[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.

[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.