First, let’s consider the opening essay of this volume,
which is Hayek on individualism.
this classic essay is called individualism
True and False and it’s from a lecture
delivered in late 1945,
after World War II had ended.
This is one of the clearest statements
of Hayek’s views on politics,
and it’s also a very interesting
essay in the history of ideas.
Hayek argues that there are
two quite distinct traditions of
individualism, and only one of
those is a true tradition of
individualism likely to lead
to liberty and civic order.
and Hayek refers to that as the
skeptical tradition of individualism.
The skeptical tradition for Hayek
emphasizes the limit of the the individual human mind.
Hayek stresses this core idea of what he calls spontaneous order.
and spontaneous order is the notion that there are institutions,
key institutions, which are the result of human action,
but not of human design, to paraphrase Adam Smith.
Examples of spontaneous order would be language, the use of money,
and indeed markets in general.
All of these are evolved institutions
which were not set out and planned by any individual,
small group of individuals
or central planning board.
Allowing these spontaneous orders
to flourish is for Hayek,
the essence of a free society.
Hayek repeatedly stresses that
not everything can be planned,
whether by a governmental
central planner or otherwise.
That social order evolves, and
it is due to processes which are very difficult
for either individual minds or central planners
to really, fully comprehend.
For Hayek, liberty is really
about learning.
It’s about trial and error.
It’s about experimentations.
It’s about having filters
which separate out better ideas from worse ideas.
One of those filters, for instance,
might be market competition.
And to the extent that we have
trial and error,
and experimentation,
and decent filters, we’re going to
get a lot of good outcomes without
anyone having planned, exactly,
those outcomes in advance.
Hayek presents some figures who
he considers to be the true individualists
in the history of ideas.
That list includes John Locke,
Bernard Mandeville, David Hume,
Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke.
By the way, on Mandeville,
Hume, and Smith,
you can see our lectures on
these figures and our class on great thinkers,
History of Economic Thought.
In any case, these individuals wrote in the 17th and 18th centuries,
and they outlined some of the core principles which were to influence Hayek
on this notion of individualism and the human mind.
For Hayek, true individualism is most of all a British tradition,
and you will note that after Hayek left the continent, he moved first to England,
teaching at the London School of Economics,
and he had a lifelong admiration for a lot of British institutions,
and the British system of government.
Two more thinkers cited by Hayek as being true individualists:
the first is Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America.
Of course, he was a Frenchman.
and then there’s also Lord Acton.
Opposed to the skeptical tradition is what Hayek calls
the irrationalist tradition and approach to individualism.
For Hayek, the irrationalist tradition emphasizes
the power of the individual human mind,
and our ability to grasp and manipulate reality,
and our ability to make and see through comprehensive plans.
Hayek regards the irrationalist tradition
as leading to a kind of false individualism,
and he associates a lot of this tradition with thinkers from France,
such as Rousseau, the physiocrats, and the French encyclopedia tradition
all dating from the 18th century.
But Hayek notes some of the British thinkers
have fallen under this French spell,
and he cites John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer in this regard.
These thinkers are all too likely to believe that we can simply sit down,
reason from first principles, and reconstruct society
along exactly the desired lines.
Hayek is also skeptical of a separate
German individualist tradition.
sometimes rooted in von Humboldt, or maybe Goethe.
and Hayek’s fear here is, again,
there’s not enough emphasis on the limitations of the knowledge
of individual human minds,
and that the German tradition in particular
is too much of a sense that individualism means developing
some kind of strong or distinctive personality
and cites steering individualism,
away from an old to be its true roots.
These are ideas of false individualism
are likely to have some dangerous results.
One of those might simply be oppression
and tyranny; that if men set out to design
society according to first principles,
this is likely to lead to too much coercion,
and too much planning,
and too much centralized control.
Hayek fears that this rationalism will lead to too much planning,
too much treating people exactly alike,
a form of enforced equality
where individuals are simply treated as cogs in a larger machine.
and too much of a movement towards collectivist ways of thinking
rather than true individualism.
another possible danger of too much, rationalism simply is revolution
The notion that we can just go out there, use force, and set things right.
Again, Hayek tends to have greater trust in evolutionary processes,
where there is adjustment, trial and error, learning, and feedback.
Where not everything is done according to some plan.
So to sum up, for Hayek, this is an essay about individualism.
and Individualism is tied into a key theme
in Hayek’s thought, namely, knowledge.
That we need to understand knowledge,
we need to understand the limitations of knowing,
and only by doing so,
Are we likely to have a healthier economy?
and a stronger polity and system of government.