. :-)
We really need a rebirth of the wisdom of these guys. Their thoughts and words and insights need amplifying echos.
82 posted on
04/24/2003 8:33:39 AM PDT by
William McKinley
(You're so vain, you probably think this tagline's about you)
To: KC Burke
I don't recall what Russell Kirk says about Hayek, but I'll defer to his judgment. While I agree with much of The Road to Serfdom, it's been at least a quarter of a century since I've read it, so I can't comment intelligently on Hayek's overall philosophy. But this post would certainly seem more in keeping with Burkean conservatism than libertarianism. If, as Hayek herein contends, names matter anyway.
94 posted on
01/13/2004 2:33:51 PM PST by
IronJack
To: KC Burke
It is also illustrative to note that Hayek explores the dichotomy between the American Revolution, whose approach to liberty derived from its English antecedents, and the French Revolution, whose radical egalitarianism spawned a system far more sanguine than the one it overthrew, although one nominally more "equal."
Kirk insists that the difference arose out of the English respect for tradition and order, while the French are blinded by ideological zeal. Conservation of order and a reverence for tradition kept the American Revolution from decaying into the murderous revolt of the Jacobins, and marked a departure from the mythical Divine Right of Kings but an acknowledgement of Man's inherent unworthiness to rule himself. In denying those caveats, the French rushed headlong into an orgy of self-destruction that many argue continues to this day.
It would seem Hayek is in agreement with the premise that tradition and custom bind rights more than any inherent sense of liberty.
98 posted on
01/13/2004 3:21:58 PM PST by
IronJack
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