Friedrich Hayek on John Stuart Mill

“John Stuart Mill was the saint of rationalism for a good reason. Mill's ideas are the roots of the self-destructive character of a rationalist or constructivistic view of how civilization could be organized. Since Mill, this muddle about facts has guided policy and most of the strivings of people of good will, who were inspired by a false picture, based on a worldwide division of labor, of how a society worked. It was from Mill's muddle (and the similar deceptions of Marx) and from the confusion of those pretended defenders of liberty who proclaimed a new moral postulate which required a complete suppression of individual freedom that the whole muddle of the middle derived. The ideal of freedom was increasingly relegated to second place by the idea of social justice. However, the two are incompatible. If one accepts the principle of social justice, one cannot preserve the market economy which provides that which social justice would like to distribute. The two principles are antagonistic and irreconcilable. There can be no halfway house between them. As the promise of social justice cannot be generally satisfied and also cannot be refused to all others once it has been conceded to some, there can be no question about where one's choice must be if one really wants to help the poor.”

“Such demands stem chiefly from the tradition of rationalistic liberalism that we have already discussed (so different from the political liberalism deriving from the English Old Whigs), which implies that freedom is incompatible with any general restriction on individual action. This tradition voices itself in the passages cited earlier from Voltaire, Bentham, and Russell. Unfortunately it also pervades even the work of the English 'saint of rationalism', John Stuart Mill. Under the influence of these writers, and perhaps especially Mill, the fact that we must purchase the freedom enabling us to form an extended order at the cost of submitting to certain rules of conduct has been used as a justification for the demand to return to the state of 'liberty' enjoyed by the savage who - as eighteenth-century thinkers defined him - 'did not yet know property'. Yet the savage state - which includes the obligation or duty to share in pursuit of the concrete goals of one's fellows, and to obey the commands of a headman - can hardly be described as one of freedom (although it might involve liberation from some particular burdens) or even as one of morals. Only those general and abstract rules that one must take into account in individual decisions in accordance with individual aims deserve the name of morals.”

“It was only the 'marginal revolution' of the 1870s that produced a satisfactory explanation of the market processes that Adam Smith had long before described with his metaphor of the 'invisible hand', an account which, despite its still metaphorical and incomplete character, was the first scientific description of such self-ordering processes. James and John Stuart Mill, by contrast, were unable to conceive of the determination of market values in any manner other than causal determination by a few preceding events, and this inability barred them, as it does many modern 'physicalists', from understanding selfsteering market processes. [...] John Stuart Mill perhaps played the most important role in this connection. He had early put himself under socialist influence, and through this bias acquired a great appeal to 'progressive' intellectuals, establishing a reputation as the leading liberal and the 'Saint of Rationalism'. Yet he probably led more intellectuals into socialism than any other single person: fabianism was in its beginnings essentially formed by a group of his followers.”