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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Virginia Postrel has written a surprisingly interesting introduction to Friedrich Hayek. This part, in particular, struck me:"Because he emphasized the pluralism of values, the limits of knowledge, and the totalitarian side of "rationalist" (or, as he would put it, "scientistic") control, some have claimed Hayek as a precursor to postmodernism. Indeed, toward the end of his life, postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault gave lectures on Hayek's work.
Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, says that in a broad sense Hayek anticipated many postmodern critiques. "Hayekian liberalism and postmodernism alike are not interested in total knowledge, or in the total institutions necessary to maintain such a vision," says Gillespie, who holds a doctorate in literary studies. "For Hayek, the very essence of liberalism properly understood is that it replaces the ideal of social uniformity with one of competing difference." That's why Foucault, though no Hayekian liberal, "recognized that Hayek's formulation of a private sphere was a meaningful hedge against the worst excesses of state power."
Leaving aside the imprecise use of terms like post-modernism (which I doubt Postrel has ever come across in any context other than as a term of abuse), I'm rather pleasantly surprised that my own thoughts on this matter have some precedent. For instance, Richard Rorty holds that since no interpretation of phenomena can lay claim to certain universality, a democracy accompanied by freedoms of speech is the most sensible approach. Both Hayek and Popper criticised the predictive capability of economics (given the claim of Marxism to be scientific in particular), the latter taking the view that since events could not be predicted the only sensible approach is to proceed through continual scrutiny; to Popper the notions of democracy and rights can almost be considered as being analagous to peer review. All of which tends to leave me rather puzzled why those that currently claim Hayek's mantle so frequently prove to be considerably more dogmatic than their mentor ever was. One other passage struck me from the piece:"This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek's best-known work, "The Road to Serfdom," which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain's well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria... Even today, the book's thesis is often misstated as what Caldwell calls "the inevitability thesis -- that if you start down the road to intervention in the economy, you're automatically going to end up in a totalitarian state." But Hayek spent much of his career arguing against the then-popular idea of historical laws. Nor did he oppose an economic safety net; a wealthy society, he believed, could provide a basic income for the poor."
Again, as Postrel is entirely correct to point out, Hayek was far from being dogmatic on such matters. However, the problem is that as a historical account of the rise of fascism in Germany, The Road to Serfdom is rather poor; state control of the economy in pre-WW2 Germany is probably better described as a product of fascism than as a causal factor.Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 9:28 pm
