The Achilles Heel of F. A. Hayek

The American intellectual conservative movement may be said to have been born in 1944, with the publication of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. That book galvanized, instructed, and to some extent brought into being an articulate opposition to the prevailing tides of ideological collectivism. Though he rejects the conservative label for himself, Hayek remains a leading light of the movement he helped to found—and for good reasons. His path-breaking scholarship in the fields of economics, legal theory, and the history of ideas has contributed greatly to our understanding of the principles of freedom. His careful demonstrations of the superiority of a free market to socialism continue to arm us against attempts both crude and subtle to restore serfdom in a modern guise. When F. A. Hayek speaks, conservatives listen, as well they should. But precisely because this is so, any fundamental error of his may have serious consequences.

I believe there is one part of Hayek’s teaching that is incompatible with a principled conservatism: his theory of the origin and significance of traditional morality. In both The Constitution of Liberty and the Law, Legislation, and Liberty trilogy, Hayek acknowledges only one criterion for judging the correctness of any possible set of moral norms: its efficacy or inefficacy in maintaining a social order in which everyone is free to pursue his own ends. There would be nothing very objectionable in this if Hayek also argued that freedom is the only condition consistent with man’s dignity as a rational animal, or if he argued that the moral law obliges us to refrain from harming our neighbor in the enjoyment of his life, his innocent liberties, and the fruits of his labor. But nowhere in Hayek’s writings do we find arguments of this kind. To Hayek, apparently, the only justification for traditional morality is its utility in promoting interests that are in themselves non-moral.

ML

About the Author

Marlo Lewis

Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he researches and writes on global warming, energy policy, and regulatory process reform.

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The American intellectual conservative movement may be said to have been born in 1944, with the publication of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. That book galvanized, instructed, and to some extent brought into being an articulate opposition to the prevailing tides of ideological collectivism. Though he rejects the conservative label for himself, Hayek remains a leading light of the movement he helped to found—and for good reasons. His path-breaking scholarship in the fields of economics, legal theory, and the history of ideas has contributed greatly to our understanding of the principles of freedom. His careful demonstrations of the superiority of a free market to socialism continue to arm us against attempts both crude and subtle to restore serfdom in a modern guise. When F. A. Hayek speaks, conservatives listen, as well they should. But precisely because this is so, any fundamental error of his may have serious consequences.

I believe there is one part of Hayek’s teaching that is incompatible with a principled conservatism: his theory of the origin and significance of traditional morality. In both The Constitution of Liberty and the Law, Legislation, and Liberty trilogy, Hayek acknowledges only one criterion for judging the correctness of any possible set of moral norms: its efficacy or inefficacy in maintaining a social order in which everyone is free to pursue his own ends. There would be nothing very objectionable in this if Hayek also argued that freedom is the only condition consistent with man’s dignity as a rational animal, or if he argued that the moral law obliges us to refrain from harming our neighbor in the enjoyment of his life, his innocent liberties, and the fruits of his labor. But nowhere in Hayek’s writings do we find arguments of this kind. To Hayek, apparently, the only justification for traditional morality is its utility in promoting interests that are in themselves non-moral.

ML

About the Author

Marlo Lewis

Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he researches and writes on global warming, energy policy, and regulatory process reform.