Comments (14)

• fundamentalist

  Very interesting insight into the great man. Thanks! I first noticed Hayek's sense of humor in some of the interviews on video posted recently. He really did have a subtle but strong sense of humor.

  Published: May 8, 2009 1:48 PM

• Barry Loberfeld

  RE: Hayek and "Social Justice":

  The imperative of economic equality also generates a striking opposition between "social justice" and its liberal rival. The equality of the latter, we've noted, is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the law -- the protection of the political rights of each man, irrespective of "class" (or any assigned collective identity, hence the blindfold of Justice personified). However, this political equality, also noted, spawns the difference in "class" between Smith and Jones. All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek's observation that if "we treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in their actual [i.e., economic] position." The irresistible conclusion is that "the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would be to treat them differently [politically]" -- precisely the conclusion that the advocates of "social justice" themselves have always reached. In the nations that had instituted this resolution throughout their legal systems, "different" political treatment came to subsume the extermination or imprisonment of millions because of their "class" origins. In our own American "mixed economy," which mixes differing systems of justice as much as economics, "social justice" finds expression in such policies and propositions as progressive taxation and income redistribution; affirmative action and even "reparations," its logical implication; and selective censorship in the name of "substantive equality," i.e., economic equality disingenuously reconfigured as a Fourteenth Amendment right and touted as the moral superior to "formal equality," the equality of political freedom actually guaranteed by the amendment. This last is the project of a growing number of leftist legal theorists that includes Cass Sunstein and Catharine MacKinnon, the latter opining that the "law of [substantive] equality and the law of freedom of expression [for all] are on a collision course in this country." Interestingly, Hayek had continued, "Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different, but in conflict with each other" -- a pronouncement that evidently draws no dissent.
  

  
  Hayek emphasized another conflict between the two conceptions of justice, one we can begin examining simply by asking who the subject of liberal justice is. The answer: a person -- a flesh-and-blood person, who is held accountable for only those actions that constitute specifically defined crimes of violence (robbery, rape, murder) against other citizens. Conversely, who is the subject of "social justice" -- society? Indeed yes, but is society really a "who"? When we speak of "social psychology" (the standard example), no one believes that there is a "social psyche" whose thoughts can be analyzed. And yet the very notion of "social justice" presupposes a volitional Society whose actions can (and must) be held accountable. This jarring bit of Platonism traces all the way back to Marx himself, who, "despite all his anti-Idealistic and anti-Hegelian rhetoric, is really an Idealist and Hegelian ... asserting, at root, that [Society] precedes and determines the characteristics of those who are [its] members" (R.A. Childs, Jr.). Behold leftism's alternative to liberalism's "atomistic individualism": reifying collectivism, what Hayek called "anthropomorphism or personification."
  

  
  From "An Inquiry Concerning 'Social Justice' and Its Influence."

  Published: May 8, 2009 2:00 PM

• LVDH

  There is one point in the article I am afraid I don´t quite get: are you saying that if one accepts Quine´s challenge to the analytic-synthetic distinction (better is: analytic-synthetic dichotomy) this rules out a priori knowledge?
  I would heve it the other way around. Rejecting the dichotomy opens up the possibility of a priori knowledge.
  

  Published: May 9, 2009 4:56 AM

• Arend

  @ LVDH: What about Kant's double dichotomy of a priori - a posteriori and analytic - synthetic propositions. Whether one challenges the second dichotomy (whatever that means; does one wnat to abolish the dichotomy or just challenges certain groups of propositions to be in one or the other category of the dichotomy?), or not, one could still distinguish between propositions/knowledge that is in principle prior to experience and those that are not.

  A priori btw means (imo) that the knowledge is inherent in the structure of reality, but that doesn't mean it's given to us without interacting with reality. It's not that the discovery of mathematics and logic sprung from the minds of great thinkers, but rather that it sprung from that great thinkers interacting with reality and furthermore the realization that what they found was actually inherent in reality all along and the realization that further knowledge could be pursued and attained without reference to reality. I think this interpretation of a priori resolves the 'disagreements' between Rothbard and Mises, of which the former acknowledged that it probably was a disagreement on semantics and taste of metaphysics anyways; see: http://mises.org/rothbard/extreme.pdf

  Published: May 9, 2009 6:07 AM

• LVDH

  I probably just misread David´s text. The "if accepted" refers to the _distinction_ and not to the _challenge_. Thus interpreted, the meaning is clear.

  Published: May 9, 2009 10:57 AM

• LVDH

  Arend, Thanks for your clarification of the _A Priori_ which seems correct.

  Published: May 9, 2009 11:24 AM

• LVDH

  Does anyone know when Hayek read _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ for the first time? He says something about this in _Hayek on Hayek_.

  Published: May 10, 2009 3:26 AM

• LVDH

  Does anyone know when Hayek read Popper´s _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ for the first time? He says something about this in _Hayek on Hayek_ if I remember well.

  Published: May 10, 2009 4:09 AM

• David Gordon

  To Ludwig,

  Popper mentions that Hayek read The Logic of Scientific Discovery within a week of their first meeting at the LSE in September or October 1935. See Popper, After the Open Society, eds. Shearmur and Turner (Routledge 2008), pp.408-409.

  I'm sorry my comment on Quine was unclear. Quine claimed that one couldn't draw a clear distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. He didn't claim that there are some propositions that are neither analytic nor synthetic, so "dichotomy" should not be used instead of "distinction", the word he uses in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Quine's claim doesn't require one to accept a particular view about a priori truth, but since many philosophers tried to analyze a priori propositions as, at least in part, analytic propositions, Quine's contention was usually taken as throwing a priori truth into question. The suggestion that it in fact makes room for the synthetic a priori is a good one, in my view. Stuart Hackett advanced this idea in a letter to Quine in 1953, but Quine was not sympathetic.
  In my article, I wasn't attempting to defend a position on this issue.

  Published: May 10, 2009 9:04 AM

• LVDH

  If I remember well, one of the positivist dogmas Quine criticized is the idea that meaningful propositions are either analytic or synthetic, and that propositions that are neither analytic nor synthetic must be eliminated from cognitive discourse as meaningless metaphysics. (The question for the positivists was not whether there are any propositions which are neither analytic nor synthetic, only whether they are cognitively meaningful.) In this sense the positivists adhered to the so-called analytic-synthetic dichotomy, which is what Quine criticized. In this sense I was entitled to use the word "dichotomy", even if Quine himself did not use it. I did not claim by the way that Quine used the expression "dichotomy".
  Thanks a lot for the factual information about Popper and Hayek.

  Published: May 10, 2009 10:09 AM

• David Gordon

  I don't think Quine said that that there are some meaningful propositions that are neither analytic nor synthetic. Rather,he said that there wasn't a clear distinction or "cleavage" between analytic and synthetic propositions. But judge for yourself: http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html

  Published: May 10, 2009 10:31 AM

• LudwigVDH

  On closer inspection I agree that a case can be made for avoiding the expression "dichotomy" and using "distinction" instead with respect to Quine. The expression is sometimes used by objectivist philosophers, but also e.g. in the Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. I don´t remember where exactly I picked it up. Within the mainstream of analytic philosophy it was not until Putnam´s (1962) _The Analytic and the Synthetic_ that these matters were further clarified using the notion of law-cluster concepts. These developments were well summarized by F. Suppe in his introduction to _The Structure of Scientific Theories_.

  Published: May 10, 2009 10:37 AM

• LudwigVDH

  Thanks also for providing the text of Quine´s paper. For those interested it is also reprinted in the collection of papers entitled _From a Logical Point of View_. I had read the paper as an undergraduate but that´s some time ago. I checked it recently for a specific quote I needed in writing a paper but without reading closely the entire article again.

  Published: May 10, 2009 12:40 PM

• Greg Ransom

  From the UCLA inverviews with Hayek, 1978:

  HAYEK: It was only after I had left Vienna, in London, that I began to think systematically on problems of methodology in the social sciences, and I began to
  recognize that positivism in that field was definitely
  misleading .

  In a discussion I had on a visit to Vienna from London with my friend [Gottfried] Haberler, I explained to him that I had come to the conclusion that all this Machian positivism was no good for our purposes. Then he countered, "Oh, there's a very good new book that came out in the circle of Vienna positivists by a man called Karl Popper on the logic of scientific research." So I became one of the early readers. It had just come out a few weeks before.

  Published: May 10, 2009 10:07 PM