Gray on Hayek

My old supervisor at Oxford University, John Gray, writes an interesting piece on Hayek in the New Statesman.

Gray’s piece is cleverly written and right on one major point: While Hayek could scientifically refute socialism, showing it to be an intellectual error (seeking to accomplish that which cannot be accomplished), he could not scientifically prove liberalism.

Gray’s criticism of Hayek’s account of spontaneous evolution is less convincing, because the liberal knows that freedom may lose out to totalitarianism (it was a near miss in the 1940s), but such a liberal (or libertarian) is simply pointing out that there is a possibility of non-coercive coordination of individual aims. This is an important insight. How can we achieve so much in a free society, and yet know so little? The answer is: Because we avail ourselves of the price mechanism and other coordinating structures, such as traditions, and thus we utilise much more knowledge than we individually possess. This does not mean that those structures will survive. They have to be defended, and perhaps sometimes guided.

Again, pace Gray, of course classical liberalism is not an ideology (i. e. a system serving the needs of a particular class of people). Classical liberalism is the theoretical insights that 1) socialism is wrong and 2) liberty is possible.


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