Worst Conservative Classic – My Pick
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Arriving at this conversation admittedly late, I have decided to share my own opinion on which is the worst of the conservative classics. I particularly liked Mr. Hawley’s post on Frank Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom, while seconding–despite my own love for Russell Kirk–the dreadfully mediocre The American Cause. Mr. Ross’s pick was also a good one.
For my pick I can’t help but settle on the canonized F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Its writer is a Nobel Prize winner, and despite Hayek’s own disdain for conservatism, his work has been inherited by even the most statist of right-wingers. When National Review published a list of “The 100 Best Non-fiction Books of the 20th Century” they placed Serfdom fourth and Human Events selected it as the #1 book in its “Top Ten Books Every Congressman Should Read.” It is a certified classic.
But it fails as cogent philosophy for several reasons. For one, its reputation as a defender of laissez-faire capitalism is absurd. Libertarian economist Walter Block has correctly pointed out that Hayek was no friend to pure capitalism, claiming that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.” In Serfdom, Hayek saw statist solutions to certain economic inequalities and felt the government had a role in the monetary system. He also supported state control over the flow of information.
Hayek also seems to insist that if only the state had the ability to ascertain the needs and wants of its people, it could provide those things without moving towards dictatorship. This is a scary prospect for anyone who believes in self-control of one’s life as a moral principle and not simply as part of an equation for social welfare. Hayek avoids the more pressing philosophical question: Does the state have the right to take and redistribute wealth, even if it provides for a happier and more stable society?
And finally, Serfdom fails on the simple fact that it predicted future events that never came to pass. The Labour Party program that motivated Hayek to write Serfdom was eventually implemented and remained in place for a long period of time and–regardless of one’s opinion of modern day Great Britain–a dictatorship has yet to surface. The same could be said for socialist Sweden, as Gordon Tullock has correctly argued. Non-economic freedom is still safely intact for the Swedes, despite almost complete government control of the economy.
Hayek’s lifework was important in the spread of economic freedom around the world. Unfortunately, the work considered to be his classic is horribly flawed and suffers from poor aging. Free-marketers should look to other books, and avoid ones that Keynes regarded as “grand,” as he did Serfdom.
As an unimportant side-note, this is my first post on Post Right. I served as an intern at this fine publication last summer and in the past have blogged as The Northern Agrarian. I am honored to be able to post at TAC again.
Filed under: books
Here are some real conservative classics- Mark Steyn’s America Alone, and Neoconservatism, The Autobiography of an Idea. Next year in Jerusalem, baby!!!
(1) Why does a defender of conservatism have to be a pure capitalist? And why does Hayek get slammed for not being right-wing enough in 1944?
(2) These errors alone don’t make RTS a bad book. Lots of great book have errors. Is Leviathan a bad book because it defends absolute monarchy? Is The Social Contract a bad book because it defends absolute democracy?
(3) Hayek claims in other works that his aim was collectivism, not social democracy, which at that time he tepidly defended, so that really wasn’t his target with RTS. You can’t count that against him.
All you’ve done is succeeded in pointing out that RTS has some flaws, but that emphatically does not make it a bad book. It is rooted in one of the most complex, fertile and interesting interwoven pictures of cognitive psychology, economic theory, information theory, philosophy of law, sociology and political economy in the entire 20th century.
Kevin,
I did not critique as a book in general. Rather, I critiqued it as a piece of non-fiction and–primarily–as a “conservative classic.” I outlined how it is considered a right-wing classic, then went on to explain why this is a silly classification. I also hoped to critique the points he made.
You surely are not arguing that non-fiction writing that rests on a few major predictions is still good non-fiction even if those predictions end up flat-out wrong, are you? I hope not.
This sounds like a load of sophistry from a wet behind the ears post-intern out to make a name for himself. You say that Hayek is no sound philosopher yet, I see no real refutation in this “post.” Your first cited “failure” is a classic non sequitur. As for “statist solutions” I assume you are one of those anarchist libertarians–as Burke said, and Aristotle before him, political society is natural to man. And for your final “failure,” Hayek’s stature as a soothsayer has nothing to do with the soundness of his philosophical arguments. Perhaps you should receive some higher education before you take on an intellectual giant such as Hayek.
Hayek flatly says that he isn’t offering a prediction and he isn’t describing an inevitable process.
This isn’t serious commentary on Hayek. Send me a note when you make a stab at such a thing.
You write:
“Serfdom fails on the simple fact that it predicted future events that never came to pass.”
After reading this article I browsed over to wikipedia for some background on Road to Serfdom. There are some striking similarities between what’s on wikipedia and what’s written here…
Article: “Walter Block has correctly pointed out that Hayek was no friend to pure capitalism, claiming that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.” ”
Wikipedia: “economist Walter Block has observed critically that while the The Road to Serfdom makes a strong case against centrally-planned economies, it appears only lukewarm in its support of pure laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism”. ”
Article: “The Labour Party program that motivated Hayek to write Serfdom was eventually implemented and remained in place for a long period of time and–regardless of one’s opinion of modern day Great Britain–a dictatorship has yet to surface. The same could be said for socialist Sweden, as Gordon Tullock has correctly argued. ”
Wikipedia: “Gordon Tullock has argued Hayek’s analysis predicted totalitarian governments in much of Europe in the late 20th century. He uses Sweden, in which the government at that time controlled 63 percent of GNP, as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom is “that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any loss of non-economic freedoms.”"
Not plagarism, perhaps, but certainly lazy.
The ad hominem attacks and puerile dismissals of these Hayek people are absurd. You’ve hit a nerve, Patrick. Good job.
Greg’s comment is ridiculous. Patrick quoted two men who have had leading opinions against Hayek, and since they were also quoted by wikipedia he is somehow lazy?
Believe it or not, these opinions were developed and then were placed on wikipedia, not vice versa.
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
This kid definitely used wikipedia to find his criticisms of Hayek. The link he provides when citing Block is exactly the same one that wikipedia uses. It is hard to believe that Patrick J. Ford developed these opinions on his own and before they appeared on wikipedia.
This is the WORST conservative classic? Where to begin?!
First of all, Hayek wasn’t a “conservative,” and to the extent that this word describes him, it is in the modern American sense. Hayek was originally a socialist, who, after having read Socialism by von Mises, embraced capitalism. (All these political words are trip wires; “capitalism” was originally a slight by socialists… but I digress.) If the mature Hayek can be viewed as anything, it was a Whig; a Burkean.
Hayek’s idea that socialism leads to dictatorship is not original, and he knew that. This notion goes back at least as de Tocqueville, and very likely further. Notably, Mises wrote “Omniopotent Government” a year or so before Hayek RTS.
I’ve only read the book once, but I believe he wrote it to express clearly how economic dictatorship empowers an all powerful, tyrannical (I realize that the word “tyranny” is a dirty word around here) government. The Nazis were half socialists, remember, and more so purely Marxist.
Hayek, unquestionably an intellectual giant and social philosopher of the first order, did not set out to espouse a “cogent philosophy,” whatever that is supposed to mean, or a defense of pure laissez-faire. In the tradition of his Austrian teachers, he sought to use economic deduction to elucidate certain conclusions he viewed as inevitable, and indeed that he had observed occur before his very eyes.
A competent review of this book cannot be written by someone who has little or no understanding of economics and, apparently, little knowledge of economic history. Patrick’s critique thus reads like an intern’s. No, there is no Adolf Hitler in England today. There is, however, the “soft tyranny” of cradle to grave Statism. Classical Liberalism might be out of style on this blog (and the world at large), but the ideas developed in this intellectual time period are still powerful.
Very, very few people are pure-play economic libertarians, even among libertarians. Walter Block is an anarchist, however, and it is not surprising that he disapproves of Hayek’s moderation. Still, I would wager that even Block admires the work in question. As most Americans support Capitalism and yet make peace with Social Security as a safety net, Hayek does as well.
“Hayek also seems to insist that if only the state had the ability to ascertain the needs and wants of its people, it could provide those things without moving towards dictatorship. This is a scary prospect for anyone who believes in self-control of one’s life as a moral principle and not simply as part of an equation for social welfare.”
This is breathtakingly stupid, and really exemplifies why people should not write reviews who are uneducated on the matters at hand. I do not have a copy of the book in front of me, but think about this for just a moment: Hayek’s main contention concerning socialism was that it lacked, fundamentally, the knowledge to organize an economy that suited the needs of the people. It is that information is too dispersed; every person, through their actions, transmits a small amount of information that guides production to satisfy their needs and desires. Hence, the only way a socialist government could possibly match capitalism’s satisfaction level – it could, notably, never surpass it – would be for the planning board (whatever) to be omniscient. Clearly this is impossible, and always will be.