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.

There is an obvious problem with this view, as there is with any purely utilitarian theory of morals. It is certainly true, as Hayek says, that a free market tends to maximize the "chances" and "opportunities" of any individual, taken at random, to pursue his own ends. It is equally true that the preservation of a market economy depends upon a widespread acceptance of the "rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family." But in themselves these propositions only explain why we should want other people to observe the rules of just conduct, not why we should regard them as binding upon ourselves. After all, it sometimes happens that we can improve our opportunities by breaking the rules. Crime can be a highly lucrative occupation. A tyrant like Mikhail Gorbachev enjoys many opportunities not available to anyone living in a free society. If justice is only a means to non-moral ends like wealth or power, there is no reason to remain just in cases where the use of unjust means would be more profitable. The only satisfactory defense of freedom and traditional morality--and the only one that deserves to be called conservative--is a defense that is grounded in unchanging principles of moral and political right. However, no such principles can be discerned in Hayek's works.

That Hayek subscribes to an amoral moral theory can be seen most clearly in his recent lecture, published in pamphlet form by the Heritage Foundation, entitled "Our Moral Heritage." In it Hayek concisely sets forth "the same argument" he has developed over the years in various books and articles. Our moral heritage, he maintains, is entirely a product of cultural evolution and natural selection. Now, this theory of morals is defective on four main counts. First, it drastically depreciates the role of ideas in the development of our moral tradition. In particular, it overlooks the epochal breakthroughs in moral understanding that took place in Athens nearly 25 centuries ago and in the Sinai Desert some eight centuries before that. Second, the theory is incompatible with the idea of natural law, an idea without which no solid defense either of traditional morality or of freedom is possible. Third, it leads to a depreciation of the importance of statesmanship and to false optimism about the future of Western man. Fourth, it cannot defend the free market against criticisms based upon the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism.

II.

Reason, Hayek tells us, was not and could not have been a source of our moral heritage. Given the complexity of a social phenomena, he argues, men could not have known in advance which of the many possible rules of conduct would best assist them in providing for their needs. Nor until very recently in human history, he implies, could men correctly interpret the practical consequences of using different rules, since it was only in the eighteenth century that the regularity and sequence of economic phenomena began to be understood. According to Hayek, then, we owe our moral heritage to the fact that some groups, by sheer accident, hit upon rules of conduct that made them more efficient at meeting their needs. Because they were more efficient, they tended to prevail over other groups and were thus able to transmit their moral practices to posterity. In Hayek's words, "We do not owe our morals to our intelligence; we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct--the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family--that enabled the groups practicing them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others." Traditional morality survived (and hence became traditional) because it facilitated the creation of "an extended order of human cooperation," in other words a market economy, which is the economic order most capable of providing means for the multiplication of species. Traditional morality is thus, in Hayek's view, the unintended and unforeseen result of a process of trial and error, involving literally billions of human beings, and spanning countless millennia. It is both futile and unscientific, Hayek believes, to look for a higher or deeper source of our moral heritage.

Religious persons may wonder where the Bible fits into this scheme of explanation. Hayek's comments on religion are unusually blunt. Faith, he contends, cannot be a source of our moral heritage, since faith has been used to support all kinds of moral beliefs. True, when faith aligns itself with the rules of property and family, it makes them easier to accept. Indeed, Hayek argues, because the social function of those rules was for a long time not understood at all, they would have been discarded without the support given them by "supernatural sanctions." However, he goes on to say, the "mystical beliefs" that helped preserve traditional morality owe their preservation, in turn, to it. "I believe," says Hayek, "that you will find about every ten years some new creator of a religion that is against property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and family."

In sum, the history of our moral heritage as understood by Hayek is one whose abstract features we can describe but whose particular events must remain largely unknown. In this account there is no place for heroes, prodigies, or founders. Our moral heritage is not an edifice whose foundations were laid by prophets, philosophers, and magnanimous statesmen, but an outcome of the same kind of "impersonal" process that allocates factors of production in the marketplace.

Hayek's evolutionism conceals the true grandeur of our moral heritage by disregarding the momentous discoveries, the bold departures, and the brilliant constructions that have in fact shaped the moral patrimony of the West. Unlike all other civilizations of which we have records, Western civilization has in a real sense been founded by books. Because "ideas have consequences," our lives would be very different if, for example, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Gospels, and The Wealth of Nations had never been written. Professor Hayek seems to have forgotten that although necessity and the natural propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" have always led men to trade with each other, it was only when governments took deliberate steps to remove arbitrary restrictions on entrepreneurial liberty that genuinely capitalist societies came into being. The chief architects of liberal capitalism--Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith--saw themselves not primarily as economists but as moral philosophers and founders of a new science of legislation. Their aim was to cause freedom to be instituted by educating the legislators and rulers of nations. Their books were intended not only to demonstrate the superior productivity of a free market, but also to change men's conceptions of what is honorable and just. For in most nations and ages the entrepreneur has been viewed with hostility and distrust.

There is a "trickle-down" effect in the marketplace of ideas as well as in the marketplace of goods. The great authors--men like Aristotle and Locke--wished to educate a "perfect prince," a statesman who could improve the mores and moral beliefs of common people. Perhaps the greatest American statesman was Abraham Lincoln, and a principal cause of his greatness was his unsurpassed ability, by speech and by deed, to strengthen the American people's sense of justice and elevate their conception of the common good. To no small degree, Lincoln owed his success as a popular educator to his careful study of a few great authors. He read the Bible to purify his understanding of justice and charity; Shakespeare to enlarge his grasp of human character and motivation; and Euclid to clarify his understanding of the nature of inference and demonstration. Above all he read Jefferson, who was himself much indebted to Locke's teaching on natural rights. Hayek's evolutionism ignores the continual influence of theory upon practice, which is in fact responsible for most of the moral progress Western man has achieved.

The limitations of Hayek's account become especially apparent when we recollect the two main roots of the Western moral tradition: Biblical revelation and Socratic philosophy.

Moses, the adopted grandson of Pharaoh, educated in the high court of a kingdom that worshipped animals as gods and held millions of human beings in chattel slavery, came to see that Egyptian civilization, however fabulous its achievements in engineering and political organization, was riddled with perverse and wicked customs. The polity he helped bring into being was the first ever to be founded on the idea of ethical monotheism--the idea that each of us has a duty "to do justly, and to love mercy," because all men are made in the image of a just and merciful God. The ancient Hebrew polity was surrounded by peoples among whom sodomy, bestiality, orgiastic fertility rites, and even child sacrifice were not uncommon practices. The prohibitions in the Mosaic Law against these and other abominations did not "evolve" out of an established legal tradition, nor were they adopted "by accident" and in ignorance of their social function. They reflected, and were informed by, a vision of the divine that was at the same time an insight into man's special dignity as a moral agent. It is no accident, for example, that the First and Second Commandments together prohibit the worship of "other gods" and the making of graven images. Moses understood, as clearly as anyone ever has, that idolatry and the worship of false gods are bound to make men brutish or inhumane or both.

Socrates was the founder of moral and political philosophy--the first philospher to devote himself primarily to the study of human affairs. Socrates' persistent questioning of the received opinions about virtue and other matters eventually brought him into conflict with the authorities in Athens. In his seventieth year he was put on trial and sentenced to death for the crimes of impiety and corrupting the young. Socrates' trial, like the revelation of the Law to Moses, proved to be one of the few truly decisive events in history. It was the first time a philosopher defended publicly, and with full awareness of all the relevant issues, the superiority of the "examined life." Socrates' unfeigned willingness to die rather than to abandon philosophy, together with his provocative and often paradoxical arguments, had an overwhelming impact on many generous-minded Athenian youths, among whom was Plato. Through his dialogues, Plato preserved the Socratic defense of philosophy as a possession for all time. He thereby completed the work Socrates had begun, which was "to establish philosophy in the cities and households of men." In large measure we owe the pervasive rationalism of Western culture to the posthumous victories of Plato and Socrates over their Athenian adversaries.

One consequence of those victories was a transformation in men's moral horizons. The Athenians, like virtually all the peoples of Graeco-Roman antiquity, recognized no higher standard of justice than the law. Socrates, on the other hand, held that a law is just only if it conforms to standards of justice that exist independently of the law. To the Athenians, moral greatness consisted in an unswerving loyalty to the group into which one was born. To Socrates, a patriotism not ennobled and limited by an allegiance to impartial justice is hardly different from the "honor" sometimes found among thieves. The Athenians believed that in matters of both private conduct and public policy, the good is identical with the ancestral, the old that is one's own.

Socrates believed that an unprincipled attachment to the old and familiar is only slightly more reasonable than a blind enthusiasm for the new and strange. In his view, the excellence of a practice or an institution can be correctly ascertained only in the light of the natural order of human needs. Finally, the Athenians assumed that one ought to accept without question the moral and theological opinions handed down by earlier generations. Socrates, on the contrary, taught that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. Socrates did not receive his ethical views from the group to which he belonged, nor did he adopt them "uncomprehendingly." Thus his radical break with his Athenian past cannot be explained in terms of cultural evolution. Nor can his astonishing moral influence on later generations be explained in terms of natural selection. The cause of that influence is simply the power of rational argument and persuasive speech. In each of the disagreements mentioned above, Professor Hayek undoubtedly sides with Socrates rather than with Meletus and Anytus. He does so because he himself, or his teachers, or the forgotten teachers of his teachers were "corrupted" by Socrates.

III.

However differently Socrates and the Biblical prophets understood the ultimate grounds of moral decency, they were in complete agreement as to its character and obligatoriness. Reason and revelation have over the centuries produced a moral code that enables us to distinguish tolerably well between liberty and license, authority and despotism. It eschews both arrogance and obsequiousness, apathy and fanaticism. While fully recognizing the equal right of all men to be treated in accordance with their dignity as persons, it also recognizes the superior excellence of some and holds in honor the rare virtues of magnanimity and saintliness. Its traditional name is the natural law.

Perhaps the clearest and most concise formulation of the natural law is to be found in the Declaration of Independence. Hayek is an admirer of the Declaration. But because he believes all morals change and develop through an evolutionary process, he rejects the idea of natural law--of a moral code applicable in principle to all men at all times. Hayek's criticism of natural law may be summarized as follows. The belief in a trans-historical moral code is a product of the "anthropomorphic fallacy." Because the rules of morality are usually experienced as given and hence as self-subsisting, and since they cannot be traced to a single human inventor, persons who mistakenly suppose that order can result only from design are compelled to postulate a superhuman intelligence as the source of moral order. Thus, Hayek concludes, natural law is credible only on the basis of certain religious premises that, as such, have no place in scientific explanation.

This interpretation sounds plausible, but it is based upon a misreading of the Declaration and of the great natural-law posterity. In Hayek's words, "We do not owe our morals to our intelligence; we owe them to the fact that some groups uncomprehendingly accepted certain rules of conduct--the rules of private property, of honesty, and of the family--that enabled the groups practicing them to prosper, multiply, and gradually to displace the others." Traditional morality survived (and hence became traditional) because it facilitated the creation of "an extended order of human cooperation," in order words a market economy, which is the economic order most capable of providing means for the multiplication of the species. Traditional morality is thus, in Hayek's view, the unintended and unforeseen result of a process of trial and error, involving literally billions of human beings, and spanning countless millennia. It is both futile and unscientific, Hayek believes, to look for a higher or deeper source of our moral heritage.

Religious persons may wonder where the Bible fits into this scheme of explanation. Hayek's comments on religion are unusually blunt. Faith, he contends, cannot be a source of our moral heritage, since faith has been used to support all kinds of moral beliefs. True, when faith aligns itself with the rules of property and family, it makes them easier to accept. Indeed, Hayek argues, because the social function of those rules was for a long time not understood at all, they would have been discarded without the support given them by "supernatural sanctions." However, he goes on to say, the "mystical beliefs" that helped preserve traditional morality owe their preservation, in turn, to it. "I believe, says Hayek, "that you will find about every ten years some new creator of a religion that is against property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and family."

In sum, the history of our moral heritage as understood by hayek is one whose abstract features we can describe but whose particular events must remain largely unknown. In this account there is no place for heroes, prodigies, or founders. Our moral heritage is not an edifice whose foundations were laid by prophets, philosophers, and magnanimous statesmen, but an outcome of the same kind of "impersonal" process that allocates factors of production in the marketplace.

Hayek's evolutionism conceals the true grandeur of our moral heritage by disregarding the momentous discoveries, the bold departures, and the brilliant constructions that have in fact shaped the moral patrimony of the West. Unlike all other civilizations of which we have records, Western civilizations has in a real sense founded by books. Because "ideas have consequences," our lives would be very different if, for example, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Gospels, and The Wealth of Nations had never been written. Professor Hayek seems to have forgotten that although necessity and the natural propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" have always led men to trade with each other, it was only when governments took deliberate steps to remove arbitrary restrictions on entrepreneurial liberty that genuinely capitalist societies came into being. The chief architects of liberal capitalism--Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith--saw themselves not primarily as economists but as moral philosophers and founders of a new science of legislation. Their aim was to cause freedom to be instituted by educating the legislators and rulers of nations. Their books were intended not only to demonstrate the superior productivity of a free market, but also to change men's conceptions of what is honorable and just. For in most nations and ages the entrepreneur hs been viewed with hostility and distrust.

There is a "trickle-down" effect in the marketplace of ideas as well as in the marketplace of goods. The great authors--men like Aristotle and Locke--wished to educate a "perfect prince," a statesman who could improve the mores and moral beliefs of common people. Perhaps the greatest American statesman was Abraham Lincoln, and a principal cause of his greatness was his unsurpassed ability, by speech and by deed, to strengthen the American people's sense of justice and elevate their conception of the common good. To no small degree, Lincoln owed his success as a popular educator to his careful study of a few great authors. He read the Bible to purify his understanding of justice and charity; Shakespeare to enlarge his grasp of human character and motivation; and Euclid to clarify his understanding of the nature of inference and demonstration. Above all he read Jefferson, who was himself much indebted to Locke's teaching on natural rights. Hayek's evolutionism ignores the continual influence of theory upon practice, which is in fact responsible for most of the moral progress Western man has achieved.

The limitations of hayek's account become especially apparent when we recollect the two main roots of the Western moral tradition: Biblical revelation and Socratic philosophy. theorists with whom the Signers were familiar. It is certainly true that the Signers acknowledge a Creator and place their "firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence." It is also true that, according to the most influential natural-law teachers, the precepts of natural law cannot be in contradiction to those of divine law. It is even true that the existence of natural law can be construed as a reason for faith, since it assures us that the universe is not indifferent to moral purpose. But it is not true that natural law rests upon premises accessible only to the faithful, or that the precepts of natural law would be void and of no force if God did not exist. The basic thesis of natural law is simply this: There is a moral order, and it is discoverable by the operation of man's natural powers. The real question is whether or not men by nature have the ability to apprehend non-arbitrary criteria of moral rectitude. It should be obvious that this question cannot be settled by either affirming or denying the divine origin of the world.

The natural powers that make the moral order known to us are reason and sympathy (in the literal sense of fellow feeling). It is by reason that we come to know the fundamental equality of all human beings. All men are equal in being members of a single species, a species defined as much by what it lacks as by what it has. Men have reason, and this distinguishes them from other animals. But no man is infallible. Moreover, since nature has endowed man with sharp appetites and pressing needs, no man is absolutely beyond temptation at all times. Men evidently lack the perfect wisdom and complete self-sufficiency attributed to God by both the Biblical and philosophic traditions. Thus all men are equal in being neither beasts nor gods, neither subhuman nor superhuman. And from this it follows that no man is the natural master of another, as any normal and sane man is of his dog or horse, or as a god would be of any human being. Each person, therefore, is the natural master of himself, or, as the Declaration puts it, each has an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Three further consequences follow immediately from the proposition of human equality. First, the just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed. For since each man is by nature his own master, no man can legitimately claim the right to rule another without that other's consent. Second, rulers are obliged to live under the laws they make. And third, the law may not discriminate among citizens on any basis other than inherent capacity to contribute to the common good. As the Declaration's remarks about "prudence," "savages," and "barbarous ages" indicate, the extent to which equal rights can or ought to be enforced depends crucially on circumstances and has to be determined by the intellectual virtue of prudence. Some peoples, for example, may be too licentious or too uncivilized for self-government. But the necessity for prudential accommodations in applying the natural law is itself a conclusion of reason. From all of this it should be evident that the natural-law teaching of the Declaration is founded on premises accessible to unassisted reason.

The moral order is revealed to man through his heart as well as through his mind. As Adam Smith explained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, we are naturally disposed to detest and resent anyone who deals dishonestly with us, robs us of our possessions, or violently attacks us without cause. What is more, because we have imaginations, we need not suffer directly from injustice and treachery in order to be outraged by them. It suffices to imagine ourselves in the place of the innocent victims. When we are not biased by our interests, or blinded to the humanity of other men by prejudice or ideological delusion, our sympathies naturally incline us to abhor the slaughter, the enslavement, and the plundering of innocents. Actions that violate men's unalienable rights are thus the natural objects of anger and loathing. But this is equivalent to saying that such actions are naturally blameworthy, which in turn is only another way of saying that they are inherently vicious and wrong. Natural law is not an illusion, as Hayek supposes, but a reality accessible to the heart and mind of man.

IV.

Hayek's evolutionism leads of necessity to a depreciation of statesmanship. The importance of statesmanship rests on two assumptions. First, the course of human events is not fixed but can be changed fundamentally by the choices men make as citizens and rulers. Second, in choosing among different courses of action men can look to the natural law for guidance. Hayek, as we shall see, denies the first premise as well as the second.

That political choice has the power to redirect the course of human events was the conviction of the American Founders and of Abraham Lincoln. In the first essay of the Federalist, as in the Gettysburg Address, the success or failure of the American experiment in self-government--a deliberately chosen experiment--is understood to be fraught with the greatest consequences for the survival of freedom in the world. If there are no natural or unchanging principles of political right, as Hayek believes, then men of affairs who are at all conscientious would have no alternative but to take their bearings by local or historical principles. Such men might be fully competent to make minore adjustments or incremental changes in an established constitution, but they would lack the competence to establish a new order of the ages, as the American Founders did, or to preside over a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln did. Only men who possess an understanding of natural law can wisely found or refound their political institutions. As one would expect, in Hayek's writings the idea of founding either is not treated or is treated in the context of a discussion designed to show that our most valuable institutions are the result of "growth" rather than of invention or design. The absence of statesmanship on the level of Jefferson and Lincoln would perhaps not matter very much, if we could assume that the triumph of freedom is assured by an impersonal process of cultural evolution and natural selection. If I am not mistaken, Hayek makes just this assumption.

Like the "pragmatic" politicians of early-nineteenth-century America, who believed that westward expansion and commercial development would suffice to check the spread of slavery by making slave labor economically unprofitable, Hayek seems to believe we can rely on economic forces to disable and destroy the Soviet slave system. According to Hayek, because no group can prosper and multiply unless it observes the rules of property and family, any religion opposed to these two institutions cannot last much longer than a hundred years. "I think that we are watching one experiment, already in a state of decline before its hundred years are over," Hayek writes. "Communism," he continues, "is, of course, one of those religions which is anti-property, anti-family, which had its time, and which is now declining rapidly. We are watching one instance where the process of the natural selection of religious beliefs disposes of yet another mistaken one and restores the basic beliefs in property and the family." Would that it were so! However, I see no evidence that the Soviet empire is tottering on weak limbs and about to tumble into the dustbin of history. When one considers that the Bolshevik Party was founded less than 75 years ago by a few dozen individuals armed with only a handful of weapons, and that today Communist regimes control a fifth of the world's population and a third of the world's land, it is hard to see how Communism's days can be numbered.

If Soviet Communism is a religion in decline, it exhibits none of the weakness of will characteristic of a decadent civilization. On the contrary, in the last two decades the USSR has made enormous strategic gains at the expense of the West. During this period Libya, Nicaragua, Angola, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Afghanistan became appendages or instruments of the Soviet empire. At the same time, the Soviets embarked upon the most ambitious arms buildup ever undertaken by any nation ostensibly at peace. The Red Army is roughly twice the size it was in 1965. The Soviet navy, which twenty years ago was hardly more than a coastal force operating in the Baltic and Black Seas, today projects Soviet power across all the oceans and is a match for any navy in the world. Whereas in 1960 the United States had three or four times as many nuclear delivery systems as the USSR, the Soviets by 1970 had achieved "parity" and by the mid-Seventies had surpassed the United States in both strategic and theater nuclear forces. In short, the Soviet Union is today the strongest military power on earth, and it has been growing stronger every year for nearly a quarter of a century. Clearly, it will take far more than the spontaneous interplay of economic forces to prevent the Soviets from burying us, let alone to put them out of business.

V.

The most alarming aspect of Hayek's evolutionism, however, is not that it might make us complacent about the growth of Soviet military power, but that it could disarm us morally against Soviet Marxism. Evolution and natural selection mean change. Why may future changes not make Communism preferable to capitalism? Hayek seems to assume that self-love, a love of one's own, which is the psychological foundation of private property and the family, will continue into the indefinite future. But this is exactly what Marxism denies. According to Marx, self-love comes from property, not property from self-love. It is private ownership of the means of production, Marx claims, that has made man acquisitive, possessive, and competitive. In the society of the future, Marx predicts, there will be no such selfishness as we now see, since there will be no private property. Men and women, no longer infected with the calculating egoism of what used to be called "human nature," will produce and unite at pleasure, free from the limitations imposed by property rights and family ties.

The only ground on which to meet this argument is the idea of a fixed human nature. But evolution and natural selection imply that human nature is dynamic or changing. If Hayek believes in the permanence of the human nature that underlies private property and the family, then he should not continue to espouse a thoroughgoing evolutionism. Coversely, if he rejects the idea of a fixed human nature, he must concede the possibility that "bourgeois economics" and "bourgeois morality" are valid only within the present or "capitalist" phase of human evolution. Only by returning to the idea of an unchanging human nature--an idea central to the natural-law tradition of the West--can we meet the moral and theoretical challenges posed by Marxism.

If the West can be saved at all, it can be saved only by statesmanship of the highest order. Although it is not possible even under the most favorable circumstances to guarantee the emergence of a Lincoln or a Churchill, it is possible by means of bad education to cut off a whole generation from the sources of human and political greatness. Unfortunately, this is what our universities mostly have been doing for the past fifty years. Professor Hayek, by depreciating the authority of both reason and revelation, and denying the reality of natural law, provides no genuine alternative to the fashionable relativism taught in the schools. Hayek's teaching on our moral heritage does not help bring to light the sources of our political salvation. Rather, it helps keep them hidden in the shadows.