There is perhaps no other mainstream position in our politics that is now so disfavored by intellectuals as liberal conservatism. Assailed from the left as little more than an apologia for oppressive hierarchies and from the populist right as some shade of milquetoast, value-agnostic, surrender-monkey cowardice, the question has even been posed by critics such as Patrick Deneen whether the very concept of liberal conservatism might not prove to be a contradiction in terms. In this cultural context F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom remains what it was when first published nearly 80 years ago: a strong rallying call to the defense of a thoroughly unfashionable system and a startlingly relevant book.
Yet, with his championing of individualism and aversion to encoding value systems in the political sphere, why should those who subscribe to deeply held claims about the human good and long for their better expression in the economy care what Hayek has to say? I would argue they should care because, no libertarian, Hayek arrives at his liberalism cautiously, as a considered position that trusts only sparingly in high ideals of progress and improvement, preferring instead to lower the danger inherent in politics by vigilantly restraining power. Against a political discourse saturated with ambitious proposals, Hayek offers a coherent and defensible framework for liberal conservatism as a pragmatic project rather than a doctrinaire value-minimalism.
Hayek’s cautionary approach is evident in two of the principles that he champions most insistently: individualism and the rule of law. Individualism is perhaps an unfortunate term to use, evoking “egotism and selfishness” (68), as Hayek himself admits. What he seems to mean by the term is something close to a principle of subsidiarity, justified by a pragmatic assessment of the limited prospects for consensus on most questions of values and goals. The genius of liberalism is that it supports a “division of knowledge” (96) analogous to capitalism’s division of labor between the individual spheres of competency that every person inhabits, respecting their own unique ability to assess their needs and values while acknowledging that their blindspots begin almost as soon as any unconnected other persons enter the picture. Rule of Law is a complementary principle, facilitating the harmonious existence of free individuals. By Rule of Law Hayek essentially means regularity, predictability, and lack of exception or special distinction in the design and enforcement of regulations. He offers a strikingly Burkean argument that “for the Rule of Law to be effective it is more important that there should be a rule applied always without exception than what this rule is” (117). Rent-seeking, discrimination, and favoritism breed contempt for the law and discord among neighbors, so it is better that the law favor no one than that it create special entitlements.
Of course this no-exceptions policy seems startlingly harsh at first. The good reasons for offering some special entitlement or other are as limitless as the injustices that have been done in the long miserable catalogue of human social existence. But it’s not as if Hayek is unsympathetic to suffering, quite the opposite. The law may seek to uplift the suffering, comfort the afflicted, or any other benefit, but it must seek to do so only impartially. With rhetoric that begins to sound almost like a New Dealer, he insists that “there is no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the [security of a minimum income] should not be guaranteed to all” (148). Where the state guarantees a minimum to prevent destitution in any of its citizens, Hayek would say it does well. It errs when that focus shifts into guaranteeing, especially in perpetuity, specific emoluments on account of a group’s or individual’s particular status or history. This is a principle aimed above all at social peace, learned from bitter experience of sectarian European collectivism.
Not that Hayek doesn’t have his blindspots. As part of his defense of private property Hayek asserts that “the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state” (136) and later reiterates this statement, insisting that “there is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess” (165). Lacking further nuance these seem at best questionable claims in an era of, for example, vertically-integrated corporate behemoths that operate as sellers within a marketplace of their own engineering on which their competitors depend1. But perhaps Hayek would endorse solutions to this situation that would belie the market fundamentalism he has often become associated with just as in The Road to Serfdom he offers conditional support for government-provided healthcare as part of a social safety net. Perhaps if we asked him today Hayek would have an interesting and divergent take on questions about universal basic income or regulating some level of internet market access as a public utility.
Hayek’s liberalism consists of a conjunction of a certain humanistic optimism about an individual’s power to know his own good with a pragmatic pessimism about his ability to see, weigh, care for, or plan around the goods of others. He is no libertarian minarchist dreaming of a government small enough to drown in his bathtub–the line “In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing” (88) well summarizes his expressed opinion on such views–but he’s seen enough to be skeptical that the people whose strong value claims come out on top of ideological struggles will ultimately be the ones with values worth asserting, or that the people most drawn to planning will plan for proper ends.
And that makes The Road to Serfdom a better defense of liberalism than many others, in that it doesn’t wed him to the ideal of liberalism in a way that would require making absurd denials of the very clear criticisms raised by people like Patrick Deneen. It’s a Chesterton’s fence sort of argument that seems (in spirit if not in content) nearer to Mark Fisher than to Milton Friedman. Hayek doesn’t require from his reader any belief in the goodness of the liberal system, only a healthy fear of its likely replacements. I can respect that, and I wish this tenor of argument was more widely adopted as a response to our current populist and socialist moments. It might have some power to persuade, for a change.
Lina Khan: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox (2017) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
Would you seek to impose this system for the greater good? Or, sit back while societies learn this the hard way...wash, rinse, repeat? Or...what else would you do?