Even today, there is widespread resistance to Hayek's guiding insight
that socialism is a nursery for the growth of totalitarian policies.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/05/hayek-the-intellectuals/

Hayek & the intellectuals

By Roger Kimball

A rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society,
may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.

- David Hume

It is one of the most disheartening spectacles of our time to see to what
extent some of the most precious things which England ... has given to the
world are now held in contempt in England herself.

- Friedrich A. Hayek

We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by
civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must
become.

- Benito Mussolini

In fact, Benito, you weren't the first. The palm for first promulgating
that principle in all its modern awfulness must go to V. I. Lenin, who
back in 1917 boasted that when he finished building his workers' paradise
"the whole of society will have become a single office and a single
factory with equality of work and equality of pay." What Lenin didn't know
about restricting the freedom of the individual wasn't worth knowing.
Granted, things didn't work out quite as Lenin hoped - or said that he
hoped - since as the Soviet Union lumbered on there was less and less work
and mostly worthless pay. (Care to exchange some of those dollars for
rubles, comrade?) Really, the only equality Lenin and his heirs achieved
was an equality of misery and impoverishment for all but a shifting
fraction of the nomenklatura. Trotsky got right to the practical nub of
the issue, observing that when the state is the sole employer the old
adage "he who does not work does not eat" is replaced by "he who does not
obey does not eat." Nevertheless, a long line of Western intellectuals
came, saw, and were conquered: how many bien pensant writers, journalists,
artists, and commentators swooned as did Lincoln Steffens: "I have been
over into the future," he said of his visit to the USSR in 1921, "and it
works."

Of course, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is
remarkable what a large accumulation of eggshells we have piled up over
the last century. (And then there is always Orwell's embarrassing
question: "Where's the omelet?") I forget the sage who described hope as
the last evil in Pandora's box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not
inapplicable to that adamantine "faith in a better world" that has always
been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy
perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised.
But it continually blooms afresh in the human heart - those portions of
it, anyway, colonized by intellectuals, that palpitating tribe Julien
Benda memorably denominated "clercs," as in "trahison de." But why? What
is it about intellectuals that makes them so profligately susceptible to
the catnip of socialism?

In his last book, "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism" (1988),
Friedrich Hayek drily underscored the oddity:

The intellectuals' vain search for a truly socialist community, which
results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a
seemingly endless string of "utopias" - the Soviet Union, then Cuba,
China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua - should suggest that
there might be something about socialism that does not conform to
certain facts.

It should, but it hasn't. And the reason, Hayek suggests, lies in the
peculiar rationalism to which a certain species of intellectual is
addicted. The "fatal conceit" lay in believing that, by exercising his
reason, mankind could recast society in a way that was at once equitable
and prosperous, orderly and conducive to political liberty.

Hayek traced this ambition back through Rousseau to Descartes. If man is
born free but is everywhere in chains, Rousseau argued, why does he not
simply cast off his fetters, beginning with the inconvenient baggage of
traditional social restraint? Whether Descartes deserves this paternity
suit is perhaps disputable. But I see what Hayek means. It was a small
step from Descartes's dream of making man the "master and possessor of
nature" through science and technology to making him the master and
possessor of man's second nature, society. How much that was recalcitrant
about human experience and the world had suddenly to be rendered
negotiable even to embark upon that path! All that was summed up in words
like "manners," "morals," "custom," "tradition," "taboo," and "sacred" is
suddenly up for grabs. But it was part of the intoxicating nature of the
fatal conceit - for those, again, who were susceptible to its charms -
that no barrier seemed strong enough to withstand the blandishments of
mankind's ingenious tinkerings. "Everything solid," as Marx famously said,
"melts into air."

John Maynard Keynes - himself a conspicuous victim of the fatal conceit -
summed up its psychological metabolism in his description of Bertrand
Russell and his Bloomsbury friends:

Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions
ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were
carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was
quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on
rationally.

What prodigies of existential legerdemain lay compacted in that phrase
"all we had to do." F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the test of "a
first-rate intelligence" was "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the
mind at the same time" and still be able to function. In fact, that
ability is as common as dirt. Look around.

Friedrich Hayek (he dropped the "von" to which he was born) was a supreme
anatomist of this species of intellectual or intellectualist folly. Born
to a prosperous family in Vienna in 1899, Hayek had already made a modest
name for himself as an economist when he departed for England and the
London School of Economics in 1931. Over the next decade, he published
half a dozen technical books in economics (sample title: "Monetary Theory
and the Trade Cycle"). Life changed in 1944 when "The Road to Serfdom" -
published first in England, then a few months later in the United States -
catapulted him to fame.

Chicago's new edition of the book[1] - Volume II in a planned
twenty-volume "collected works" - offers a good occasion to remind
ourselves both of the power of Hayek's criticism and the intractable
persistence of the attitudes he argued against. It takes courage, or
something like it, to declare one's offering "The Definitive Edition."
"Definitive" is a shifting and elusive trophy in such matters. I have no
hesitation, though, in describing this as an excellent edition. The longer
lines make the type slightly less readable than Chicago's handsome
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, but the new edition corrects a handful of
typographical errors and adds useful supplementary material, including
notes identifying the figures Hayek cites.

The story of this short but extraordinary book - which is less a treatise
in economics that an existential cri de coeur - is well known. Three
publishers turned it down in the U.S. - one reader declared it "unfit for
publication by a reputable house" - before Chicago, not without
misgivings, took it on. One of Chicago's readers, while recommending
publication, cautioned that the book was unlikely to "have a very wide
market in this country" or "change the position of many readers." In the
event, Chicago could hardly keep up with demand. Within months, some
50,000 copies were in print. Then Reader's Digest published a condensed
version, which brought the book to some 600,000 additional readers. A Look
picture-book version a few years later further extended its reach.

Translated into more than twenty languages, "The Road to Serfdom"
transformed Hayek from a retiring academic into an international
celebrity. In succeeding years, his influence waxed and waned, but by the
time he died, six weeks shy of his ninety-third birthday, in 1992, Hayek
had at last become a darling of the academic establishment. He'd been a
professor at LSE, the University of Chicago, and the University of
Freiburg, and was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. In 1974, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics - the first free-market
economist to be so honored - and his theories helped lay the intellectual
groundwork for the economic revitalizations that Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan undertook in the 1980s.

In a deeper sense, however, Hayek remained a maverick, outside the
intellectual or at least the academic mainstream. The message of "The Road
to Serfdom" shows why. The book had two purposes. On the one hand, it was
a paean to individual liberty. On the other, it was an impassioned attack
on central economic planning and the diminution of individual liberty such
planning requires.

It might seem odd, in the wake of the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, to
describe an attack on central planning or a defense of individual liberty
as "maverick." But in fact, although Hayek's theories won some major
skirmishes "on the ground," in the world of elite intellectual opinion his
views are as contentious now as they were in the 1940s. Even today, there
is widespread resistance to Hayek's guiding insight that socialism is a
nursery for the growth of totalitarian policies. With the example of Nazi
Germany before him, Hayek saw how naturally socialism, leaching more and
more initiative away from the individual in order to invest it in the
state, shaded into totalitarianism. A major theme of the book is that the
rise of fascism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the
1920s, as is often contended, but on the contrary was a natural outcome of
those trends. What began as a conviction that, if planning were to be
"efficient," it must be "taken out of politics" and placed in the hands of
experts, ended with the failure of politics and the embrace of tyranny.
"Hitler did not have to destroy democracy," Hayek noted; "he merely took
advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained
the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed
the only man strong enough to get things done."

Britain, Hayek warned, had already traveled far down the road of socialist
abdication. "The unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist
planning," he wrote, "create a state of affairs in which ... totalitarian
forces will get the upper hand." Hayek quotes numerous influential
commentators who cheerfully advocate not only wholesale economic planning
but the outright rejection of freedom. In 1932, for example, the
influential political theorist Harold Laski argued that "defeat at the
polls" must not be allowed to derail the glorious progress of socialism.
Voting is all well and good - so long as people vote for the right, i.e.,
the left, things. In 1942, the historian E. H. Carr blithely argued that
"The result which we desire can be won only by a deliberate reorganization
of European life such as Hitler has undertaken." The eminent biologist and
commentator C. H. Waddington also proposed handing society over to the
experts, noting that freedom "is a very troublesome concept for the
scientist to discuss, partly because he is not convinced that, in the last
analysis, there is such a thing." Sir Richard Ackland, architect of the
"Commonwealth movement," wrote with bluff chumminess that the community
says to the individual "don't you bother about getting your own living."
The "community" as a whole will take care of that, determining how, where,
and in what manner an individual will be employed. It will also, he added,
run camps for shirkers, but don't worry, "the community" will insist on
"very tolerable conditions." Like Carr, Ackland found a good deal to
admire in Hitler, who, he said, had "stumbled across ... a small part of,
or perhaps one should say one particular aspect of, what will ultimately
be required of humanity." This, incidentally, was written in 1941, a
moment when the world discovered that following Hitler required a very
great deal of humanity indeed.

The two great presiding influences on "The Road to Serfdom" were Alexis de
Tocqueville and Adam Smith. From Tocqueville, Hayek took both his title
and his sensitivity to what Tocqueville, in a famous section of "Democracy
in America," called "democratic despotism." Hayek, like Tocqueville, saw
that in modern bureaucratic societies threats to liberty often come
disguised as humanitarian benefits. If old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes,
democratic despotism infantilizes. "It would," Tocqueville writes,

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare
men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed
irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves
provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.... It willingly
works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole
arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures
their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal
affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their
inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of
thinking and the pain of living? ... [This power] extends its arms over
society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small,
complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original
minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the
crowd; ... it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates,
extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing
more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the
government is the shepherd.

Echoing and extending Tocqueville, Hayek argued that one of the most
important effects of extensive government control was psychological, "an
alteration of the character of the people." We are the creatures as well
as the creators of the institutions we inhabit. "The important point," he
concluded, "is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude
toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political
institutions under which it lives."

A major part of "The Road to Serfdom" is negative or critical. Its task is
to expose, describe, and analyze the socialist threat to freedom. But
there is also a positive side to Hayek's argument. The road away from
serfdom was to be found by embracing what Hayek called "the extended order
of cooperation," AKA capitalism. In "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith
noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of capitalism: that the more
individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their
activities were "led by an invisible hand to promote" ends that aided the
common good. Private pursuits conduced to public goods: that is the
beneficient alchemy of capitalism. Hayek's fundamental insight, enlarging
Smith's thought, is that the spontaneous order created and maintained by
competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned
economy.

The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum.
He cannot understand why we shouldn't favor "co-operation" (a
pleasing-sounding arrangement) over "competition" (much harsher), since in
any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be
even worse. Socialism is a version of sentimentality. Even so hard-headed
an observer as George Orwell was susceptible. In "The Road to Wigan Pier"
(1937), Orwell argued that since the world "potentially at least, is
immensely rich," if we developed it "as it might be developed ... we could
all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to." Never mind that part
of what it means to be a prince is that others, most others, are not
royalty.

The socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have
been able to "generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,"
they cannot also consciously "design an even better and more gratifying
system." Central to Hayek's teaching is the unyielding fact that human
ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency
of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of
socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order
generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like;
it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that,
only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect.
The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In
the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that
free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact
that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction
of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the
importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in "The Fatal Conceit,"
the "dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a
matter of survival" because "to follow socialist morality would destroy
much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest." We get a
foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph.
There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a
diminution of individual freedom.

The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the
attitudes of intellectuals. No merely empirical development, it seems -
let it be repeated innumerable times - can spoil the pleasures of
socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common
trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of
commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the "profit motive" and
recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek
notes, that "to employ a hundred people is ... exploitation but to command
the same number [is] honorable." Not that intellectuals, as a class, do
not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon
the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something
indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts' desires. Of
course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals
fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek
put it, is "one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,"
opening "an astounding range of choice to the poor man - a range greater
than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy." Second,
intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of
commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc
put it in "The Servile State," "The control of the production of wealth is
the control of human life itself." The really frightening question
wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue
our most important ends but who determines what those "most important
ends" are to be. "Whoever," Hayek notes, "has sole control of the means
must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be
rated higher and which lower - in short, what men should believe and
strive for." Thus it is that while it "may sound noble to say, 'Damn
economics, let us build up a decent world,' ... it is, in fact, merely
irresponsible."

Ultimately, the appeal of socialism is an emotional appeal. And because
one of the primary vehicles of our emotions is language, the perversions
of socialism have their correlative in a perversion of language. "While
wisdom is often hidden in the meaning of words," Hayek notes, "so is
error." Consequently, the task of reclaiming liberty involves the task of
reclaiming language. Throughout his work, Hayek devotes a great deal of
attention to "our poisoned language," showing how socialist sentimentality
has distorted almost beyond recognition basic terms like "liberty,"
"freedom," and "equality." Quite apart from any definite meaning they
convey, such words are eulogistic: they automatically solicit our
allegiance even when they have been conscripted to serve realities
different from or even opposed to the things they originally named. As
Hayek notes, the "most efficient technique" to achieve the requisite
semantic transformation is "to use the old words but change their
meaning." The phrase "People's Republic" epitomizes the process, but look
at what has happened to words like "liberal," "justice," and "social." In
"The Fatal Conceit," Hayek made a quick list of 160 nouns to which the
word "social" had been affixed, from "accounting," "administration,"
"age," and "awareness" to "thinker," "usefulness," "views," "waste," and
"work." A weasel was once said to be able to empty an egg without leaving
a mark, and "social" is in this sense a "weasel word": a phonetic husk
with only an echo of meaning. It is, Hayek writes, "increasingly turned
into an exhortation, a sort of guide-word for rationalistic morals
intended to displace traditional morals, and now increasingly supplants
the word 'good' as a designation of what is morally right." Think only of
the odious phrase "social justice." What it means, in practice, is de
facto injustice, since it operates by enlisting the legal machinery of
justice in order to support certain predetermined ends. Partisans of
"social justice" eschew "merely formal" justice; in so doing they replace
the rule of law - which was traditionally represented as blind precisely
because it was "no respecter of persons" - with the rule of (pseudo)
"fairness."

It is not surprising that Hayek is often described as "conservative." In
fact, though, he was right to object that his position is better described
as "liberal," understanding that term not in its contemporary deformation
(i.e., leftist, statist) but in the nineteenth-century English sense in
which Burke, for example, was a liberal. There is an important sense in
which genuine liberals are (in Russell Kirk's phrase) conservative
precisely because they are liberals: they understand that the best chance
for preserving freedom is through preserving the institutions and
traditional practices that have, so to speak, housed freedom. Although
cautious when it came to political innovation, Hayek thought traditional
Tory conservatism too wedded to the status quo. His liberalism was in this
sense an activist or experimental liberalism. This was a feature of
Hayek's thought that the philosopher Michael Oakeshott coolly discerned
when he observed that the "main significance" of "The Road to Serfdom" was
not the cogency of Hayek's doctrine but "the fact that it is a doctrine."
"A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite," Oakeshott
continued, "but it belongs to the same style of politics." Perhaps so. But
Hayek's inestimable value is to have dramatized the subtle insidiousness
of the socialist enterprise. "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is
lost all at once": that sentence from Hume stands as an epigraph to "The
Road to Serfdom." It is as pertinent today as when Hayek set it down in
1944.

Notes

1. The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume II: The Road to Serfdom:
Text and Documents - the Definitive Edition, by F. A. Hayek, edited by
Bruce Caldwell; University of Chicago Press, 283 pages, $35, $15 paper.

--
These nations have progressed through the following sequence: From bondage
to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage
to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy
to dependency; from dependency back into bondage.
- Alexander Fraser Tytler