The road from serfdom: F.A. Hayek spent years in the wilderness for arguing that socialism was the road, not to prosperity and justice, but to tyranny

National Review, April 27, 1992 by John Gray, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Ralph Harris, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jr.

It is in The Constitution of Liberty that intimations first appear of the ideas of spontaneous social order and cultural evolution that were to occupy him for the rest of his life, though in 1952 he had published a book, The Counter-Revolution of Science, in which he had criticized the "constructivist rationalism" of positivistic science. By constructivism Hayek meant that form of rationalism, inaugurated by Descartes and identified by Hayek with the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which stigmatizes as irrational all beliefs and practices that cannot be demonstratively justified, and which aims at a comprehensive reconstruction of social life. As against this rationalism Hayek posits another, that of the Scottish Enlightenment, which takes a humbler view of human reason and acknowledges the wisdom embodied in inherited traditions.

Though he always denied that he was a philosophical conservative, Hayek's view of traditions as repositories of knowledge has much in common with that of Edmund Burke. However, if in Burke this view has a basis in a Christian providentialist interpretation of human history, it is in Hayek given a secular Darwinian statement. It is in The Constitution of Liberty that Hayek first gives systematic and unequivocal voice to this cultural Darwinism. His thesis was that groups or traditions engage in a competition in which those with practices and beliefs which have Darwinian superiority come to prevail over others. Accordingly--as Hayek put it in his last work, The Fatal Conceit--there is a kind of natural selection of religions in which those that favor private property and the family, and thereby promote fertility, will supplant those that do not. At times, in The Constitution of Liberty and more explicitly in his later works such as the three-volume Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek comes close to suggesting that market institutions have an analogous evolutionary advantage over socialist institutions, such that economic freedom is bound to prevail.

It is in The Constitution of Liberty, also, that Hayek adumbrates the idea of a spontaneous order in society. This is not only the idea that undesigned institutions and traditions may be bearers of knowledge which their practitioners may not have theorized, but which is available to them for use. It is also the idea that, unless it is stifled by government, human society contains coordinating and equilibrating mechanisms that, left to themselves, will produce an order subtler and stabler than any we can even conceive, let alone impose. Hayek cites the development of the common law and the evolution of language as examples of orders that are products of human action, but not of human design.

Hayek synthesized the central ideas of his thought--of markets as epistemic devices, of cultural evolution, and of a spontaneous social order--to provide a comprehensive theoretical foundation for his ideal of government under the rule of law, devoted to the protection of individual liberty in both the personal and the economic spheres. It is in this attempted synthesis that weaknesses appear. The idea of cultural evolution, or the natural selection of groups by their practices, is very obscure: what is the unit of cultural evolution, and what is its mechanism? Like Marxism, Hayek's theory of cultural evolution neglects historical contingency. (Religions often die out, not because they are at a Darwinian disadvantage to their rivals, but because state power is deployed to persecute them.) The idea of a spontaneous social order is no less difficult. What are the mechanisms whereby societies reach to equilibrium? And how does Hayek explain the political catastrophes and economic collapses with which human history is littered? In truth, Hayek's attempt at an evolutionary or synthetic philosophy that supports the political ideals of classical liberalism fails, just as Herbert Spencer's did before him. Hayek would have done better to rest his case for limited government on the ethical foundation of respect for human freedom; but a deep-seated ethical skepticism, common among those whose intellects were formed in the Vienna of the first part of this century, induced him instead to seek foundations for liberalism that were, in his own term, "scientistic" in that they gave to science a normative force it does not possess.