Is Hayek relevant?
Two views:
No.
"Hayek is by no means as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical. But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic. In Road, first published in 1944, he makes a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life. At least as far as he takes the argument in this book, there isn’t much that thoughtful modern liberals or even democratic socialists who understand the power of markets would necessarily object to—although they might feel that there is more to the story than Hayek acknowledges."
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Yes. From my friend David who sent me this great piece with the following advice:
"Print this and read in on your patio while the weather is good. I finished it last night.
Hayek did a good job of articulating, in philosophical terms, what you and I have always known in our bones. In my case, it was reinforced in law school, where we learned how the common law was refined in England and the U.S. over the centuries."
An excerpt from from Edward Feser's "Hayek on Tradition:"
"Thus, Hayek’s account shows us that (and shows us why) where morality and practical affairs in general are concerned, it is precisely respect for tradition and common sense that is rational, and the hostility to these things exhibited by so-called Enlightened rationalists that is irrational. For just as the socialist economic planner cannot possibly accumulate the knowledge embodied in market-determined prices—such that would-be planners in Eastern bloc countries typically had to rely on information about prices in the capitalist West in order to set their own prices—so, too, the anti-traditionalist advocate of the construction of an allegedly more rational “new morality” cannot possibly have the knowledge of the intricate facts about human nature and the social environment that would be required for such a task, knowledge which is embodied in traditional morality itself."
Read the rest here.
Hayek would have enjoyed the discussion.
Thanks Arts and Letters Daily and David.
It seems to me that your friend David hits the mark when he brings the issue to the notion of a rational new morality. It is in the search by certain quarters of the progressive movement for an issue of sufficiently critical proportions to justify government by intellectuals and experts that Hayek seems most relevant today. A large motivation for The Road to Serfdom was precisely that, the fear produced by watching admiration take hold in the UK for such administrations in Germany and Italy.
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