Political Works

"The argument for the Strong Principle of Equality would appear to support the conclusion that everyone subject to the laws should be included in the demos, Everyone? Not quite: not children, for example, the Presumption of Personal Autonomy applies to adults. As we saw earlier, Athenian democrats did not find it anomalous that their demos included only a minority of adults."

"This is simply that, when the idea of democracy is actively adopted by a people, it tends to produce the best feasible political system, or at any rate the best state taken all around. In this view, many of the philosophical justifications offered for democracy may be true. But they speak to political ideals rather than directly to human experience. A hardheaded look at human experience, historical and contemporary, shows that among political societies that have actually existed, or now exist, those that most nearly satisfy the criteria of the democratic idea are, taken all around, better than rest."

"Democracy—rule by the people—can be justified only on the assumption that ordinary people are, in general, qualified to govern themselves. For it seems self-evident that people ought not to govern themselves if they are not qualified to do so. … Yet the assumption that people in general—ordinary people—are adequately qualified to govern themselves is, on the face of it, such an extravagant claim that critics of democracy have rejected it ever since the philosophical idea and practice of democracy appeared among the Greeks over two thousand years ago."

"The persistence and generality of the assumption of intrinsic equality in systematic moral reasoning could be attributed to the existence of a norm so deeply entrenched in all Western cultures that we cannot reject it without denying our cultural heritage and thereby denying who we are."

"If the good or interests of everyone should be weighed equally, and if each adult person is in general the best judge of his or her good or interests, then every adult member of an association is sufficiently well qualified, taken all around, to participate in making binding collective decisions that affect his or her good or interests, that is, to be a full citizen of the demos."

"Democracy means literally, rule by the people. But what does it mean to say that the people rule, the people is sovereign, a people governs itself? In order to rule, the people must have some way of ruling, a process for ruling. What are the distinctive characteristics of democratic process of government? … To answer these questions it is useful to proceed in three stages. First, since democracy is a political order it is useful to set out the assumptions that justify the existence of a political order. Second, we need to specify the assumptions that justify a democratic political order. … Third, we need to describe the essential criteria of a democratic political order and indicate how these follow from the assumptions."

"Locke and Rousseau appear to have advanced two different principles on which a claim to citizenship might be grounded. One is explicit, categorical, and universal, the other is implicit, contingent, and limiting:Categorical Principle: Every person subject to a government and its laws has an unqualified right to be a member of the demos (i.e., a citizen). Contingent Principle: Only persons who are qualified to govern, but all such persons, should be members of the demos (i.e., citizens)."

"Like the majority principle, the democratic process presupposes a proper unit. The criteria of the democratic process presuppose the rightfulness of the unit itself."

"To live together in an association, then, people need a process for arriving at governmental decisions: a political process."

"In a dialogue with a thoughtful anarchist, a democrat might also add something like this: … In my view, the best possible state would be one that would minimize coercion and maximize consent, within limits set by historical conditions and the pursuit of other values, including happiness, freedom, and justice, Judged by ends like these, the best state, I believe, would be a democratic state."

"The idea of guardianship has appealed to a great variety of political thinkers and leaders in many different guises and in many different parts of the world over most of recorded history. If Plato provides the most familiar example, the practical ideal of Confucius, who was born more than a century before Plato, has had far more profound influence over many more people and persists to the present day, deeply embedded in the cultures of several countries, including China, where it offers a vigorous though not always overt competition to Marxism and Leninism for political consciousness."

"Although the anarchist critique of democracy is unconvincing, it is important to recognize its strengths. As we saw, several of its assumptions are widely shared, among others by advocates of democracy. Moreover, in portraying the possibility of society without a state, anarchism reminds us that, as a form of social control, coercion by law is marginal in most societies most of the time and in democratic orders always."

"Demo: But in my judgment most people understand their own interests better than your guardians are likely to! Aristo: A base and baseless dogma. But if you'll allow me. I'd like to proceed. Even if ordinary people adequately understood their own interests, they would still not be fully qualified to govern. Since it would be utterly useless if people knew the right ends--whether their own interests or some other good--but failed to act to achieve them, those who govern should also possess a strong disposition actually to seek good ends. … To be qualified to govern, rulers … must actively attempt to bring it about."

"The members believe that no single member, and no minority of members, is so definitely better qualified to rule that the one or the few should be permitted to rule over the entire association. They believe, on the contrary, that all the members of the association are adequately qualified to participate on an equal footing with the others in the process of governing the association. I am going to call this idea the Strong Principle of Equality."

"These historical experiences reveal two important features of the Strong Principle. First, belief in something like the principle, and the development of at least a rude democratic process, have often com about among people who had little or no acquaintance with Greek democracy or the republican tradition or the eighteenth-century discovery of representation. […] These and other historical experience reveal another important point about the Strong Principle: It need not necessarily be applied very broadly. On the contrary, more often than not it has been interpreted in a highly exclusive way."

"Aristos: Well, I’ve tried to help you to see another vision than democracy. Mine is a vision of a well-qualified minority, whom I call the guardians, experts in the art and science of governing, who rule over the rest, governing in the best interests of all, fully respecting the principle of equal consideration, indeed perhaps upholding it far better than would the people if they were to govern themselves. Paradoxically, then, at its best such a system might actually rest on the consent of all. In this way, a system of guardianship might attain one of the most important ends of both anarchism and democracy—but by very different means. Demos: I admit that it is a powerful vision. It has always been the strongest competitor to the democratic vision and remains so today, when so many nondemocratic regimes—left, right, revolutionary, conservative, traditional—justify themselves by appealing to it for legitimacy. If democracy were to decline and perhaps even to disappear from human history in the centuries to come, I think its place would be taken by hierarchical regimes claiming to be legitimate because they were governed by guardians of virtue and knowledge."

"In sum, the following judgments seem reasonable:1. In the absence of a state, highly undesirable forms of coercion would probably persist. 2. In a stateless society, some associates might in any case acquire sufficient resources to create a highly oppressive state. 3. A degree of social control sufficient to avoid the creation of a state appears to require that an association be highly autonomous, very small, and united by multiple bonds. 4. Creating such associations on a significant scale in the world today appears to be either impossible or highly undesirable.These judgments support the conclusion that it would be better to try to create a satisfactory state than try to exist in a society without a state."

"The transformation of democratic theory and practice that resulted from its union with representation has had profound consequences.[...] Modern democratic governments have not been created by philosophers or historians familiar with Greek democracy, the republican tradition, or the concept of representation. Whatever independent influence ideas like these may have had, and however complex the interplay of ideas and action may be, we know that democratic theories are not self-fulfilling."

"Lofty as guardianship may appear as an ideal, its extraordinary demands on the knowledge and virtue of the guardians are all but impossible to satisfy in practice. Despite the example of the Republic of Venice and a few others that an advocate might offer as proof that guardianship is a genuine historical possibility, it cannot be reasonably defended, I think, as superior to democracy either as an ideal or as a feasible system in practice"

"In the real world, then, answers to the question, what constitutes "a people" for democratic purposes? are far more likely to come from political action and conflict, which will often be accompanied by violence and coercion, than from reasoned inferences from democratic principles and practices. For as we have seen, in solving this particular problem democratic theory cannot take us very far. Democratic ideas, as I have said, do not yield a definitive answer. They presuppose that one has somehow been supplied, or will be supplied, by history and politics."

"It is true that a democratic regime runs the risk that the people will make mistakes. But the risk of mistake exists in all regimes in the real, and the worst blunders of this century have been made by leaders in nondemocratic regimes. Moreover, the opportunity to make mistakes is an opportunity to learn. Just as we reject paternalism in individual decisions, because it prevents the development of our moral capacities, so too we should reject guardianship in public affairs, because it will stunt the development of the moral capacities of an entire people. At its best, only the democratic vision can offer the hope, which guardianship can never do, that by engaging in governing themselves, all people, and not merely a few, may learn to act as morally responsible human beings."

"Most rules of conduct are thus not derived by an intellectual process from the knowledge of the facts of the environment, but constitute the only adaptation of man to these facts which we have achieved, a ‘knowledge’ of them of which we are not aware and which does not appear in our conceptual thought, but which manifests itself in the rules which we obey in our actions."

"The demand for that kind of pellucid order which would satisfy the standards of the constructivists, on the other hand, must lead to a destruction of an order much more comprehensive than any we can deliberately construct. Freedom means that in some measure we entrust our fate to forces which we do not control; and this seems intolerable to those constructivists who believe that man can master his fate—as if civilization and reason itself were of his making."

"The conservative critique of radical projects is not mainly that the emancipatory goals of radicals are morally indefensible – although some conservatives criticize the underlying values of such projects as well – but that the uncontrollable, and usually negative, unintended consequences of these efforts at massive social change inevitably swamp the intended consequences. Radicals and revolutionaries suffer from what Frederick Hayek termed the “fatal conceit” – the belief that through rational calculation and political will, society can be designed in ways that will significantly improve the human condition."

"Man has developed rules of conduct not because he knows but because he does not know what all the consequences of a particular action will be."

"Bartley's approach to editing was perhaps best described in a Jan. 16, 1988, letter to Leif Wenar, another of Hayek's research assistants, who was to edit the latter two parts of "The Fatal Conceit." In this correspondence, also at the Hoover Institution, Bartley encouraged Wenar to edit Hayek's work on a massive scale: to compose introductions, conclusions, connective material, and summaries on Hayek's behalf, to link the second and third parts to the first part Bartley was working on, and to compose its conclusion. Hayek's essential message in "The Fatal Conceit" could be lost in the circumstances surrounding the work. This message was that people do not like capitalism because it relies on an unseen extended order over time to produce goods and services, and people instinctively like to see immediate, visible good. Similarly, the glamorous idea of what he termed "constructivist rationalism" (that individuals can design any sort of society they wish) is false. Rather, by following rules that enforce contracts, promote and preserve private property, and encourage exchange, mankind can produce the most and be freest and happiest."

"I don’t think it’s one of Hayek’s better works. It’s awfully forced. It’s put into this form of, “I’m going to show you once and for all, by God, and after you hear this you’ll have no answer to me whatsoever.” It’s not up to Hayek at his best."

"While the comprehensive spontaneous order which the law serves is a precondition for the success of most private activity, the services which the government can render beyond the enforcement of rules of just conduct are not only supplementary or subsidiary to the basic needs which the spontaneous order provides for."

"The function of rules of conduct as a means for overcoming the obstacle presented by our ignorance of the particular facts which must determine the overall order is best shown by examining the relation between two expressions which we have regularly employed together to describe the conditions of freedom."

"Since only situations which have been created by human will can be called just or unjust, the particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust: if it is not the intended or foreseen result of somebody’s action that A should have much and B little, this cannot be called just or unjust."

"The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the "general principles which are always the same." In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments."

"While traditional economic theory is clearly wrong in treating individuals as immutable "tastes" no less than technology were the primitives of the model we have no scientific basis on which to judge one set of moral values, one set of personality types, as superior to others. Thus, while Hayek may have been right in stressing the moral dimension of markets — the kind of consequences in shaping human nature that I have just described — he fails to provide us with a systematic approach for addressing these issues (e.g., see his 1989 book)."

"So far as we know, the extended order is probably the most complex structure in the universe - a structure in which biological organisms that are already highly complex have acquired the capacity to learn, to assimilate, parts of suprapersonal traditions enabling them to adapt themselves from moment to moment into an ever-changing structure possessing an order of a still higher level of complexity."

"Yet if the market economy did indeed prevail over other types of order because it enabled those groups that adopted its basic rules the better to multiply, then the calculation in market values is a calculation in terms of lives: individuals guided by this calculation did what most helped to increase their numbers, although this could hardly have been their intention."

"These two different conceptions of the ‘purpose’ of law show themselves clearly in the history of legal philosophy. From Immanuel Kant’s emphasis on the ‘purposeless’ character of the rules of just conduct, to the Utilitarians from Bentham to Ihering who regard purpose as the central feature of law, the ambiguity of the concept of purpose has been a constant source of confusion. If ‘purpose’ refers to concrete foreseeable results of particular actions, the particularistic utilitarianism of Bentham is certainly wrong. But if we include in ‘purpose’ the aiming at conditions which will assist the formation of an abstract order, the particular contents of which are unpredictable, Kant’s denial of purpose is justified only so far as the application of a rule to a particular instance is concerned, but certainly not for the system of rules as a whole."

"The efforts of the judge are thus part of that process of adaptation of society to circumstances by which the spontaneous order grows. He assists in the process of selection by upholding those rules which, like those which have worked well in the past, make it more likely that expectations will match and not conflict. He thus becomes an organ of that order. But even when in the performance of this function he creates new rules, he is not a creator of a new order but a servant endeavouring to maintain and improve the functioning of an existing order. And the outcome of his efforts will be a characteristic instance of those ‘products of human action but not of human design’ in which the experience gained by the experimentation of generations embodies more knowledge than was possessed by anyone."

"Envy and ignorance lead people to regard possessing more than one needs for current consumption as a matter for censure rather than merit."

"To appreciate the significance of this it is necessary to free ourselves wholly from the erroneous conception that there can be first a society which then gives itself laws. This erroneous conception is basic to the constructivist rationalism which from Descartes and Hobbes through Rousseau and Bentham down to contemporary legal positivism has blinded students to the true relationship between law and government."

"The undoubted historical connection between religion and the values that have shaped and furthered our civilisation, such as the family and several property, does not of course mean that there is any intrinsic connection between religion as such and such values. Among the founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family."

"The concept of sovereignty, like that of the ‘state’, may be an indispensable tool for international law—though I am not sure that if we accept the concept there as our starting point, we do not thereby make the very idea of an international law meaningless. But for the consideration of the problem of the internal character of a legal order, both concepts seem to be as unnecessary as they are misleading. Indeed the whole history of constitutionalism, at least since John Locke, which is the same as the history of liberalism, is that of a struggle against the positivist conception of sovereignty and the allied conception of the omnipotent state."

"Even now, outside the scientific examination of law, language and the market, studies of human affairs continue to be dominated by a vocabulary chiefly derived from animistic thinking."

"Hayek gave a series of several lectures at the conference during which he sketched out most of the ideas that were later to appear in his treatise The Constitution of Liberty (1960). He must have already had a quasi-finished draft of this book in hand, since, as I recall, the arguments were well developed. Most of the ideas were, as expected, quite congenial to me, but I recall thinking that Hayek was analytically wrong in his discussion of equal pay for equal work, and that, normatively, I rejected his argument in support of proportional rather than progressive income taxation. On the latter point, the influence of Henry Simons was still too fresh for me to appreciate the political implications of progression, which Hayek may have sensed although they did not appear directly in his discussion. At the time, I was only beginning to escape from the orthodox mindset and to begin to look at politics realistically. In retrospect, what seems most interesting to me about the Wabash lectures is that we judged Professor Hayek as a senior scholar who was presenting to us the well-reasoned product of a life's work. Little did we dream that there were major new and quite different Hayek contributions ahead, and that Hayek would develop ideas that he surely did not sense at all at the time."

"An altogether amazing feat....It fully supports the recent characterization of Hayek by the Economist that he is our time’s preeminent social philosopher."

"The distinct character of the rules which the judge will have to apply, and must endeavour to articulate and improve, is best understood if we remember that he is called in to correct disturbances of an order that has not been made by anyone and does not rest on the individuals having been told what they must do."

"As we have seen, rules of just conduct did not need to be deliberately made, though men gradually learned to improve or change them deliberately. Government, by contrast, is a deliberate contrivance which, however, beyond its simplest and most primitive forms, also cannot be conducted exclusively by ad hoc commands of the ruler."

"Though quieta non movere may at times be a wise maxim for the statesman it cannot satisfy the political philosopher. He may wish policy to proceed gingerly and not before public opinion is prepared to support it, but he cannot accept arrangements merely because current opinion sanctions them. In a world where the chief need is once more, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly has erected, his hopes must rest on persuading and gaining the support of those who by disposition are "progressives," those who, though they may now be seeking change in the wrong direction, are at least willing to examine critically the existing and to change it wherever necessary."

"Much the worst use of 'social', one that wholly destroys the meaning of any word it qualifies, is in the almost universally used phrase 'social justice'."

"The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions."

"Ignorance of the function of trade, which led initially to fear, and in the Middle Ages to uninformed regulation, and which only comparatively recently yielded to better understanding, has, then, now been revived in a new pseudo-scientific form."

"Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today; and it is true that most utopias aim at radically redesigning society and suffer from internal contradictions which make their realization impossible. But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to be aimed at, is nevertheless not only the indispensable precondition of any rational policy, but also the chief contribution that science can make to the solution of the problems of practical policy."