manwithoutqualities

In a recent article in Dessent entitled “Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right” Jesse Larner expresses his surprise that he finds Hayek to be “nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants” and “not the cynic I had braced for.” It is reassuring to know that Larner has come to this assessment. Hayek is a social epistemologist, a philosopher of social science, and a philosophical psychologist – taken thus, one will be hard pressed to view Hayek as doctrinal or ideological.   

It is odd that the New Right’s Hayek seems to be so skewed/misappropriated. The problem is that Hayek is layered with multiple coats of intellectual varnish – more often than not, highly whimsical. Ideological categories employed in popular discourse are taken as Procrustean – not appreciating that there is a great deal of fluidity within and between ideological positions. Larner’s take on Hayek as a romantic or an eccentric mystic has no resonance at all. On what grounds does this claim rest upon? Perhaps because social knowledge condenses in tradition and practice – to ignore this repository is not only impossible, but it is to be irrational. Indeed, Larner’s Hayek would have no resonance to self-ascribed conservatives (at least in the US) who are in fact rationalistic and foundational – an anathema to the high liberality expressed though a high Tory lens or a Berlinian/Razian liberalism. 

Larner writes: “Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that individual beings can exists both as individuals and as members of a society”. On the contrary, if one has any familiarity with Hayek’s philosophical psychology and his social theory, this polarity is deflated. For Hayek, both the individual and the ambient social soup are ontologically and epistemologically reciprocal and correlative. Hayek is certainly not the paradigmatic (and caricatural) laissez-faire theorist. Oakeshott famously took Hayek to task by pointing out that a doctrinal laissez-faire attitude is also a species of rationalism. This is uncritically taken as a knock-down argument by Oakeshott commentators. Hayek explicitly and repeatedly distanced himself radical libertarianism as early as 1944 in The Road to Serfdom – the primary focus of Larner’s article. The laissez-faire Hayek would undermine the Hayek of tradition – it would be corrosive!