Corey Robin on Friedrich Hayek

“I think it's a scandal that he's not one of the absolute required names on political theory reading lists for modern political thought or 20th century political thought. I know this gets into some sensitive terrain, but he absolutely should be there alongside Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt. And certainly should be there over Berlin, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Schmitt. Obviously, more is better, and I want students to read everything, but we have to make choices, and I'd put H. ahead of Berlin et al.”

“The intrinsic links between moral and economic life, as well as the intractability of moral conflict, were the kernels of insight that animated Hayek’s most far-reaching writing against socialism. The socialist presumes an agreement on ultimate ends: the putatively shared understanding of principles such as justice or equality is supposed to make it possible for state planners to conceive of their task as technical, as the neutral application of an agreed-upon rule. But no such agreement exists, Hayek insisted, and if it is presumed to exist, nothing will reveal its nonexistence more quickly than the attempt to implement it in practice.”

“Here’s where things get interesting. Though Hayek abandoned formal economics for social theory after the 1930s, his social theory remained dedicated to elaborating what he saw as the essential problem of economics: how to allocate finite resources between different purposes when society cannot agree on its basic ends. With its emphasis on the irreconcilability of our moral ends—the fact that members of a modern society do not and cannot agree on a scale of values—Hayek’s point was fundamentally political, the sort of insight that has agitated everyone from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Hayek was unique, however, in arguing that the political point was best addressed—indeed, could only be addressed—in the realm of the economic. No other discourse— not moral philosophy, political theory, psychology, or theology— understood so well that our ultimate moral values and political purposes get expressed and revealed only under conditions of radical economic constraint—when one is forced to assign a limited set of resources to ends that favor different sectors of society.”

“What distinguishes the theoretical men of the right from their counterparts on the left, Anderson writes, is that their voices were “heard in the chancelleries.” Yet whose voice has been more listened to, across decades and continents, than Hayek’s? Schmitt and Strauss have attracted readers from all points of the political spectrum as writers of dazzling if disturbing genius, but the two projects with which they are most associated—European fascism and American neoconservatism—have never generated the global traction or gathering energy that neoliberalism has now sustained for more than four decades. It would be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between the marginal children of Nietzsche—with political man on one branch of the family tree, economic man on the other. Hayek, at times, could sound the most Schmittian notes. At the height of Augusto Pinochet’s power in Chile, Hayek told a Chilean interviewer that when any “government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created.” The sort of situation he had in mind was not anarchy or civil war but Allende-style social democracy, where the government pursues “the mirage of social justice” through administrative and increasingly discretionary means. Even in The Constitution of Liberty, an extended paean to the notion of a “spontaneous order” that slowly evolves over time, we get a brief glimpse of “the lawgiver” whose “task” it is “to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself.” (“Of the modern German writings” on the rule of law, Hayek also says, Schmitt’s “are still among the most learned and perceptive.”) Current events seemed to supply Hayek with an endless parade of candidates. Two years after its publication in 1960, he sent The Constitution of Liberty to Portuguese strongman António Salazar, with a cover note professing his hope that it might assist the dictator “in his endeavour to design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy.” Pinochet’s Constitution of 1980 is named after the 1960 text. Still, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that though Nietzschean politics may have fought the battles, Nietzschean economics won the war. Is there any better reminder of that victory than the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus in Berlin? Built to house the Luftwaffe during World War II, it is now the headquarters of the German Ministry of Finance.”