O upright judge! Is Hayek Like Nietzsche or not?

Did Nietzsche put a question mark after the Enlightenment, or a period? (For the time being, never mind that he wasn’t the only one looking to punctuate it in one way or the other.) We don’t really know, do we? What we do know is that careful reasoning about Reason is as slippery as it is seductive. Anyone who pursues it far enough is likely to feel either exhausted or betrayed. The proposed Hayek/Nietzsche axis is loads of fun, but it wobbles when it’s turned, largely because Hayek is just, you know, not commensurate with Nietzsche, not without a lot of jiggery-pokery, anyway. Or so I think….

“all of Nietzsche’s philosophy amounts to the thought that the vision of the first passage is attractively glorious but monstrous and, ultimately, in peril of tipping in to nihilism, due to highly equivocal elements introduced by the second passage”

With every passing post this blog looks more and more like something out of the Sokal Affair…

It seems that this view of Hayek puts him pretty close to Ayn Rand’s ideas. Probably true.

You can put that quoted thing in a more simple way:

Nietzsche gives the average man a goal: he is a failed experiment of nature. He is not the great man that was attempted. Yet, he should strive to ensure that in future, great men can emerge. This is because great men are the Purpose of Life. This view is pessimistic, but it has certain beauty and meaning.

On the other hand, Nietzsche considers great men futile. They will not be understood by the masses and their lives will be miserable. So, the Purpose of Life is to produce wretches who are useless for the public and for themselves, but metaphysically valuable. This is nihilism bordering on madness.

The original author wrote it much more poetically but Orwell would have preferred the latter version.

John, I think that what you’re suggesting is only *kind of* mostly what Corey was saying. “Therefore Pinochet” would seem like a serious non-sequitor at the end of your story.

The question– or a question, at least– is how to balance the one-in-a-million thought with the we-can’t-know thought as a matter of what animates Hayek. Maybe you’re right that the one-in-a-million figure, who gets approximately two moments in the spotlight, is nonetheless the character who really makes the whole drama go. Maybe there’s a Randian spark that fires the whole Hayekian engine. These things happen.

But against that possibility, I think we need to weigh the fact that we-can’t-know is such a central defining idea for Hayek’s whole corpus. CL follows in time both Uses of Knowledge in Society and Sensory Order; after CL he turns to the firs volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, which is all about taking *really really seriously* the idea that the rule of law requires anonymous rules rather than personalized administration, and treats the rule of law in that sense as the central good a political order can produce. (And, incidentally, includes his denunciation of utilitarianism as such.) Decades later he’s writing about the blind forces of cultural evolution. In other words, it seems to me that there’s a very strong prima facie case that the one-in-a-million character is only setup for what really gets Hayek out of bed in the mornings: a deep fascination with “we can’t know and therefore need anonymous rules and institutions.”

In Knowledge in Society the capitalist has no privileged information. (Indeed one of the knocks on that piece has traditionally been just how implausibly informationally passive it makes producers and sellers, as if they aren’t in the business of trying to get a jump on the competition by anticipating a rise in the price of copper the day before it happens. ) The producer isn’t smarter or more knowledgeable; the producer knows not what he does, and it’s his ignorance that necessitates the anonymizing market process. If he *did* know what he did, a good enough planner would be able to just *ask all the producers what they knew.*

The main actor in the drama isn’t one. It’s the anonymous and anonymizing price system, *not* the individual producer who experiences it as a set of external constraints and forces beyond his ability to understand or control. This, I think, is part of Hayek’s argument with Schumpeter. Schumpeter sees the capitalist managerial class as capable of gathering the sort of knowledge which they can then transfer to (or which will allow them to become) the socialist planning class. Hayek thinks this is nonsense. And as for Schumpeter’s (arguably heroic) entrepreneur, he makes no appearance in Knowledge, except in the mocking characterization of the “desire, constantly voiced by producers and engineers, to be allowed to proceed untrammeled by considerations of money costs.” Of course the R&D department wants to be able to just keep making cool stuff, regardless of the cost of the inputs. And of course that’s not how it works.

The discussions of language as an analogy to markets, from Knowledge onward, are similar. It’s language evolution without Shakespeare or King James or l’Academie: entirely anonymous and built on countless small interactions. Again, this is a traditional knock on his account, but he stuck by it; he thought that the nameable persons were pretty much epiphenomenal in the story of language.

Knowledge in Society was, I think and I think Hayek thought, his central, most important insight– it was the beginning of his real scholarly mission, and why he takes the apparent detour into Sensory Order before (re)turning to political-social theory. And it’s *entirely* anonymizing. Then The Sensory Order moves in the direction of making the limits on knowledge and self-knowledge deep inescapable facts about how we know. “Our brains couldn’t conceivably understand complex systems in their entireties and so we need to just let the systems unfold” is not the direction someone takes who is leaving ubermensch loopholes.

For CL to emerge out of that period in Hayek’s work– and not directly out of 1920 Austria– seems to me relevant in thinking about whether we should read him as excited about the one-in-a-million man or as excited about the “can’t know” part. And the fact that it’s followed by a book (LLL v1) about abstract rules as the centerpiece of civilization– a book for which he regretted not having reserved the title “Constitution of Liberty”– seems to me confirmatory.

If the Nietzschean-Randian hero-producer were really the spark that made the whole engine go, I think that would look like a very strange trajectory.

I don’t at all deny that Hayek had an elitist streak. But I think that the case you’re making here, the analogy to Mill (whose late period of work just keeps returning to his weird kind of heroic figure– Representative Government at least as much as On Liberty, and the writings on India, intervention, centralization, etc sometimes even more), really does fail. The elitism really is tangential, and Hayek is centrally committed to its being tangential.

Supposing– for which we don’t really have textual evidence– that the one-in-a-million man is an economic producer, we get no account of what makes that producer superior to any other producers. It’s not purity of creative vision; that way lies the desire to keep making stuff regardless of the cost of inputs. It’s very likely to be very accidental. No only can’t *we* know who that one in a million might turn out to be; he can’t know himself, on the model of Knowledge in Society and Sensory Order. And I don’t think the desire to remake Hayek as an esoteric Randian can really survive once we realize that even John Galt can’t know who John Galt is.

I enjoyed this so much that I tweeted it!

But why do we take Hayek so seriously?

Well John since you put it that way, I think the difference between Nietzsche and Hayek is this: Nietzsche’s hierarchy is something like, “cultural superman VS. the common person”. Hayek demotes the whole hierarchy downward, to something like, “business success stories in the spontaneous order VS. dropouts and parasites”. (“Alienation, Dropouts, and the Claims of Parasites” is the title of appendix D of The Fatal Conceit, Hayek’s last book, 1988).

Wow, is that Harry Potter article terrible. Hard to believe it was published in a major law review…is there any job cushier than ‘law professor’?

Holbo is being polite, and saying that ‘Nietzsche is properly a provocation’ @14 is a way of implying politely that seriously trying to view Hayek as a ‘Nietzschean’ in a serious way simply does not hold water and is an intellectual distraction. What you are really asking is whether Hayek is an inegalitarian/aristocratic romantic and using Nietzsche as your all-purpose stand in for such a figure. Since it is quite reductionist to view Nietzsche as simply a replacement-level 19th century romanto-aristocratic intellectual you are much better off simply identifying common tendency in 19th century thought and examining Hayek directly. In general, this whole effort to do intellectual history by assigning thinkers positions on Team Conservative and Team Liberal is going to reduce them to bumper stickers at best.

Now note: if you read ‘great man’ as ‘capitalist entrepreneur’ in the first passage, then you get a weirdly lurid ‘who is John Galt?’ fantasy. If you read ‘nature’ as ‘market’ and ‘artist’ as ‘capitalist entrepreneur’ in the second passage,

Yeah, but you really can’t do that, because they aren’t. It’s like saying, ‘if you read ‘Zarathustra’ as ‘Jack Welch’ you find that Nietzsche considers employee downsizing the true destiny of the Ubermensch’. Ummm, OK, I guess so…

“To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use”

You seem to be misunderstanding this quote. Everyone eats. So one form of freedom is to let/help people eat what they want. Not everyone is a chemical engineer who would discover amazing battery technology if given/allowed the freedom to explore rather than being born into a subsistence farming family in India, but helping out his freedom may be more important to society than making sure everyone has lots of food choices.

Which still might work into your discussion, but doesn’t make Hayek look particularly silly.

“A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men.—Yes, and then to get round them.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 126)

I have for the longest time mulled over this statement because, like much in his writing, it doesn’t offer up an “easy solution.” Given the attention to the metaphor of nature in the above post and the attention to what I think may be a false “problem” being asked (because Hayek seems to point toward that problem), I think this slight statement from BG&E might fit peculiarly into the discussion.

Most recently I have been looking at the issue of elites vs. masses, an important contemporary political debate, through various lenses, and was led to consider a type of historical pendulum movement similar to the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” in evolution—the idea that significant change comes in fits and starts rather than being gradual—which returned me to a reconsideration of Nietzsche’s statement quoted above. So-called great persons come in fits (nature gets lucky); they cause significant change; but as Nietzsche’s influence Emerson said, every great man at last becomes a bore, and nature causes the nation to get round him.

Of course, getting round those great men may have been a sarcastic evaluation of nations and nature rather than a positive valuation, depending upon your interpretation. Either way, a certain ephemerality is suggested for great persons.

Nietzsche was quite specific in stating his mistrust of systematizers. My own impression is that he would have been nauseated by a) any followers (directly descended or “marginal children”) who attempted to formulate a model or formula for societies to follow based upon his words, and b) those studying him and others who attempted to systematize some relation between them and him. There may be a fine line of course, since Nietzsche obviously did not skirt broad categorization of philosophers himself. But narrowing with precision bits and pieces of Nietzsche in another also was un-Nietzschean, given that he did not want to be mistaken for someone he wasn’t and that he specifically noted that bad readers of his work would take out of it only bits and parts that suited them.

This from a few years back seems relevant on Rand’s John Galt and Hayek’s story of the market process:
http://willwilkinson.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/john-galt-and-the-billion-tweaks/

Joseph de Maistre said something to the effect of “the Gospels, read without the instruction of the Church, are poison.” The “Catholicism emptied of Christianity” tendency in France became more explicit under Charles Maurras, who, unlike de Maistre, was frank about his personal atheism. Here are his thoughts:

With some spare time, what a Treatise there would be to write on the intellectual decadence wrought by, first, the Christian spirit of mind that brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire; secondly, the Christian spirit of mind that in the sixteenth century disrupted Catholic civilization through the reading of the Bible in the vernacular tongue; thirdly, the Christian spirit of mind that drove on Rousseau, that encouraged the Revolution, and that elevated morality to the dignity of a super-science and a super-politics, equally metaphysical; and, lastly, the Christian spirit of mind that gives us, today, a theology of the individual, a theory of pure anarchy.

Boy, I feel like a putz. Anyway, I wanted to bring attention to my long post here

https://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/14/nietszche-and-the-marginalists/comment-page-3/#comment-467787

for those contemplating the links between Christianity and liberalism and radicalism, and just why people like Nietzsche and other reactionaries considered Christianity a subversive force.

“The Golem” (1920) Some may have not seen Paul Wegener’s silent film, enjoyable for all sorts of reasons. In the final act, the golem is enlisted to fight a lover’s quarrel. A double plot. Go to about 1 hour 2 minutes — 1:02:00, or near there…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTEN9JL1A_g

The final act title-card in green, a warning from astrologic alchemy: “If you have brought an inanimate being to life through magic, beware of your creation.”

I have not read original golem stories, and I don’t know whether the filmmakers consciously adopted Shelley to their task, but vaguely Frankensteinish events, images ensue. I think some of the oldstyle eye-acting is really good.

Since we’re interchanging heros, replace the one-in-a-million man with a scientist.

A lab in Berkeley that works on photovoltaic cells finds that by tweaking the structure of an existing nanomaterial through a novel process, they can increase the efficiency of the cells by 1%. Marginally useful, but not particularly heroic.

A few months later, a cancer researcher happens to read this paper, and realizes that she can tweak some nanomaterial that she works with by the same process, helping to make an alternative treatment to chemotherapy viable and thus improving the quality of life of cancer patients. She’s not exactly a hero, either, since she borrowed the idea from someone else—and again the idea itself wasn’t all that interesting in its original context.

My understanding of science is that it often works this way: progress comes in marginal improvements in highly specialized areas, each of which are not only often modest but also sometimes accidental, and each of which often leads to advancements beyond the imagination of those who did the original work. The original idea, however, was still one in a million.

The ratio is mathematically true (at least ballpark) not only because for every innovation that turns out to be useful there are many futile projects, but also because within a given project the researchers end up going back to the drawing board many times before getting it right. It’s also figuratively true in the sense that the ideas often seem to come clear out of the blue—who would have thought that research on solar cells would help improve cancer treatment?

Returning to Hayek, the fact that the one-in-a-million man does more to benefit his fellows than most others do does not give us any basis to assume either a) that there is anything particularly special about this man, or even b) that there is anything particularly special about whatever it is that he does.

In that light, here’s another way of interpreting liberty-maximization-for-the-one-in-a-million. It’s not that we let all the stupid scientists putz around in the hopes that a smart one will come along, but that the very nature of scientific advancement requires a lot of ideas to be tried out, and that this process requires freedom. This is true even—or especially—if we presume that all scientists are equally intelligent.

I don’t think it’s fair to imbue Hayek’s one-in-a-million man with any superhuman qualities that Hayek didn’t articulate. Within the context of the rest of Hayek’s thought, as Jacob Levy suggests, it’s more likely that Hayek didn’t think there was anything particularly special about the man. He may have stumbled upon something that anyone else could have stumbled upon, but even if his accomplishment is accidental or unwitting, it still may be important. Freedom is therefore not squandered on the rest of us, for we all have the potential to be one-in-a-million men. It is precisely because the one-in-a-million man is not distinguished by superhuman qualities that we can never know when or by whom the next useful thing will be stumbled upon, and thus that freedom must be maximized for all, even if in practice not all make as beneficial a use of it as others.

A final thought: as science and the tools it uses advance, the pace of progress increases. Individual scientists are more productive today than ever before, and more likely to be one-in-a-millions. Which means that the ratio itself varies as liberty and the progress it begets. Even if a small group makes the best use of maximal liberty at first, the ratio of those who contribute improves over time as a function of that same liberty. I interpret Hayek as meaning not that this progress is led by superior individuals, but that it occurs in marginal advancements by many individuals in unforeseeable ways, and that limiting liberty to a few necessarily constrains this process (even, I believe Hayek would say, if we could identify the “best” among us and limit it to them).

@ Joseph Swetnam #32 — Does Hayek ever write about how the market may sometimes inhibit the process, and how to measure that tradeoff?

the very nature of scientific advancement requires a lot of ideas to be tried out, and that this process requires freedom.

This process requires freedom, true, but that freedom is quite different from the type of freedom a normal person experiences. It requires academic freedom, which is easy to grant. Especially in the realm of pure science, academic freedom can coexist with a terribly oppressive political climate.

To take a real-life example, consider the Soviet Union. Research in pure sciences was very free and scientists could pursue extremely blue-sky concepts with little economic or political hindrance. (In applied sciences, e.g. engineering, political considerations were more important and often prevented progress.) As long as a scientist paid formal allegiance to the state, he had a complete freedom of thought in his own field. And Soviet Union excelled in these fields. The same applies to imperial Germany of the late 19th century: a politically unfree regime with a thriving research community. (Or Bush administration USA: a militaristic, war-mongering country with streamlined media, ruthless security apparatus and a very vibrant research community.)

I am sorry. It is late, and I can’t read the entire post, much less the commentary.
Of course the philosophical right has always prized the freedom of the entrepreneur above the freedom of anyone else; the entrepreneur unleashes the creative destruction on which continuous growth and thus opportunity for capital investment depend. The entrepreneur must have the freedom to challenge the extant elites. This is the freedom that matters for dynamic capitalism, conceived in Schumpeterian terms. That is, a stationary capitalism is a contradiction in terms., and the lifeblood of dynamic capitalism is freedom for entrepreneurs specifically, under the rule of law.

Perhaps the best selling work in social science in the last several years–Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail–is a paean to such entrepreneurial freedom as the pivot of the inclusive institutions on which successful nations must be built.

That said, two points:

1. Why link Nietzsche’s philosophy of the overman to the entrepreneur?

2. Even if Hayek is pulling a Straussian trick by trying to present his vision of a free society in which only those few elites who actually do burn for freedom will benefit as a universally desirable one, Hayek still seems to be committed to the universal principle of the freedom to contract (PFC) for all individuals and the PFC would seem to be essential for all possible Pareto improvements to be made. Perhaps one can expose Hayek’s Straussian elitism, but the real task of arguing under what conditions it can be justified to violate or restrict the Principle of Free Contract remains. Can it be shown for example that at a certain point what would be a series of Pareto-improving exchanges, under the Principle of Free Contract, yields a Pareto inferior state. This is what Kaushik Basu tries to demonstrate.

Sebastian H. @20
An even better example might be a journalist.

Yes, in general the saying (poorly made – it doesn make him sound elitist) might be interpreted as saying simply that freedom is valuable even when not used. (Like having a escape route is an encourage to undertake risky endevours. But isn’t this an argument for the social state?)

But if that was his view, what is his view of intellectual property rights?

Yes, Hayek believes that society can only make progress if we have a hereditary upper class to perform the selective function in [insert one of a clutch of halfbaked evolutionary schemata trotted out by H in the particular hackfest under discussion].

At one point he seems explicitly to suggest that this is a universal law of progress, rather than just sticking to the usual “assume capitalism. Now see that capitalist phenomenon a has coincided with phenomenon b, which is better than sitting in a bush eating grubs, QED” kind of argument:

Most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them. Yet a progressive society, while it relies on this process of learning and imitation, recognizes the desires it creates only as a spur to further effort. It does not guarantee the results to everyone. It disregards the pain of unfulfilled desire aroused by the example of others. It appears cruel because it increases the desire of all in proportion as it increases its gifts to some. Yet so long as it remains a progressive society, some must lead, and the rest must follow. The contention that in any phase of progress the rich, by experimenting with new styles of living not yet accessible to the poor, perform a necessary service without which the advance of the poor would be very much slower will appear to some as a piece of far-fetched and cynical apologetics. Yet a little reflection will show that it is fully valid and that a socialist society would in this respect have to imitate a free society. It would be necessary in a planned economy (unless it could simply imitate the example of other more advanced societies) to designate individuals whose duty it would be to try out the latest advances long before they were made available to the rest. There is no way of making generally accessible new and still expensive ways of living except by their being initially practiced by some. It would not be enough if individuals were allowed to try out particular new things. These have their proper use and value only as an integral part of the general advance in which they are the next thing desired. In order to know which of the various new possibilities should be developed at each stage, how and when particular improvements ought to be fitted into the general advance, a planned society would have to provide for a whole class, or even a hierarchy of classes, which would always move some steps ahead of the rest.

There is quite a bit I could say about this, but for now just notice that there is a bit of equivocal approval of a perfectionist rather than ‘trickle down’ approach to progress (call it Neitzsche or maximax as preferred).

…

A final thought: as science and the tools it uses advance, the pace of progress increases. Individual scientists are more productive today than ever before, and more likely to be one-in-a-millions.

Lots of other people have already pointed out the problems with this analogy, but it’s worth noting that this is a very inaccurate model of actual scientific progress. In particular, arguing that “the pace of progress increases” and that “individual scientists are more productive today than ever before” means you need to put a metric on “pace” and “productivity.” How is that going to be measured? Is it the number of publications? Lines of code written? “Fundamental” advances made? What counts as fundamental?

In fact, scientific progress is wildly heterogenous, both across disciplines and within the same discipline across time periods. Just to give one example, the era lasting from roughly 1945 to, oh, about 1995 (give or take), was a wildly productive era in particle physics. But towards the end of that era, discoveries started coming less and less frequently; consider how much time passes between the early discoveries of the various light mesons, leptons, and quarks, and how long it took to get the top quark (hence by date of 1995). A lot of that is simply a function of getting the low-hanging fruit first. In the case of particle physics, the low-hanging fruit is lower energies, as the time necessary to conduct the next-highest energy experiment scales nonlinearly with the energy. In other fields, the situation is somewhat reversed; for example, computational biology wasn’t even a field in a strict sense until about 25 years ago, because the technology required to do truly intensive big data computations didn’t exist. How the progress of that particular field will evolve is something we don’t really know. As usual, the easier problems will be solved first, just because they can be solved, but the question of whether the harder problems will be tractable, or whether the resources required to solve them will scale favorably with their difficulty, is an open question (although if I were laying a bet, I’d bet that they won’t; there are precious few examples of such scalings historically).

All this means that you can’t just rely on a simplistic model of scientific progress to bail you out sometime down the line. Moore’s law is a thing, but not a thing that can just be invoked at will as a deus ex machina a la Ray Kurzweil. Scientific productivity is a tough thing to measure, and it’s dangerous to generalize from relatively short-term trends to a larger picture.

“Eventually, these values learned how to exist wholly independently from their Christian shell, revealing that they were not rooted in that worldview ideologically, only historically.”

I’m not a Christian anymore, but I still wonder if this is true. I grew up in a VERY Christian household, and it still surprises me how often anti religious westerners lean on strongly Christian background assumptions. The idea of egalitarianism is a good example. It is an important premise for all sorts of Western political thought, and a key arguing point even for those who disagree with it. ( and opposing it as seen here is used as a multi-purpose condemnation). But it is an axiom that isn’t shared by all sorts of other cultures/religions, which is very grounded in Christian thought. We act as if it is an obvious principle, but in fact it was a rather radical feature of Christianity(historically) and it isn’t obvious how easy it is to maintain outside of a culture which is still deeply steeped in Christian background (to speak to current ideology).

I’m not really saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying that it isn’t particularly obvious that you’re right.

Bruce Wilder, Hayek is greatly in favor of rules. “Laws” even. Of course, he distinguishes between “law” (which can emerge from decentralized decisions of judges, as the common law is supposed to have evolved) and “legislation” (hence “Law, Legislation and Liberty”). I think he favored plenty of legislation as well, “Road to Serfdom” endorsed a welfare state with environmental regulation. I haven’t actually read his books to find out what his criterion for acceptability is, he has a reputation as an unclear and inconsistent writer.

Andrew F., Professor Levy, and Rob make the key point(s) above: that Hayek was especially concerned with epistemological questions. His most important insights were attuned to “Knowledge in Society” problems and human ignorance (especially among elites) and that “what really gets Hayek out of bed in the mornings: a deep fascination with ‘we can’t know . . .” As Rob points out, Hayek apparently offered the one-in-a-million example as part of an epistemological “thought exercise,” not as a serious foray into a theory of freedom.

For purposes of argument, let’s assume that we could actually ascertain what were Hayek’s deep underlying conceptions of the “real value of his values.” Hayek would have been the first to respond: “How would I (or anyone else) know how to promote such values in the first place?”

Unlike Professor Levy, I’m nothing like an expert on Hayek, but I’m guessing that inasmuch as Hayek addressed values and the philosophy of freedom, etc., probably mostly indirectly in pursuance of his major interests, he was weaker in these areas. Fair enough. But so, if we were going to turn around your style of critique on the great political theorist Rawls, it wouldn’t be to suggest that Rawls was secretly “a liberal fascist control freak!” but to concentrate on Rawls’ lack of serious attention to epistemological questions and/or his ignorance of real-world economics. In other words, we’d project our concerns unto Rawls . . .

In general, this whole effort to do intellectual history by assigning thinkers positions on Team Conservative and Team Liberal is going to reduce them to bumper stickers at best.

Maybe that’s the idea. He’s not trying to educate. He’s trying to beat a marching drum.

True story: I was at a lecture by Manuel DeLanda a while back in which he was hitting the Deleuzian rhizome/Niezschean will-to-power angle pretty hard, and I said that bit sounded a lot like a Hayekian catallaxy, which was weird given that every other sentence in his lecture was about the significance of all this Deleuzian metaphysics for the left. (His response was to grant the point but to add that everyone makes a big mistake thinking of Hayek as a right-winger, for that very reason.) So there’s another link from Nietzsche to Hayek, albeit a) through Deleuze, and b) metaphysical rather than political or economic (and (c) kind of sketchy and metaphorical). Not sure what that’s worth, but there it is.

@53:

Actually, in his last years, Foucault was said to be reading von Hayek and recommending him. Presumably the common thread (or obsession) is a libertarian conception of freedom (and perhaps a denial of any institutional basis for “freedom”). I myself found that recommendation a bit, er, perverse. But I’m not surprised that “Po-mo” would be susceptible to the sorts of currents that lead to neo-liberal capture.

From the OP: “He made economics exciting by painting its petit bourgeois portrait as secretly sublime – a romantic landscape of mysterious heights and depths. In this landscape a hero makes his lonely way, his high fate unknown even to himself. He stands alone, against great odds.”

Cf. the role of the sublime in Kant, where the experience of the sublime is the goad that, in the encounter with the abyssal and incomprehensible, causes the imagination to submit to the legislative authority of conceptual understanding. The sublime instigates the sacrifice of the imagination to reason. This sacrifice bridges the gulf between pure and practical reason, and affirms man as lord of nature.

It is a journey through a Dionysian adventure back to an Apollonian triumph. The romantic hero has seen the horror, and recoiled from it, a sadder and wiser man. But a man committed to reason, and to mastery of nature, and keenly aware of the value of the necessary sacrifice.

And it is this notion of sacrifice that seems to play such an important role in neo-liberal economic doctrine. One (the rational subject who understands) might imagine a better world, a world of greater liberty, equality, and fraternity. But one must confront the abyssal mysteries at the heart of nature and humanity that preclude such happy outcomes. One must be ‘realistic,’ one must temper ones dreams with a knowledge of the sublime indifference of nature and the sublime inscrutability of the human heart.

Contrasted to Nietzsche’s valourization of Dionysian ecstasy, the contrast between the loquaciously reasonable neo-liberal hero and Zarathustrian rational silence become very stark.

One last word on Schumpeter, I know you are all bored by it, but everybody seems to me to get him wrong.

I tend to doubt that Schumpeter would have considered himself a member of the Austrian school. Yes, he was from Austria. Yes, he preferred dynamic over static discussions (which, Schumpeter wrote, was first pointed to by Marshall, not the Austrians), and he brought forward the role of the entrepreneur (again he found bare bones of it in Marshall) and he may have been the first to say that the methods of mathematical physics were misapplied in economics (though rather like a famous point by Marshall about the use of math…), but there the similarity to the AUSTRIANS ends.

Schumpeter loved theory, but distrusted it when removed too long from reality. In his History of Economic Analysis, he sometimes takes aim at the Austrians, politely. For example, he writes of a theory of Menger that it was “not only far removed from any actual mental processes that may be credited to any deciding agents –this does not greatly matter considering the ‘as if’ that enters this, as it does so many other scientific constructions — but also unnecessary.” A judicious, amusing, quite damning smackdown. (Here we may also have a damning source for Friedman’s so-called new ideas on “positive economics”, coming three years after this book was published).

And, on the other hand, since Schumpeter believed that Marx was right that capitalism would transform itself into socialism (although he thought that some of Marx’s reasoning was wrong), I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that, in turn, the Austrian school was rather wary of his superior intellect.

I wonder whether Hayek’s later writing might have been partly a response to Schumpeter, without quite saying so: in order to counteract possible arguments that a reader might make out of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. (We already know that Hayek had taken a cue for some of his endeavors from Keynes’ public promotion skills.)

In that book Schumpeter pointed-out many of the problems that the coming socialism will have — although, good scientist that he was, he was careful also to point out that centralized socialism had never really been tried in all its possible forms (he specifically excludes smaller forms like guild socialism), and so he even admits that his analysis is crude and provisional, and not like his analysis of capitalism, which flaws were evident. But he thought some form of socialism could probably work, and that for all its flaws, it might have its own small virtues.

I have a hunch that this might have alarmed Hayek, and so he set out to try (unsuccessfully) to prove it wrong. But Schumpeter had the far greater intellect, and he is the one still standing.

In the History of Economic Analysis, he wrote of Keynes, “Keynes was Ricardo’s peer in the highest sense of the phrase.” Schumpeter didn’t build a system, but I think he was up there, too.

Schumpeter’s review of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (JPE, 1946) suffers from a calculated vagueness. He writes:

“But the author [Hayek] deals with ideas and princi- ples as if they floated in the air. If he had gone into the historical conditions from which the ideas arose which he dislikes so much, he could not have helped discovering that they are the products of the social system which he does like. The principles of individual initiative and self-reliance are the principles of a very limited class. They mean nothing to the mass of people
who —no matter for what reason-are not up to
the standard they imply. It is this majority that the economic achievement and the liberal policy of the capitalist age have invested with domi- nant power. Excepting intellectuals and politi- cians, nobody has changed his ideas. It is the people whose ideas count politically that have changed. This is why the old road has been abandoned. And in this situation there is no point in appealing to Cicero or Pericles, whose individualism blossomed in societies whose very basis was slavery, or to Benjamin Franklin (p.
133), who spoke for a small body of hardy pioneers every one of whom cheerfully faced the alternative of getting on or perishing and some of whom did not scorn a profitable deal in slaves.”

Schumpeter finds anachronistic Hayek’s reactionary appeals to Manchester Liberalism. Mass society has arrived, a theme in Lederer and Arendt. If ones reads the whole review, I think it will be clear that JAS is saying that the only way that a premature socialization of bourgeois civilization can be prevented, at this point, is through the kinds of pseudo-socialist measures undertaken by the Nazi regime. Schumpeter is indirectly saying that there must be some combination of social programs for the lesser men whose dignity is not tied up with self-reliance and anti-union violence. He may actually think Hayek’s pride that his class has not lost respect for self-reliance and individualism and thus remains a moral beacon may well provoke even more fierce class resentments and endanger civilization (as its bourgeois form is called) itself.

Consumatopia – Is it a problem for the ‘elective affinity’ argument if tCoL is not Hayek’s most popular book? Or maybe it just means that Hayek himself has elective-affinity for Nietzsche, but his followers don’t necessarily? Even among people who have read it, it doesn’t seem like the parts of it that stick out most to egalitarian critics are the same as the parts that resonate with Hayek sympathizers

Well, leaving aside the bravura quasi-contrarianism of the Nietzsche connection, ask whether the defence of plutocratic elitism is essential to Hayek’s position. I don’t care about Hayek’s affinities. I don’t care if Hayek at times retained enough grip on reality to accept the need for a ‘safety net’ and collective funding of some public goods. I don’t care if Hayek’s followers, apologists, and exploiters (and Foucault in the late 70s – cf. Nozick) choose to focus only on the know-nothing economics and the denunciation of arbitrary (government) power (of course they do).

The point is that the proprietarian right from welfare state liberals to self-styled anarchocapitalists largely tend to ignore (I do not say overlook) the two simple and obvious refutatory (ra-FYUT-a-tree) arguments against their position:

1. In a modern industrial setup, with all its material advantages, we are going to have large and powerful organisations which co-ordinate with each other, and not only by the mythical ‘price signals’ – co-operation is useful everywhere, in service of any goal, and whether via Acts of Parliament and civil service memos or the Britich Bankers’ Association and Smith’s golf-course conspiracies, it will happen. The primary choice in the absence of a detailed third alternative is whether power is going to be concentrated in the (somewhat – let’s hope increasingly) democratic state, or in openly and incorrigibly self-serving organisations like, say, large capitalist corporations and super-rich individuals. Which latter gets us to:

2. Unless intentionally confiscatory taxation or some other deliberate measure is used to prevent it, a proprietarian system rapidly leads to concentration of wealth and thus power, giving rise to a de facto (generally hereditary) ruling class.

The second is the more relevant of the two (they are of course interrelated). Possible answers are: 1. claim that commutative justice must be done though the heavens fall 2. simply deny it (probably claiming that it’s all the fault of government cronyism – whereas in fact it’s government capture) or 3. claim that it’s not a problem in welfare terms. The first two of these have obvious problems; the third would seem to require backing from some substantive empirical thesis; Hayekian elitism at least purports to offer such a thesis. That’s why this stuff is not just some idiosyncratic and severable aberration on Hayek’s part, but an integral part of his argument (such as it is).

The neoliberal establishment were and are well aware of this. That’s why (per the recently much-reprised anecdote) Thatcher banged a copy of TCoL down on the table and announced ‘this is what we believe’. Not Anarchy, State, and Utopia which of course never gets anywhere near addressing the reality I’ve sketched. And – lo! – these same kinds of arguments were a standard part of Reaganomics’s ‘supply side’ propaganda. Even today, this combination of aristocratic/elitist themes with free market radicalism is much closer to the views of actual right-wingers in and around government and the ruling classes than is a more Californian style of libertarianism.

Just to take a quick reality-check, Robin’s project (& not only his) is alarming to some establishment libertario-liberals because it might lead to talking about actual current/recent politics, the *last* thing they want (politics, not the daily back and forth). ‘Let’s detour, as we always do – let’s keep the discussion about ‘demonizing’ (or not) Hayak or Nietzche themselves as persons.’ It’s the ideas that matter, no?

Let’s talk about the pudding itself, the situation we all like to pretend we aren’t in (we’re observers and have no influence on what we observe!). What makes Prof Robin’s essay provoking is that, as is his wont, he comes right out and says that which must not be said: we have an economizing way of formulating practically ALL our values now. More, everything is now thought of in market terms, including spirituality, emotions, creativity…every decision is, in a sense, an ROI decision [btw It’s a perfect set-up for reactionary politics, since (see also: abortion), ‘culture’ issues are the gift that keeps on giving; the very strong incentive is to make sure it keeps on giving]. I don’t think it’s going to be so easy to defend this point of view (neoliberalism) going forward. It is vulgar and disastrous to an extent that its intellectual fathers themselves possibly wouldn’t have approved of. Anyway, identifying it is half the battle.

The swiftest libertarian answer to Robin’s essay made a point to scoff at Robin’s identification of a paradox (Robin is just rationalizing a conflict, said the libertarian). That moment stuck with me. Libertarian/neo-liberalism is *made* of paradox. Freedom is constraint!

That dismissal of paradox gave him away. Paradox is very powerful!

What “pseudo-socialist measures” did the Nazis take beyond the welfare state as they found it? Strength-Through-Joy cruises?

Sorry, that quote from CL should have read: ““I do not think the cause of liberty will prevail unless our emotions are aroused.”

Anderson, Mark Blyth has some interesting bits in his contribution to the Sheri Berman book forum that Henry Farrell organized here:
http://www.henryfarrell.net/berman.pdf

The best antidote to calculating grades (for three courses in my case, without teaching assistants, but such is the life of a lecturer) is an occasional post here and there.

I am bit skeptical of taking the fashionable affective turn in regards to Hayek, though there is the old stand-by that he understood (though perhaps not explicitly) the morality of the masses in terms of a caricatured Nietzschean theory of ressentiment. The expression of such class bias by Peter Sloterdijk was greeted a few years back by Axel Honneth in a devastating criticism.

The best work that I have read on the emotions and class inequality is by Andrew Sayer.

All that said, it seems to me that Hayek feared emotion more than he appealed to it. He found threatening the raw emotional need for anti-individualistic collectivity that he probably thought was rooted biologically in our deep ethnological past.

He wanted to restrain emotion just as he much as he wanted to cast doubt on the kind of Enlightenment reason that James Scott sees as work in high modernism.

It would seem that the working of common law steers a path between raw emotion and Enlightenment reason, between lawlessness and revolutionary statutory law. The common law is his ideal.

Also interesting is Hayek’s critique of underconsumptionism as the basis of his anti-Keynesianism, but this is for another discussion. He certainly did not think that the brightening of investment prospects depended on the strengthening of final demand in a downturn. But this was actually not a political or Nietzschean argument against economic populism but a properly economically theoretical one.

@ 66:

” Freedom is constraint! ”

But of course, that is not paradoxical, but simply true. “Freedom”, i.e. human agency, is a matter of structured, rule-governed behavior, (since to follow a rule is precisely not to be causally determined). The cross-secting structure of rules do not just constrain or limit, but by the very same token, they render possible. And finitude is an essential mark of all human agency. (The basic model is natural language, which is marvelously flexible, but involves rule-governed constraints to be at all intelligible. Cf. Wittgenstein). “Freedom” is anything but the unfettered absence of constraint. (Libertarians of whatever stripe, take note).

@Gianattasio in 29

this begs the question of why it took almost 2000 years for this supposedly liberal intellectual force to make good on its promise?

I touched upon this in my original post, though perhaps I should’ve been more clear: the fact that the Church held a near monopoly on the exchange of information until the 16th century meant that it could ensure only interpretations favorable to the status quo became widespread. Once that monopoly is broken, by the printing press and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, you DO start seeing various liberal, proto-liberal and proto-radical movements appearing on the scene in less than a half century! The “why did take 2000 years to reach this point?” argument doesn’t hold up, and also contains a modern conceit that moral progress and philosophical/intellectual revolutions are things that happens relatively quickly when history demonstrates otherwise.’ Whether moral or scientific, our greatest discoveries and advances are often the by-product of centuries of labor.

Jacob McM @ 78

Why attribute the emergence of an antithesis to the qualities of the thesis, as if the thesis was the antithesis all along?

The “increased inequality” meme, in its vaporous abstractness, hides one of the most profound deficiencies in the conservative use of Hayek’s vision.

The issue of income and wealth distribution is, or should be, two-fold: fairness and insurance, not some abstract equality of opportunity or result. The way it is frequently framed on the left is as a personal preference for greater equality, and in this form invites reductio as the absurdity of absolute equality.

Conservative economists won the methodological debate on concepts of fairness, by cramming a combination of pareto optimality and profit maximization under complete information down our throats. A more realistic vision would be parasitic unfairness as the normal outcome of “spontaneous order”. The entrepreneur cannot distinguish profit derived from delivering value from profit from oppressive extraction — it’s all the same. So, we hear about how capitalism is raising living standards in third world countries, and how a building housing sweatshops collapsing killing hundreds, and we’re not supposed to make a connection.

In the conservative vision, the capitalist entrepreneur is a far-sighted captain of commerce or industry, concerned to preserve reputation and in it for the long-run. We can trust Jamie Dimon to run an out-sized bank, because he’s a smart, profit-maximizer, who can be trusted to know all that can be known and use excellent judgment. If there’s a problem, it is because government is offering small depositers, insurance — a guarantee, which “distorts” the incentives of the great profit-maximizing capitalists. A dramatic narrative spins out, in which gov’t and ill-conceived public purposes and public planning makes things worse, from a baseline of spontaneous goodness.

Ultimately, there’s no other use for purely financial wealth than as insurance, and the primary ways to increase the profitability of insurance are predatory: increase the buffeting of risk, by adding financial risk to the ordinary risks of life. Medical insurance without medical bankruptcy is no fun! Banking without bank failures is no way to strip the middle class of their savings! Stock bubbles, where the smart money exits to short positions in a timely fashion is a hedge fund’s dream; if the short position is structured to draw more of the rubes into losses, so much the better!

But, any policy intervention is going to be pareto-suboptimal, threatening “innovation”! The “real” problem is regulation and the effect of government policy is subsidizing TBTF.

And, all these arguments that make it so difficult to escape neoliberalism start with Hayek and Friedman. OK, they don’t start there, but they become really potent, with the polemics of Hayek and, then, Friedman.

arg. messed up the italics. My statement begins with ‘Your faith…’

I used to like to pose to right-libertarians, (“properitarians”), the question: how is human agency, a.k.a. “freedom”, possible in a causally determined world?

And the right-libertarian could reply, presumably, that s/he doesn’t think the world is “causally determined.” And that wd be that.

I don’t understand how following a rule makes you not causally determined. The rule is just another cause thrown onto the pile of factors which causes my meatbag body to do whatever it is it does. I tend to think of freedom as the ability to do what you want. I am free to do something if, had I wanted to do it, then I would do it. Good old compatibilism extended into the social realm. You need some sort of cognitive structure to give people enough of a psychology to have desires in the first place, (and you can split hairs quite a lot over what exactly we mean by what “I” want, since the self is somewhat of a blurrily defined entity) but I don’t see why people would need to follow structured rule-governed behavior on top of that.

Of course, this conception of freedom is extremely different from the traditional libertarian formulation, since many things I’d like to do but find myself incapable of doing are not because of any active coercion.

nature is not a market, anymore than evolution is progressive. if this error is being made here, it’s being made on marx’s account.

far less is nietzsche’s concept of nature a market. markets are purely quantitative. to austrians they mean: price determination. that’s it. this, out of its own logic, is said to generate greater efficiencies and growth and hence net benefit for all, as contained in the concept of utility. already, as should be apparent, we are very far from nietzsche. the “best” is never said, in hayek, to triumph as a result of market forces. that is not the point. results are based on economics and hence chance — not natural gradation in ability, reflected by cultural rank.

strauss hews to nietzsche, not hayek. it is nature that produces philosophers and artists — nature which can produce mutants and monstrosities (by design). markets only produces quantitatively demanded philosophy and art, almost the definition of what nietzsche would call degraded philosophy and art.

even any vague comparo of the notion of authoritarian rule between the two doesn’t pan out. hayek promotes anti-democracy to preserve economic liberalism, a weird negative of the schmittean state. one cannot even conceive of what would constitute the complementary nietzschean argument: a defense of political power on behalf of the powerless.

a philosophic reading of hayek sans a complementary economic reading of nietzsche. typical. amazes me why anyone takes robin’s cheap shots at “reactionary” thinkers seriously.

…
Back to the passage from TCoL:
it is very questionable whether there are any actions which can be called merely “economic” and whether any restrictions on liberty can be confined to what are called merely “economic” aspects. This is, I suppose, just about capable of being made consistent with the idea that ‘econ. lib.’ is ‘included’ in, and narrower than, freedom of action. But this continues to pretend that what capitalists get up to, or waged employees for that matter, is specifiable just in terms of ordinary actions without legal ramification. It’s the usual conservative-romantic idea that capitalist ‘economic activity’ is continuous with homely actions such as sowing some seeds on a conveniently ‘unowned’ bit of wasteland, or playing basketball, or what-have-you. The “selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property”, to coin a phrase. (cf. the propensity to truck and barter, etc.)

Economic considerations are merely those by which we reconcile and adjust our different purposes, none of which, in the last resort, are economic (excepting those of the miser or the man for whom making money has become an end in itself). – But ‘economic liberty’ not being a species of freedom of action at all, it is not really a matter of identifying certain actions as ‘merely’ economic, and certainly not of banning certain kinds of actions as always purely economic. Though it is in fact possible to identify certain actions as carried out for purely economic purposes – those which are performed in pursuit of profit rather than for their own sake. The fact that money is usually desired instrumentally doesn’t make any difference – though of course the super-rich class of ‘gentlemen of independent means’ are the most likely to end up pursuing pecuniary profit for no further reason, which imparts quite a bit of irony to von H’s throwaway caveat at the end.

And of course there is no question of needing to actively prohibit such ‘economic activities’ – altering the legal framework so that they are no longer profitable removes the motivation to perform them – if and insofar as they are purely economic in this sense. And actually, this would seem to be exactly what Hayek would want to argue against under the rubric of defending economic liberty – but he is now basically saying there’s no such thing as ‘economic liberty’, only undifferentiated ‘freedom of action’ – which just happens to be the freedom of action of those who have the resources and proclivities requisite for engagement in capitalist ventures. In reality, iof the aim is to stimulate new developments by increased activity using scarce resources, one might well suppopse that distributing those resources far more widely would be the way to go, rather than leaving it all to a hereditary class of aristocrats (inbreeding, in the literal sense, is a known problem in small hereditary elites; it would certainly seem to apply in metaphorical ‘memetic’ terms.)

The idiocy does not end with this failure to acknowledge the enabling – indeed constitutive – role of property rights etc. in the ‘actions’ involved in commercial enterprises. Nowhere here is there any recognition of the fact that freedom of action is rivalrous, and that laws governing it so as to minimise conflict involve substantive choices privileging some kinds of action over others. Still less is there any acknowledgement that this rivalry is especially pronounced where actions involve extensive use of resources. We just have this generic ‘freedom of action’ and a claim that all sorts of other stuff falling under the rubric of ‘economic activity’ is a kind of freedom of action, and so commingled with non-economic activity that we couldn’t separate them if we tried.

This hasn’t really got us past “if we were to prevent all that we disliked, the unforeseen good things that might be thus prevented would probably outweigh the bad.” And it’s worse – since we are talking about welfare consequences, it’s not a matter of ‘preventing’ in any strong sense, but of precluding. Hayek wants maximal doing of stuff – action – to furnish us with the mutations from which the elite can select (see my ##42-3 above). So we shouldn’t preclude the doing of stuff by anyone, by for example failing to preclude the doing of rivalrous stuff by someone else. But of course that’s stupid.

The fact is that Hayek assumes that the doing of lots of stuff is going to occur primarily in the course of business activity by ‘gentlemen of independent means’ – the elite – and this is supposedly enough, though we are given no good reason to suppose so, to satisfy the imperative to ‘freedom’ provided by the Iron Law of The Good Probably Outweighing the Bad.

And on top of all that, and just to reconnect with the Nietzschian analogy (though I personally think this is a distraction and an easy target for counterargument), such a process of mutation and selection is of course, like biological evolution, endless and aimless – called ‘progress’ only by stipulation. (see again ##42-3: a progressive society, while it relies on this process of learning and imitation, recognizes the desires it creates only as a spur to further effort. It does not guarantee the results to everyone.) maybe not the will to power exactly, but certainly a kindred fetishisation of means.

Consum way back @29:

Hayek’s point is that, often, before a new political idea is adopted by the public, that idea is promulgated and advocated by a committed minority. The public decides, but obviously the public cannot know before the efforts of that minority which new political ideas ought be adopted; if the public did, it would already have adopted them. In other words, political progress often depends on the existence of a small group of determined individuals who are willing to make their case again and again to the larger society, who in turn may at first reject them. Very Margaret Mead of Hayek, really.

Bruce @ 81 writes: Hayek’s “spontaneous order”, despite his fog of equivocation and occasional concessions to common sense, is clearly meant to contrast sharply with public “planning”, as if politics, somehow, doesn’t belong to the “spontaneous order”, just as much as private economic activity.

Worth quoting John Gray’s essay for a different emphasis:

In Hayek’s conception, we are not bound to accept the historical body of social rules just as we find it: it may be reformed in order to improve the chances of the unknown man’s achieving his goals. It will be seen that this is a maximizing conception, but not one that represents utility as a sort of neutral stuff, a container of intrinsic value whose magnitude may vary. Indeed, in taking as the point of comparison an hypothesized unknown individual, Hayek’s conception (as he recognizes[75]) parallels John Rawls’ model of rational choice behind a veil of ignorance as presented in Rawls’ Theory of Justice.

“Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. . . . The roots of the notion of determinism surely lie in a very common philosophical idea: the idea that everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise.” Carl Hoefer, Causal Determinism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, with its discovery of so-called physical laws, exemplified by Newton’s Laws, gave a great impetus to the idea of determinism, and to what has to be among the most sterile debates in philosophy, free will v. determinism. Newton’s model of the solar system, governed by calculable gravity and inertia, inspired the fanciful notion of a clockwork universe — a favorite of the Deists — but scientific analysis also facilitated the replacement of esoteric craft knowledge with technological innovation. Human power was amplified by analytic understanding and the “obedience” of human machines to the Laws of Nature. The constraints represented by Newton’s principles — conservation of energy, mass and momentum — could, for example, allow you to derive by analysis the laws of aerodynamics, and you could build a machine that made appropriate use of those constraints, which would give to humans the power, and freedom, to fly.

The paradox of constraint as the means of freedom — if it be a paradox — is as old as Archimedes recognizing that the power of his machine, his lever, required a place to stand. But, the scientific revolution prompted a wholesale replacement of symbolic storytelling with functional analysis. It was, as Nietzsche recognized, as momentous a spiritual development as the birth of tragedy, when men first began to recognize that their fates were in their own palsied hands, and not the whims of unseen gods and demons — that character was destiny, as Oedipus showed and could not face. Notions like the Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence are part of Nietzsche’s meditation on the consequences of this new and further disenchantment, this Death of God, which lay as the foundation of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Knowledge of Fact and Value, in this disenchanted world, is made deeply problematic by the intrusion of the pragmatic standards of science qua technology. If you don’t know what you are doing, the consequences of what you do are, essentially, random. Random is what you don’t know and cannot control, the new Terra Incognita, the tragic accident marking the limits of hubris.

If you meet the constraints of nature, accept nature’s implacable, indifferent determinacy, in lieu of trying to please or placate non-existent gods with sacrifice, you have power.

“If you meet the constraints of nature” on the road, kill them!

” during the classical period of Roman law it was fully understood that there is no conflict between law and freedom and that freedom is dependent upon certain attributes of the law, its generality and certainty, and the restrictions it places on the discretion of authority. This classical period was also a period of complete economic freedom”

Thanks for that quote TW, it’s quite funny! (I remark in earnest). How pompous and overreaching. The period had complete freedom! Everyone knew this! Obviously!

Anderson @ 97

One of these days, I’ll get wound up about reflexive overdetermination in social causality, and things really will get confused. ;-)

@95:

“, precisely what is meant by ‘causally determined’,”

What? Causality is a schema by which we order the understanding of events, regardless if we know the specific causes in operation or not. But the operation of physical causes is understood to be pervasive in the world, no? It’s only a question of whether “meaning” itself can be meaningfully reduced to causal terms, but not a question of their being ever an absence of a substrate of physical causes.

You do understand that natural language operates through a pervasive structure of rules, even as those rules are largely inaccessible to conscious reflection, that one can say a great deal in such a language, but only by following out the constraints o such rules, because at bottom those rules are constitutive and not merely regulatory, (i.e. no such rules, no such language), eh? Of course, mis-fires and mis-cues occur all the time in human communicative interaction, by they are due precisely to failure in the operation of those rules.

So what the connection between language and agency. Animal organism are self-regulating causal organizations that delimit themselves from an environment and on the basis of that relative closure, intervene causally in environmental state-of-affairs/chains-of-events, with whatever senses and appendages they are endowed with. But that’s not agency, “freedom”, merely animal motility, and the case there is the same for you as for your cat. And animals can only react to environmental events/affairs or cycles thereof. It’s only when there is natural language and the symbolic thinking to enables and carries, that environmental events/affairs can be interpreted against a horizon of counter-factual possibilities and one such possibility can be deliberate selected and implemented. Which is the root of the phenomenon we call “human agency”, a.k.a. “freedom”. Now the exercise of agency involves the acquisition of skills and know-hows that are not reducible to the structured rule-systems involved in speaking and understanding a language. By my claim is that such additional capacities are just as much a matter of internally structured rule-systems analogous to those involved in linguistic behavior and that to exercise agency is to act on the basis of some sort of understanding: hence it’s partly a matter of direct overlap and partly an matter of analogous structure. (It doesn’t matter in the first instance whether the interpretive understanding of an agent is a particularly good or accurate one: in some cultures, sacrificing children to appease the gods could be considered a “free” act. Nor is there ever any ultimate guarantee that our interpretive understandings exactly correspond to whatever would be the case in the independent external world. Though most of our interpretations and their background assumptions would have a t least a well-worn pragmatic adequacy).

One further implication needs to be emphasized. Language always and everywhere, directly or indirectly, involves a relation to an other, as that which is invoked and addressed. So likewise, human agency is always bound up in relations with others. So it is as much a collective as an individual matter. Which is one reason that questions about “freedom” are not well addressed by starting from the first-person solipsistic perspective and its alleged self-evidence.

Tim Wilkinson @ 91:

Sorry. I don’t mean to derail the thread. I was just tempted to respond to a silly comment someone made. I don’t know why.

Still, providing a realistic non-reductive, non-metaphysical account of human agency as a limited, finite phenomenon is of some usefulness when confronting and dealing with either hyperbolic, (e.g. self-creation), or excessively individualistic conceptions of “freedom”. (Of course, “free will” is an archaic metaphysical conception and there is no need to understand matters of human agency in such terms, even if it might still have currency with some people).

I prefer to talk simply in terms of human agency rather than “freedom” because “freedom” is an abstraction that can be attached to a bewildering variety of entities, (states, corporations, works of art, or whatnot), generally for ideological purposes. And “freedom” is assumed to be self-evidently tantamount to the good, even the one supreme good. Who after all does not want to be “free” and “liberated”? But to my mind, human agency, like human equality, is more of a fact than a value. Or, at least, that is how I would construe the justificatory burdens.

“He even goes so far as to argue that if such a class didn’t already exist, we should select people at random and and give them enough money to create such a class.”
That’s very funny. It almost makes me want to reconsider my decision not to read Hayek in the original.
Did Hayek ever write anything about lotteries? What would he think of the “Lotto Lout” “King of Chavs”?

we should also select people at random, and destroy their lives, to encourage the rest, as they say.

(Oh wait, we already do that!)

I wielded Google site search and got 24 hits, going back to 2004.

Actually, I think most of those searches are finding “hunger”.

Unger’s writing and video talks are available at his website. Found provocative his critique of Keynesians for responding to the 2008 crisis with only conventional fiscal and monetary tools while the ending of the Great Depression showed that deeper institutional reforms were necessary. Perhaps he had Galbraith’s experience with war-time planning in mind, but there was no real specificity on what more radical institutional reforms he had in mind, as I recall the talk.
On another point: it does not follow that institutional arrangements, even if they are not grounded in nature or God, do not pose objective constraints on the possibility of action. I don’t doubt that Unger understands this well, but sometimes his writings give me the impression that all he thinks that really stands in the way of the radical institutional experimentalism for which he calling is ignorance of his activist or pragmatic philosophy which strips away our belief in the fixity of our characters and the necessity of our institutions. That is, Unger seems overly idealistic to me at times, but he writes boldly, and I never finish a piece of his without having been provoked into thought.