Political Works

"Before we can try to remold society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them."

"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."

"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."

"It is one of the most characteristic facts of a progressive society that in it most things which individuals strive for can be obtained only through further progress. This follows from the necessary character of the process: new knowledge and its benefits can spread only gradually, and the ambitions of the many will always be determined by what is as yet accessible only to the few. It is misleading to think of those new possibilities as if they were, from the beginning, a common possession of society which its members could deliberately share; they become a common possession only through that slow process by which the achievements of the few are made available to the many."

"Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong."

"As Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty, he began to conceive it as his magnum opus on human freedom and how to achieve liberty in and through society. It was a product of his continued development away from economics and into social philosophy. He felt he was misconceived in The Road to Serfdom and desired to set the record straight. More than mere personal vindication, though, he sought to write a work that could guide humanity during the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond."

"If many features of our civilization seem to us unnatural, artificial, or unhealthy, this must have been man's experience ever since he first took to town life, which is virtually since civilization began. All the familiar complaints against industrialism, capitalism, or overrefinement are largely protests against a new way of life that man took up a short while ago after more than half a million years' existence as a wandering hunter, and that created problems still unsolved by him."

"All that we can know is that the ultimate decision about what is good or bad will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the decline of the groups that have adhered to the “wrong” beliefs."

"Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problem" for society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; it is gradually "solved" by the establishment of a new overall adjustment."

"Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant."

"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better."

"All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest."

"I find the historical origins of Hayek terribly puzzling. He was in Austria, where a conservative, authoritarian Catholic state declared itself in favor of something called corporatism. This was a kind of pose which announced itself as political economy, but it had no political economy. Corporatism was the name of the state ideology, but corporatism in Austria was a partnership between the government and various parts of society. There was very little in the way of interventionist fiscal or monetary policy."

"Obviously, in exchange and other formally free relations, great inequality of power—which is the only issue, whatever the form—gives the stronger party some control over the weaker and may mean his helplessness. But for Hayek, even that does not prove coercion. He does not note that inequality tends to grow, especially economic; for one who at a moment possesses more wealth is in a better position to acquire still more. And free inheritance continues the tendency over generations. The facts have forced preventive or offsetting social action on a vast scale. The tendency is not disproved, as has sometimes been alleged, by the modern rough statistical constancy of the ratios between larger and smaller incomes. If all have grown at about the same rate, the differences grow at that rate, and it is differences not ratios that are felt, since they determine what the richer families can do and the poorer cannot."

"If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty. And, in turn, liberty of the individual would, of course, make complete foresight impossible. Liberty is essential in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable; we want it because we have learned to expect from it the opportunity of realizing many of our aims. It is because every individual knows so little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen. These accidents occur in the combination of knowledge and attitudes, skills and habits, acquired by individual men and also when qualified men are confronted with the particular circumstances which they are equipped to deal with. Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances. Of course, it is true of social as of individual life that favorable accidents usually do not just happen. We must prepare for them."

"It is the case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depend."

"Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." "In science the more we know, the more extensive the contact with nescience." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom … The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb. The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends."

"I suggest, as reasonable speculation and inference, that the conspicuous absence in Hayek’s argument of ifs and buts and of painful wrestling with the task of weighing pros and cons in the light of a complex pattern of values and of a supply of information which points in various directions is largely the result of two factors: first, that he selects as his targets extremist forms of opposing doctrine and, second, that for the purposes of his argument he works from an extremely limited set of values. With each of these procedures there is associated a particular logical peril. To attack an extreme position when it is not clear that a more moderate position is open to the same kind of objections may be, depending on the historical context, to attack a straw man, while to reach final conclusion upon the basis of consideration of a single value, or of very limited set of values, is liable to result in what has been called “the fallacy of the unexplored remainder.”"

"If we are to understand how society works, we must attempt to define the general nature and range of our ignorance concerning it."

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

"It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone."

"I have long resented being more widely known by what I regarded as a pamphlet for the time than by my strictly scientific work. After reexamining what I wrote then in the light of some thirty years’ further study of the problems then raised, I no longer do so. Though the book may contain much that I could not, when I wrote it, have convincingly demonstrated, it was a genuine effort to find the truth which I believe has produced insights that will help even those who disagree with me to avoid grave dangers."

"Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad … Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom."

"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."

"The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created by his mind. His mind is itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into affect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. … The conception of man deliberately building his civilization stems from an erroneous intellectualism that regards human reason as something standing outside nature and possessed of knowledge and reasoning capacity independent of experience. But the growth of the human mind is part of the growth of civilization; it is the state of civilization at any given moment that determines the scope and possibilities of human ends and values. The mind can never foresee its own advance."

"The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call 'civilization' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess."

"It is a fair reading of The Road to Serfdom to say that forty years more of the march toward socialism would lead to major losses of the political and economic freedom of individuals. Yet in those forty years we have seen that continuous expansion of the state in Sweden and England, even in Canada and the United States, without consequences for personal freedom so dire as those he predicted."

"Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom."

"What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free."

"No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society."

"The fact that an increasing number of social scientists confine themselves to the study of what exists in some part of the social system does not make their results more realistic, but makes them largely irrelevant for most decisions about the future. Fruitful social science must be very largely a study of what is not: a construction of hypothetical models of possible worlds which might exist if some of the alterable conditions were made different. We need a scientific theory chiefly to tell us what would be the effects if some conditions were as they have never been before. All scientific knowledge is knowledge not of particular facts but of hypotheses which have so far withstood systematic attempts at refuting them."

"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."

"Hayek’s warning was dead wrong. Most rich countries tried some form of Keynes’s policies in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and while they didn’t always work as advertised, they most definitely did not lead to totalitarianism. Yet somehow Hayek’s meme entered our collective consciousness. On blogs and in the financial media, where politics and economics mix freely, self-described "Austrians" kept using the word "Keynesian" as a political epithet, the way National Review writers or Fox News anchors use the word "liberal.""

"The 20th Century looked for many decades as if it were going to be the century of collectivism … Anyone who would have predicted the reversal of this trend … would have been considered mad just a dozen years ago. Innumerable factors led to [the reversal of the rise of collectivism], not the least of which was the bitter experience of seeing 'rational planning' degenerate into economic chaos and Utopian dreams turn into police-state nightmares. Still, it takes a vision to beat a vision … An alternative vision had to become viable before the reversal of the collectivist tide could begin with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. That vision came from many sources, but if one point in time could mark the beginning of the intellectual turning of the tide which made later political changes possible, it was the publication of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek."

"The most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time [the late 1940's], and to which I have returned so often since [is] F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom."

"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."

"In The Road to Serfdom, he gave powerful reason to indicate why explicit provision has to be made by the state and the society for the deprived and the dispossessed. While Hayek is often taken to be uncompromisingly hostile to any economic role of the state (other than what is needed to support the market mechanism), and certainly late in his life he gave grounds for thinking that this could indeed be his view, nevertheless in The Road to Serfdom Hayek's position is much broader and inclusive than that. Now that the welfare state is often under such attack, it is worth recollecting that the pioneering manifesto that championed the market mechanism on grounds of freedom did not reject the need for a welfare state and provided a reasoned defence of it as an institutional necessity."

"Language enables us not only to label objects given to our senses as distinct entities, but also to classify an infinite variety of combinations of distinguishing marks according to what we expect from them and what we may do with them. Such labelling, classification, and distinction is of course often vague. More importantly, all usage of language is laden with interpretations or theories about our surroundings. As Goethe recognised, all that we imagine to be factual is already theory: what we 'know' of our surroundings is our interpretation of them."

"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."

"Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter."

"Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness."

"The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others."

"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'."

"This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. It seems that now, in order to participate in politics and expect a hearing, it is necessary to have, in the strict sense, a doctrine; not to have a doctrine appears frivolous, even disreputable. And the sanctity, which in some societies was the property of a politics piously attached to traditional ways, has now come to belong exclusively to rationalist politics."

"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."

"I should therefore conclude your theme rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could almost be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil. … What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger ahead is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the US in a fairly extreme form. No, what we need is the restoration of right moral thinking - a return to proper moral values in our social philosophy. If only you could turn your crusade in that direction you would not look of feel quite so much like Don Quixote. I accuse you of perhaps confusing a little bit the moral and the material issues. Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were execute by those who think and feel wrongly."

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

"It also seems to follow from the preceding observations that there is some question about the notion, frequently encountered among conservative politicians and social scientists, (see, for example, Friedrich Hayek's famous The Road to Serfdom), that nationalization of capital will necessarily lead to dictatorship. Historically, the order in which nationalization and dictatorship have occurred seems rather to have been the reverse of that suggested by Hayek. In all communist dictatorships today, dictatorship came first and nationalization afterward, rather than the other way around (except for the Soviet Union, where nationalization and the present form of dictatorship came simultaneously)."

"Libertarians are not just bad emotional cripples. They are also bad advice givers. I refer of course to the views of both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The “serfdom” they warn against is not that of Genghis Khan or Lenin-Stalin-Mao or Hitler-Mussolini. Rather, they warn against the centrist states of the modern world. Think only of Switzerland, Britain, the US, the Scandinavian countries, and the Pacific Rim. Why do citizenries there report high indexes of “happiness” and enjoy broad freedoms of speech and belief?"