Because nothing says “spontaneous order” like torture and disappearances

Not strictly relevant: but here’s a view of Hayek on trade unions:

‘Friedrich Hayek wrote frequently on the consequences of trade unions,
usually highly critically, making large claims about their very adverse economic
and social impact. A close analysis of his work demonstrates that his judgments
do not rest on a theory of trade unions which is clearly different from a
conventional treatment; nor does he anywhere present any relevant new empirical
work. Further, his methodological writings seem to disbar him from making the
kind of empirical claims on trade unions that feature throughout his writings. The
conclusion is that he was morally so offended by the extraordinary legal
immunities which the trade unions had acquired that his judgment deserted him,
so that he descended into a series of wholly untenable empirical assertions. His
significant influence on thinking and policy on industrial relations matters, at least
in the UK, looks to have been based far more on powerful emotions than on
science.’

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/DP0178.pdf

While I was at Robin’s last night, I actually became much more interested in his admiration for the work of the historian and pragmatist (?) James Livingston.

Here’s just a taste

@4, Nah. Some are big on freedom, others are big on equality. Each is to be accused of hypocrisy according to their believes. Castro and Chavez seem alright, more or less, in this respect.

Is this the same Corey Robin who was on book tv, maligning “leftists” for not reading Hayek with the seriousness that he deserves? How serious are we supposed to be about the triangles in Prices of Production or the lurking social Darwinism in the Constitution of Liberty?

If I’m not mistaken, there are two Singapore residents in-house. I’d be interested in what they have to say about what kinds of freedom, and how much of it, Singaporeans have. My knowledge of the country is based on several business trips there in the mid-1980’s, when I got the impression that if you avoided becoming a potential pest to the government and or an actual pest to your neighbors, you would be left alone; but I would be the first to admit that this is a superficial and dated impression.

9: I spent a couple hours looking up Singapore last week, and learned stuff I doubt I would have as a tourist, or perhaps even as a long-term resident. Wikipedia:

Singapore has the world’s highest percentage of millionaire households, with one out of every six resident households having at least one million US dollars in disposable wealth — excluding their properties, businesses and luxury goods. If those were included, the number of millionaires would be higher, since property in Singapore is amongst of the world’s most expensive. [94] Despite its relative economic success, Singapore does not have a minimum wage, believing that it would lower its competitiveness. It also has one of the highest income inequality levels among developed countries, coming in just behind Hong Kong and in front of the United States.[95][96]

“Most work in Singapore is in the service sector…” IYKWIM

Harold, before we get ahead of ourselves let’s remember that the claim was that there are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.” It’s perfectly coherent to believe that Singapore is one such instance while denying that it is a libertarian paradise or whatever.

In case you didn’t know what I meant at 11

Are Singapore Servants Really Slaves

governing employers’ control over their live-in servants, which are found in roughly 20 percent of Singapore’s homes.

For domestic workers, the latest legal gain is their biggest so far: the right to demand at least one weekly day off starting in 2013. And as maids hanging laundry out of high-rise condos continue plummeting to their deaths — there are nine cases this year and 75 since 2000, according to government figures — Singapore has vowed to punish families that don’t provide safe working conditions.

Sorry. Gone off topic. Back to boogeyman.

Weirdly enough, I’m in a way sympathetic with Dan (@12). Rightist conceptions of liberty tend to be at best indifferent to and more generally inhospitable to democratic social arrangements. This is plenty clear in Berlin, it’s fairly explicit in Nozick, etc. So while it’s of course fun to shame Hayek and his supporters by pointing out he had no problem with apartheid, etc., isn’t his position in fact consistent as regards the question of “liberty” ? (Admittedly, I know Hayek a lot less well than I do Berlin and Nozick, so maybe I’m missing something here.)

The more arguments I read between libertarian/propertarians and socialists (count me more in the latter camp, btw) the more it seems that ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are not very useful terms. To take the Pakistan/Singapore example above; I’m genuinely confused as to which nation should be regarded as more ‘free’.

Seems to me that the free-wheeling, bad-ass, self-possessed attributes libertarians like to celebrate are embodied more in the recalcitrant and anti-statist warlords of Waziristan than in the cramped, highly regulated lives of the Singaporean middle class.

Yes, but in authoritarian regimes “those who are valued” can change at the whim of the local police. My stepfather was marched to the police station, jailed, and threatened with torture by castor oil under Mussolini. His crime? He was caught buying a copy of L’Osservatore Romano (the Vatican newspaper) which, unbeknownst to him, that day had published an article slightly critical of Mussolini. Fortunately for him, he had some friends who were able to get him out.

Specifically on Singapore see Jeffrey Winters, OLIGARCHY, Cambridge University Press, 2011. As for Hayek..honestly, why are we still wasting time on Hayek?

Couple error there – sorry.

now = nor
wrest = rest

Carl Weetabix lol love your name. When I was a kid, the ‘gang wars’ I knew about were between the kids who had weet-bix for brekky and those of us who had vita-brits.

Carl Weetabix: Pinochet didn’t just jail people, nor just kill people. He had people tortured as well. Hayek would have been aware. There would have been enough reports even in the seventies to let him know what his best mate Augusto was up to. He just chose to ignore them. It’s straight out of Orwell, and Hayek would have known his Orwell:

Consider for instance some comfortable English Austrian professor defending Russian Chilean totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet Pinochet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian Chilean people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement free markets.”

That’s a different situation from hypotheticals like “framing the US Constitution led to the Civil War” – because there was four score and seven years separating the two events. Jefferson and Hamilton may have feared a war over slavery, but they were quite dead when it came to pass.

Regarding Hayek’s knowledge of what was going on in Pinochet’s Chile. The authors of the article I cite in my post also write this (which I didn’t include in my post):

Hayek had accepted an “invitation . . . [from] a private university in Chile to give lectures there” and when this became public knowledge he was supposedly inundated with “letters. . . [and] telephone calls” and was also provided with a wealth of anti-Pinochet documentary evidence by organizations like Amnesty International and other similarly “well-intentioned people I did not know . . . [all of] which were intended to stop me visiting such an ‘objectionable’ country” (44).

I like the way Amnesty gets treated as some kind of culty-fringe organization, which I guess it sort of was (fringe, that is) back then.

Classical liberalism has long had an ambivalent relationship with democracy. This sometimes comes out even in people like Mill, who in many ways breaks from the classical liberal tradition. (You can see it in his idea of plural voting for the smartest people, and I think it’s an essential part of understanding his worries about the “tyranny of the majority.”) This comes out today pretty clearly in the works of people like Jason Brennan (one of the “bleeding Heart Libertarians”) and, in a slightly more subtle way, Gerald Gauss. (I discuss this aspect of Gaus’s thought a bit in the review I did of his book, here:

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24757-the-order-of-public-reason-a-theory-of-freedom-and-morality-in-a-diverse-and-bounded-world/

Though not as much as I would have liked.)

The Gaus Book is good, though very long and complex.

If you were to rephrase the comment as “liberalism is more important than democracy” I could see it as defensible. I certainly would prefer to live in a non-democratic state the respected human rights and the rule of law over a democracy that respected neither. That would go double (or more) if I was a member of a despised minority; taking Singapore now over Rwanda under Kambanda is a no-brainer. However, in actual application, I don’t see South Africa under apartheid and Chile under Pinochet being better than the democratic alternatives, especially in retrospect. Well OK, I can see that, but only if you think socialism is something so evil that anything must be better.

@32 — It’s my endless crusade against materialism (a.k.a. “energy monism”) that keeps me youthful. The tenor of my comment was that Hayek happened upon the ideas of self-organisation and spontaneous order at more or less the same moment as many other proto-systems theorists.

My evidence is that in his last book Hayek writes, “When I began my work, I felt that I was nearly alone in working on the evolutionary formation of such highly complex self-maintaining orders. Meanwhile, researches on this kind of problem — under various names, such as autopoiesis, cybernetics, homeostasis, spontaneous order, self-organisation, synergetics, systems theory, and so on — have become so numerous that I have been able to study closely no more than a few of them.” (The Fatal Conceit, 1988, p. 9.–A good overall view of his final understanding of a nonmathematical biosystems theory, and moreover it is short.) Now we don’t have a date for when he began working on “the evolutionary formation of such highly complex self-maintaining orders”, but let’s put it around the date of “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945).

Well, wait a minute, the first Macy cybernetics conference in 1946 had around 20 people including Ross Ashby, Bateson, von Foerster, McCulloch and Pitts, von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener, and discussed these topics: self-regulating and teleological mechanisms; simulated neural networks; anthropology and how computers might learn how to learn; object perception’s feedback mechanisms; deriving ethics from science” (Wikipedia).

I think we have to conclude that these ideas were already advanced by the mid-1940’s, and Hayek was more or less out of touch when he began.

The general idea goes back as far as Alfred Russell Wallace, who characterized natural selection the following way, in a letter written to Charles Darwin before The Origin of Species was published: “The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they have become evident, and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure to follow.” (1858; quoted in Bateson, Mind and Nature, p.176. Darwin published The Origin of Species the next year).

Indeed, Wallace’s explanation could easily have been twisted later by any Social Darwinian into a justification for supporting Pinochet no matter whose skull gets smashed, because the last extinction-event we would want to chance is socialism of any conspicuous magnitude… And that sort of consideration led me to the second point of my old comment, which is that this error of Hayek’s, ignoring the bloody horror of the instance if you can, is in fact common to many of the early systems theorists: taking descriptions of systems as prescriptions for running them properly.

I apologise for not linking to the comment, have excuse but won’t be a bore. I was hoping that the person who posted it would comment again and they did.

Thanks Lee A. Arnold for your response.

Hayek began working on self-organisation and spontaneous orders in 1920, although he only published “The Sensory Order” thirty years later. So he was quite advanced for his time:
http://manwithoutqualities.com/2012/06/03/marginal-men-weimer-on-hayek/

I regard “Sensory Order” as a great work, along with some of the early papers (“Knowledge in Society”, etc). Being purely syntactic, this early “systems theory” can be interpreted in many different ways, some of them contrary to Hayek’s latter authoritarian streak.

A good, if short, reference is “Knowledge, Institutions and Evolution in Economics” by Brian Loasby.

J. Otto Pohl 07.10.12 at 5:39 am

” There is something to be said for developmental dictatorships over incompetant and corrupt democratic governments. Despite their authoritarian nature there have been a number of non-democratic governments that have overseen significant economic development and sometimes led to democratic transitions. South Korea under Park comes to mind.”

And Singapore, and a few other places.

Meanwhile, the list of brutal, oppressive, parasitic dictatorships/authoritarian regimes which trashed their countries would fill many, many pages.

I think one might reasonably doubt that personal liberty was safe under a non-democratic regime, even if it was (temporarily) existent. In any case, Singapore doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Rightist conceptions of liberty tend to be at best indifferent to and more generally inhospitable to democratic social arrangements.

As opposed to? Surely unless you explicitly build in political rights into your conception of liberty, it’ll be “indifferent” to democratic social arrangements in the sense that it’s a contingent fact that democratic social arrangements maximize (or respect or whatever) liberty.

Someone on the libertarianets is wrong.

Surely unless you explicitly build in political rights into your conception of liberty, it’ll be “indifferent” to democratic social arrangements in the sense that it’s a contingent fact that democratic social arrangements maximize (or respect or whatever) liberty.

Well, it’s a question of the conception of liberty you’re working with. Look, I’m just following Berlin here. I happen to think that his particular conception of liberty is dead wrong (on which, see, e.g., Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty”), but I think he’s right that there are two competing conceptions of liberty. One of them–call it the rightist one–is at best mute on questions of forms of political authority; the other one–call it leftist–takes political, or perhaps social, self-determination to be a necessary component of freedom. But I don’t think you gain much by simply assuming the former.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I endorse the system Singapore has by any means. At the moment they appear less arbitrary than other authoritarian systems. That could change at any time.

45

Agreed, but it is hard to come up with examples of newly developed countries that were not founded upon infrastructure built by developmental dictatorships. Taiwan, Turkey,and some of the ASEAN countries all made important strides in infrastructure development under authoritarian regimes before becoming democratic. South Korea developed significantly under Park and then transitioned to civilian rule in the 1980s after two more military rulers. South Korea was not democratic before Park came to power. But Park did a lot more to develop the economy than Rhee.

Other examples where real economic improvement and transition to civilian rule occurred were Ghana under Rawlings. There had been significant development from 1957 to 1966 under Nkrumah. But, neither the military regimes or civilian governments between Nkrumah and Rawlings had any economic competence and they were all incredibly corrupt. It took Rawlings ordering the execution of the former military dictators for corruption to set the stage for Ghana’s current economic development.

The only developed countries not to have had authoritarian regimes are those that were colonial powers and settler colonies. This would include the US, UK, Australia, and France. Yes the UK had democracy for white people, but most people think that even at his most brutal that Rawlings was a lot better than British rule over the Gold Coast.

Otto, stable bourgeois democracy, even the most bastardized form, a two-party seesaw, is not a political system that can be implemented anywhere, any time. There are prerequisites, the usual kind: exterminate the commies, buy off separatists, define the boundaries for the most powerful, dominate the mass-media, education, etc. It’s a delicate arrangement. And Hayek, clearly, is correct: when you are a propertarian, it is, at most, secondary to capitalism.

“Personal liberty” norms for standardized drone unit human integers look and sound very different when used to describe the freedom options of actual humans with actual humanish lives.
Personal liberty for a myopic paraplegic coward with severe diabetes looks nothing like personal liberty for a high-testosterone neo-Cro Magnon.
The default norm for humans in the active discourse of whoever it is that’s been actively discoursing most of the last few hundred years seems to have slipped steadily toward the myopic coward as base norm, and away from the hearty hardy caveman.
That’s in speech and abstract forms of social interaction. In social circumstances cavemen/women still win hands down.
This skewed dynamic, with its hypocrisy and deceit built in, probably accounts for the massive growth of the prison industry and its less “civilized” inmate populations. Inferior places for inferior lives.

Kukai (at 60): “Hobbes…lays out why a monarchy is to be preferred: fewer people to bribe and the dictator views the rise and fall of his own country as an indicator of his own fortunes”.

Hobbes’ life overlapped with the monarchy of Charles II. He (Hobbes) must have been pretty blind if he still maintained those views after watching that particular show.

gordon@63

Hobbes published “Leviathan” in 1651. Charles II’s reign began in 1660.

Or at least I was under the impression that was the policy…

“many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.”

Using suitable definitions for democratic vs. authoritarian government, one can certainly justify that claim in at least some cases. But that is beside the point here. Hayek’s argument is not an academic one but it was used specifically as a justification for the Pinochet dictatorship (which he preferred to call “authoritarian” – well Singapore may be authoritarian, Pinochet was a dictator). By most people’s standards, personal liberty was safer under Allende than Pinochet. But Hayek disagreed no doubt because he valued the economic “freedom” of multinational corporations (which supported the putsch) more than the life and liberty of actual people suppressed, tortured and murdered under Pinochet.

Since the OP mentions Franz Joseph Strauss, let me mention that there actually were academics in Bavaria (chief among them Prof. Bossle (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothar_Bossle) at University of Wuerzburg) at the time whose job it was to actually redefine (in good old 1984 fashion) dictatorship as democracy – “New Democracy”, to be precise.