THE FATAL CONCEIT

The Errors of Socialism

A paperback of Volume I of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek F. A. Hayek studied at the University of Vienna, where he became both a Doctor of Law and a Doctor of Political Science. After several years in the BIBLIOTEKA AUSTRIACKA

Austrian civil service, he was made the first director of the Austrian Institute OSTERREICH - BIBLIOTHEK

for Business Cycle Research. In 1931 he was appointed Tooke Professor of UNIWERSYTETU WROCLAWSKIEGO

Economics and Statistics at the London School of Economics, and in 1950 he went to the University of Chicago as Professor of Social and Moral Sciences.

He returned to Europe in 1962, to the chair of Economics at the University of 4234

Freiburg, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1967.

The holder of numerous honorary doctorates, and a member of the British Academy, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974. He was created Companion of Honour in 1984. He is the author of some fifteen books, including Prices and Production, The Pure Theory of Capital The Road to Serfdom, The Counter-Revolution of Science, The Sensory Order, The Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation and Liberty. He died in 1992.

The editor, Professor W. W. Bartley, III, was at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University until his death in 1990.

PLAN OF THE COLLECTED WORKS

Founding Editor: W. W. Bartley, III

Editor: Stephen Kresge

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

Volume I

* The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

Volume II

Friedrich August Hayek

The Uses and Abuses of Reason: The Counter-

Revolution of Science, and Other Essays

Volume III

The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political VOLUME I

Economists and Economic History

Volume IV

The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian

Economics and the Ideal of Freedom

Volume V

Nations and Gold

THE FATAL CONCEIT

Volume VI

Money and Nations

Volume VII

Investigations in Economics

The Errors of Socialism

Volume VIII

Monetary Theory and Industrial Fluctuations

Volume IX

Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays,

Correspondence, and Documents

Volume X

Socialism and War: Essays, Correspondence, and

Documents

Volume XI

Essays on Liberty

Volume XII

Essays, Debates, and Reviews

Volume XIII

The Pure Theory of Capital

EDITED BY

Volume XIV

The Road to Serfdom

Volume XV

The Constitution of Liberty

W. W. BARTLEY, III

Volume XVI

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Volume XVII

Law, Legislation, and Liberty

Volume XVIII The Sensory Order and other Essays in Psychology Volume XIX

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their

Friendship and Subsequent Marriage

The plan is provisional. Minor alterations may occur in titles of individual books, and several additional volumes may be added.

* available in paperback

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF F. A. HAYEK

Founding Editor: W. W. Bartley III

First published in 1988 by Routledge

General Editor: Stephen Kresge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Reprinted 1989

Assistant Editor: Gene Opton

New in paperback 1990

Reprinted 1990, 1992

Set in Baskerville

by Columns of Reading

Published with the support of

and printed in Great Britain

by T.J. Press (Padstow) Ltd.

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Padstow, Cornwall

Stanford University

© F. A. Hayek 1988

Anglo American and De Beers Chairman's Fund, Johannesburg Cato Institute, Washington, D.C.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

The Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney

reproduced or utilized in any form or

Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, Taipei by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now Earhart Foundation, Ann Arbor

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying Engenharia Comercio e Industria S/A, Rio de Janeiro and recording, or in any information storage or

Escuela Superior de Economia y Administracion de Empresas retrieval system, without permission in writing from (ESEADE), Buenos Aires

the publishers.

The Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University Instituto Liberal, Rio de Janeiro

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Wichita

Hayek, F.A. (Friedrich August), 1899-

The Vera and Walter Morris Foundation, Little Rock The fatal conceit : the errors of socialism.

Verband der Osterreichischen Banken and Bankiers, Vienna (The collected works of Freidrich August Hayek).

The Wincott Foundation, London

1. Socialism. Philosophical perspectives

I. Title

II. Bartley, William Warren

III. Series

335'.001

ISBN 0-415-00820-4

ISBN 0-415-04187-2 (Pbk)

4234

CONTENTS

Editorial Foreword

X

Preface

5

Introduction

Was Socialism a Mistake?

6

One

Between Instinct and Reason

I I

Biological and Cultural Evolution

I I

Two Moralities in Cooperation and Conflict

1 7

Natural Man Unsuited to the Extended Order

1 9

Mind Is Not a Guide but a Product of Cultural

Evolution, and Is Based More on Imitation than on Insight or Reason

21

The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution Is Not Darwinian 23

Two

The Origins of Liberty, Property and justice

29

Freedom and the Extended Order

29

The Classical Heritage of European Civilisation 31

` Where There Is No Property There Is No justice'

33

The Various Forms and Objects of Property, and the Improvement Thereof

35

Organisations as Elements of Spontaneous Orders 37

Three

The Evolution of the Market: Trade and Civilisation 38

The Expansion of Order into the Unknown

38

The Density of Occupation of the World Made

Possible by Trade

41

Trade Older than the State

43

The Philosopher's Blindness

45

Four

The Revolt of Instinct and Reason

48

The Challenge to Property

48

Our Intellectuals and Their Tradition of Reasonable Socialism

52

Morals and Reason: Some Examples

55

A Litany of Errors

60

vii

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Positive and Negative Liberty

62

Appendices

`Liberation' and Order

64

A. `Natural' vs. Àrtificial'

1 43

B. The Complexity of Problems of Human Interaction 1 48

Five

The Fatal Conceit

66

C. Time and the Emergence and Replication of Structures 1 51

Traditional Morals Fail to Meet Rational

D. Alienation, Dropouts, and the Claims of Parasites 152

Requirements

66

E. Play, the School of Rules

154

Justification and Revision of Traditional Morals 67

F. Remarks on the Economics and Anthropology of Population 1 55

The Limits of Guidance by Factual Knowledge;

G. Superstition and the Preservation of Tradition

1 57

The Impossibility of Observing the Effects of

Our Morality

71

Editor's Acknowledgements

158

Unspecified Purposes: In the Extended Order Most Ends of Action Are Not Conscious or Deliberate 75

Bibliography

159

The Ordering of the Unknown

83

Name Index

1 73

How What Cannot Be Known Cannot Be Planned

85

Subject Index

1 76

Six

The Mysterious World of Trade and Money

89

Disdain for the Commercial

89

Marginal Utility versus Macroeconomics

94

The Intellectuals' Economic Ignorance

100

The Distrust of Money and Finance

101

The Condemnation of Profit and the Contempt

for Trade

104

Seven

Our Poisoned Language

106

Words as Guides to Action

106

Terminological Ambiguity and Distinctions among Systems of Coordination

110

Our Animistic Vocabulary and the Confused

Concept of `Society'

112

The Weasel Word `Social'

114

'Social Justice' and `Social Rights'

117

Eight

The Extended Order and Population Growth

120

The Malthusian Scare: The Fear of Overpopulation 120

The Regional Character of the Problem

124

Diversity and Differentiation

126

The Centre and the Periphery

127

Capitalism Gave Life to the Proletariat

130

The Calculus of Costs Is a Calculus of Lives

132

Life Has No Purpose But Itself

133

Nine

Religion and the Guardians of Tradition

135

Natural Selection from Among the Guardians

of Tradition

135

viii

i x

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

moralities

of socialism and the market order; he recounts the EDITORIAL FOREWORD

extraordinary powers that `the extended order' of the market, as he calls it, bestows on mankind, constituting and enabling the development of civilisation. Hayek also weighs - in a manner occasionally reminiscent of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents, yet reaching very different conclusions - both the benefits and costs of this civilisation, and also the consequences that would ensue from the destruction of the market order. He concludes: `While facts alone can never determine what is right, ill-considered notions of what is reasonable, right and good may I

change the facts and the circumstances in which we live; they may destroy, perhaps forever, not only developed individuals and buildings The Fatal Conceit, here published in paperback, is a new work by Hayek.

and art and cities (which we have long known to be vulnerable to the It was first published in 1988 as the first volume to appear in The destructive powers of moralities and ideologies of various sorts), but Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, a new standard edition of his writings.

also traditions, institutions, and interrelations

without which such

The reader who is struck by the pace and freshness of the argument creations could hardly have come into being or ever be recreated.'

of this new book, its vigorous application to specific cases, and its occasionally polemical thrust will want to know something of its background. In 1978, at the age of nearly eighty, and after a lifetime of II

doing battle with socialism in its many manifestations, Hayek wanted to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek attempts to make virtually the have a showdown. He conceived of a grand formal debate, probably to entire Hayek corpus available to the reader for the first time. The chief be held in Paris, in which the leading theorists of socialism would face organisation is thematic, but within this structure a chronological order the leading intellectual advocates of the market order. They would is followed where possible.

address the question: `Was Socialism a Mistake?'. The advocates of the The series opens with two closely-related books on the limits of market order would argue that socialism was - and always had been -

reason and planning in the social sciences - The Fatal Conceit, a new thoroughly mistaken on scientific and factual, even logical grounds, and work, and The Uses and Abuses of Reason: The Counter-Revolution of Science, that its repeated failures, in the many different practical applications of and Other Essays, a work never previously published in Britain. The socialist ideas that this century has witnessed, were, on the whole, the series continues with two collections of historical and biographical direct outcome of these scientific errors.

essays ( The Trend of Economic Thinking and The Austrian School and the The idea of a grand formal debate had to be set aside for practical Fortunes of Liberalism). The essays in these two volumes have never reasons. How, for instance, would the representatives of socialism be before been collected; over half of them have previously been available chosen? Would socialists themselves not refuse to agree on who might only in German; and approximately one-third of the first of these represent them? And even in the unlikely event that they did agree, volumes is drawn from important manuscripts never previously could they be expected to acknowledge the real outcome of any such published.

debate? Public confessions of error do not come easily.

The series continues with four volumes encompassing the bulk of Yet those of his colleagues who had met with Hayek to discuss the Hayek's contributions to economics: Nations and Gold; Money and Nations; idea were reluctant to abandon it, and encouraged him to set down, in a Investigations in Economics; and Monetary Theory and Industrial Fluctuations.

manifesto, the main arguments in the free-market case.

What was

These volumes are followed by three volumes of documentation, intended as a brief manifesto first grew into a large work in three parts; historical record and debate: The Battle with Keynes and Cambridge; The then the whole was compressed into the short book - or longer Battle with Socialism; and the remarkable Correspondence Between Karl

manifesto - presented here. Some fragments of the larger work have Popper and F. A. Hayek, extending over fifty years, in which these close been preserved, and will be published separately in Volume X.

friends

and intellectual collaborators intensely debate the main

Adopting an economic and evolutionary approach throughout, Hayek problems of philosophy and methodology, and many of the principal examines the nature, origin, selection and development of the differing issues of our time.

x

xi

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

These documentary volumes are followed by two new collections of The presiding genius behind the larger project, without whose advice essays by Hayek, and by a volume of his interviews and informal and support it never could have been organised or launched, is Walter conversations about both theoretical issues and practical affairs -

S. Morris, of the Vera and Walter Morris Foundation. Two other Conversations with Hayek - a volume intended to make his ideas available institutions whose directors watched carefully over the inception of the to a wider readership.

project, and whose advice has been ,invaluable, are the Institute for These first fourteen volumes will draw on, and be in large part Humane Studies, George Mason University, and the Institute of created from, the resources of the large Hayek Archive at the Hoover Economic Affairs, in London. The editor is particularly indebted to Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, as well Leonard P. Liggio, Walter Grinder, and John Blundell, of the Institute as its closely-related Machlup Archive and Popper Archive. Numerous for Humane Studies; and to Lord Harris of High Cross and John B.

other rich archival resources throughout the world will also be used.

Wood, of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Equally important has been The first volume in the series, The Fatal Conceit, which is fresh from the unflagging support and advice of Norman Franklin of Routledge & Hayek's hand, is of course unburdened by critical apparatus. The texts Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, who has been Hayek's publisher for many of subsequent volumes will be published in corrected, revised and years.

Finally, the project could not have been carried through annotated form, with introductions by distinguished scholars intended successfully without the generous financial support of the supporting to place them in their historial and theoretical context.

organisations, whose names are listed prominently at the beginning of The series will conclude with eight of Hayek's classic works -

this volume, and to which all associated with the volume are deeply i ncluding

The Road to Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order, The grateful. The support of these sponsors - institutions and foundations Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation and Liberty - books that are at from six continents - not only acknowledges the international appre-the moment still readily available in other editions. It is assumed that ciation of Hayek's work, but also provides very tangible evidence of the the publication of the entire series will take ten to twelve years.

èxtended order of human cooperation' of which Hayek writes. The It is the intention of the editors that the series of volumes be complete Editor also wishes to acknowledge grants in aid of the project from i n so far as that is reasonable and responsible. Thus essays which exist the Werner Erhard Foundation, Sausalito, California, and from the i n slightly variant forms, or in several different languages, will be Thyssen Foundation, Cologne, West Germany.

published always in English or in English translation, and only in their most complete and finished form unless some variation, or the timing W. W. Bartley, III

thereof, is of theoretical or historical significance. Some items of ephemeral value, such as short newspaper articles and book notices of a few lines written when Hayek was editing Economica, will be omitted.

And of course the correspondence to be published will be mainly that which bears significantly on Hayek's literary and theoretical work in economics, psychology, biography and history, political theory, and philosophy. All materials used in the creation of these volumes, as well as those comparatively few items omitted, will be available to scholars in the Hoover Institution Archives.

III

The preparation of a standard edition of this type is a large and also expensive undertaking. First and foremost among those who are to be thanked for their very great assistance are W. Glenn Campbell, Director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, for the generous decision to provide the principal underlying support for this project, and also for the editor's biography of Hayek.

xii

xiii

F. A. HAYEK

THE FATAL CONCEIT

The Errors of Socialism

Liberty or Freedom is not, as the origin of the name may seem to i mply, an exemption from all restraints, but rather the most effectual applications of every just restraint to all members of a free society whether they be magistrates or subjects.

Adam Ferguson

The rules of morality are not the conclusions of our reason.

David Hume

How can it be that institutions that serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed towards establishing them?

Carl Menger

PREFACE

For this book I adopted two rules. There were to be no footnotes and all arguments not essential to its chief conclusions but of interest or even essential to the specialist were either to be put into smaller print to tell the general reader that he might pass over them without missing points on which the conclusions depended, or else were to be assembled in appendices.

References to works cited or quoted are therefore usually indicated simply by brief statements in brackets of the name of the author (where not clear from the context) and the date of the work, followed after a colon by page numbers where needed. These refer to the list of authorities quoted at the end of the volume. Where a later edition of a work has been used, this is indicated by the latter of the dates given in the form 1786/1973, where the former date refers to the original edition.

It would be impossible to name the obligations one has incurred in the course of a long life of study even if one were to list all the works from which one has acquired one's knowledge and opinions, and still more impossible to list in a bibliography all the works one knows one ought to have studied in order to claim competence in a field as wide as that with which the present work deals. Nor can I hope to list all the personal obligations I have incurred during the many years my efforts were directed towards what was fundamentally the same goal. I wish, however, to express my deep gratitude to Miss Charlotte Cubitt, who has served as my assistant throughout the period that this work was in preparation and without whose dedicated help it never could have been completed; and also to Professor W. W. Bartley, III, of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, who - when I fell ill for a time, just prior to the completion of the final draft - took this volume in hand and prepared it for the publishers.

F. A. Hayek

Freiburg im Breisgau

April 1988

5

WAS SOCIALISM A MISTAKE?

effect a collective product of at least the same magnitude as that which INTRODUCTION

we now produce, it would indeed prove a grave moral problem how this WAS SOCIALISM A MISTAKE?

could be done justly. This, however, is not the position in which we find ourselves. For there is no known way, other than by the distribution of products in a competitive market, to inform individuals in what direction their several efforts must aim so as to contribute as much as possible to the total product.

The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple.... We may say, by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based

. . . so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside.

generated and utilised. As a question of fact, this conflict must be Ludwig von Mises

settled by scientific study. Such study shows that, by following the spontaneously generated moral traditions underlying the competitive This book argues that our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but market order (traditions which do not satisfy the canons or norms of also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the rationality embraced by most socialists), we generate and garner greater extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if some-knowledge and wealth than could ever be obtained or utilised in a what misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilisation, centrally-directed economy whose adherents claim to proceed strictly in one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human accordance with `reason'. Thus socialist aims and programmes are design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally factually impossible to achieve or execute; and they also happen, into conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of the bargain as it were, to be logically impossible.

which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to This is why, contrary to what is often maintained, these matters are understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonethe-not merely ones of differing interests or value judgements. Indeed, the less fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection - the question of how men came to adopt certain values or norms, and what comparative increase of population and wealth - of those groups that effect these had on the evolution of their civilisation, is itself above all a happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption factual one, one that lies at the heart of the present book, and whose of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to answer is sketched in its first three chapters. The demands of socialism valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to bèfruitful, and are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' ( Genesis 1:28). This extended order that made civilisation possible. Rather, they endeavour process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system Socialists take a different view of these matters. They not only differ whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised in their conclusions, they see the facts differently. That socialists are consequences. They assume that, since people had been able to generate wrong about the facts is crucial to my argument, as it will unfold in the some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to pages that follow. I am prepared to admit that if socialist analyses of the design an even better and more gratifying system. But if humankind operation of the existing economic order, and of possible alternatives, owes its very existence to one particular rule-guided form of conduct of were factually correct,-. we

might be obliged to ensure that the

proven effectiveness, it simply does not have the option of choosing distribution of incomes conform to certain moral principles, and that another merely for the sake of the apparent pleasantness of its this distribution might be possible only by giving a central authority the immediately visible effects. The dispute between the market order and power to direct the use of available resources, and might presuppose the socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist abolition of individual ownership of means of production. If it were for morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish instance true that central direction of the means of production could much of the rest.

7

6

THE FATAL CONCEIT

WAS SOCIALISM A MISTAKE?

All of this raises an important point about which I wish to be explicit question of how we came to acquire such an irreplaceable economic from the outset. Although I attack the presumption of reason on the part order - especially in view of my claim that powerful instinctual and of socialists, my argument is in no way directed against reason properly rationalistic impulses rebel against the morals and institutions that used. By `reason properly used' I mean reason that recognises its own capitalism requires.

li mitations and, itself taught by reason, faces the implications of the The answer to this question, sketched in the first three chapters, is astonishing fact, revealed by economics and biology, that order built upon the old insight, well known to economics, that our values and generated

without design can far outstrip plans men consciously institutions are determined not simply by preceding causes but as part contrive. How, after all, could I be attacking reason in a book arguing of a process of unconscious self-organisation of a structure or pattern.

that socialism is factually and even logically untenable? Nor do I This is true not only of economics, but in a wide area, and is well dispute that reason may, although with caution and in humility, and in known today in the biological sciences. This insight was only the first of a piecemeal way, be directed to the examination, criticism and rejection a growing family of theories that account for the formation of complex of traditional institutions and moral principles. This book, like some of structures in terms of processes transcending our capacity to observe all my earlier studies, is directed against the traditional norms of reason the several circumstances operating in the determination of their that guide socialism: norms that I believe embody a naive and particular manifestations. When I began my work I felt that I was uncritical theory of rationality, an obsolete and unscientific methodol-nearly alone in working on the evolutionary formation of such highly ogy that I have elsewhere called 'constructivist rationalism' (1973).

complex self-maintaining orders. Meanwhile, researches on this kind of Thus I wish neither to deny reason the power to improve norms and problem - under various names, such as autopoiesis, cybernetics, institutions nor even to insist that it is incapable of recasting the whole homeostasis, spontaneous order, self-organisation, synergetics, systems of our moral system in the direction now commonly conceived as `social theory, and so on - have become so numerous that I have been able to justice'. We can do so, however, only by probing every part of a system study closely no more than a few of them. This book thus becomes a of morals. If such a morality pretends to be able to do something that it tributary of a growing stream apparently leading to the gradual cannot possibly do, e.g., to fulfill a knowledge-generating and development of an evolutionary (but certainly not simply Neo--

organisational function that is impossible under its own rules and Darwinian)

ethics

parallel

and supplementary to, yet quite

norms, then this impossibility itself provides a decisive rational criticism distinct from, the already well-advanced development of evolutionary of that moral system. It is important to confront these consequences, for epistemology.

the notion that, in the last resort, the whole debate is a matter of value Though the book raises in this way some difficult scientific and judgements and not of facts has prevented professional students of the philosophical questions, its chief task remains to demonstrate that one market order from stressing forcibly enough that socialism cannot of the most influential political movements of our time, socialism, is possibly do what it promises.

based on demonstrably false premises, and despite being inspired by Nor should my argument suggest that I do not share some values good intentions and led by some of the most intelligent representatives widely held by socialists; but I do not believe, as I shall argue later, that of our time, endangers the standard of living and the life itself of a large the widely held conception of `social justice' either describes a possible proportion of our existing population. This is argued in the fourth state of affairs or is even meaningful. Neither do I believe, as some through sixth chapters, wherein I examine and refute the socialist proponents of hedonistic ethics recommend, that we can make moral challenge to the account of the development and maintenance of our decisions simply by considering the greatest foreseeable gratification.

civilisation that I offer in the first three chapters. In the seventh The starting point for my endeavour might well be David Hume's chapter, I turn to our language, to show how it has been debased under insight that `the rules of morality ... are not conclusions of our reason'

socialist influence and how careful we must be to keep ourselves from ( Treatise, 1739/1886:11:235). This insight will play a central role in this being seduced by it into socialist ways of thinking. In the eighth volume since it frames the basic question it tries to answer - which is chapter, I consider an objection that might be raised not only by how does our morality emerge, and what implications may its mode of coming into socialists, but by others as well: namely, that the population explosion being have for our economic and political life?

undercuts my argument. Finally, in the ninth chapter, I present briefly The contention that we are constrained to preserve capitalism a few remarks about the role of religion in the development of our moral because of its superior capacity to utilise dispersed knowledge raises the traditions.

8

9

THE FATAL CONCEIT

ONE

Since evolutionary theory plays so essential a part in this volume, I should note that one of the promising developments of recent years, BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

leading to a better understanding of the growth and function of knowledge (Popper, 1934/1959), and of complex and spontaneous orders (Hayek, 1964, 1973, 1976, 1979) of various kinds, has been the development of an evolutionary epistemology (Campbell, 1977, 1987; Radnitzky & Bartley, 1987), a theory of knowledge that understands reason and its products as evolutionary developments. In this volume I turn to a set of related problems that, although of great importance, remain largely neglected.

Consuetudo est quasi altera natura.

That is, I suggest that we need not only an evolutionary epistemology Cicero

but also an evolutionary account of moral traditions, and one of a character rather different than hitherto available.

Les lois de la conscience que nous disons naitre de la nature, naissant de Of course the

la coustume.

traditional rules of human intercourse, after language, law, markets and M. E. de Montaigne

money, were the fields in which evolutionary thinking originated. Ethics is the last fortress in which human pride must now bow in recognition Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,

of its origins. Such an evolutionary theory of morality is indeed Die eine will sich von der anderen trennen.

emerging, and its essential insight is that our morals are neither J. W. von Goethe

instinctual nor a creation of reason, but constitute a separate tradition -

' between instinct and reason', as the title of the first chapter indicates - a Biological and Cultural Evolution

tradition of staggering importance in enabling us to adapt to problems and circumstances far exceeding our rational capacities. Our moral To early thinkers the existence of an order of human activities traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concur-transcending the vision of an ordering mind seemed impossible. Even rently with our reason, not as its product. Surprising and paradoxical as Aristotle, who comes fairly late, still believed that order among men it may seem to some to say this, these moral traditions outstrip the could extend only so far as the voice of a herald could reach ( Ethics, IX, capacities of reason.

x), and that a state numbering a hundred thousand people was thus i mpossible. Yet what Aristotle thought impossible had already happened by the time he wrote these words. Despite his achievements as a scientist, Aristotle spoke from his instincts, and not from observation or reflection, when he confined human order to the reach of the herald's cry.

Such beliefs are understandable, for man's instincts, which were fully developed long before Aristotle's time, were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed. These genetically inherited instincts served to steer the cooperation of the members of the troop, a cooperation that was, necessarily, a narrowly circumscribed interaction of fellows known to and trusted by one another. These primitive people were guided by concrete, commonly perceived aims, and by a similar perception of the dangers and opportunities

- chiefly sources of food and shelter - of their

1 0

11

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

environment. They not only could hear their herald; they usually knew of all trade and employment without exception' is evil (1715/1924), by which him personally.

he meant, precisely, that the rules of the extended order conflicted with Although longer experience may have lent some older members of innate instincts that had bound the small group together.

these bands some authority, it was mainly shared aims and perceptions Once we view morals not as innate instincts but as learnt traditions, their that coordinated the activities of their members. These modes of relation to what we ordinarily call feelings, emotions or sentiments raises coordination depended decisively on instincts of solidarity and altruism various interesting questions. For instance, although learnt, morals do not

- instincts applying to the members of one's own group but not to necessarily always operate as explicit rules, but may manifest themselves, as others. The members of these small groups could thus exist only as do true instincts, as vague disinclinations to, or distastes for, certain kinds of such: an isolated man would soon have been a dead man. The primitive action. Often they tell us how to choose among, or to avoid, inborn individualism described by Thomas Hobbes is hence a myth. The instinctual drives.

savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist. There was never à war of all against all'.

It may be asked how restraints on instinctual demands serve to Indeed, if our present order did not already exist we too might hardly coordinate the activities of larger numbers. As an example, continued believe any such thing could ever be possible, and dismiss any report obedience to the command to treat all men as neighbours would have about it as a tale of the miraculous, about what could never come into prevented the growth of an extended order. For those now living within being. What are chiefly responsible for having generated this extra-the extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbours, ordinary order, and the existence of mankind in its present size and and by applying, in their interactions, rules of the extended order - such structure, are the rules of human conduct that gradually evolved as those of several property and contract - instead of the rules of (especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, solidarity and altruism. An order in which everyone treated his exchange, trade, competition, gain, and privacy). These rules are neighbour as himself would be one where comparatively few could be handed on by tradition, teaching and imitation, rather than by instinct, fruitful and multiply. If we were, say, to respond to all charitable and largely consist of prohibitions ('shalt not's') that designate appeals that bombard us through the media, this would exact a heavy adjustable domains for individual decisions. Mankind achieved civilis-cost in distracting us from what we are most competent to do, and likely ation by developing and learning to follow rules (first in territorial tribes only make us the tools of particular interest groups or of peculiar views and then over broader reaches) that often forbade him to do what his of the relative importance of particular needs. It would not provide a instincts demanded, and no longer depended on a common perception proper cure for misfortunes about which we are understandably of events.

These rules, in effect constituting a new and different concerned. Similarly, instinctual aggressiveness towards outsiders must morality, and to which I would indeed prefer to confine the term be curbed if identical abstract rules are to apply to the relations of all

` morality', suppress or restrain thènatural morality', i.e., those men, and thus to reach across boundaries - even the boundaries of i nstincts that welded together the small group and secured cooperation states.

within it at the cost of hindering or blocking its expansion.

Thus, forming superindividual patterns or systems of cooperation required individuals to change their `natural' or ìnstinctual' responses I prefer to confine the term `morality' to those non-instinctive rules that to others, something strongly resisted. That such conflicts with inborn enabled mankind to expand into an extended order since the concept of instincts, `private vices', as Bernard Mandeville described them, might morals makes sense only by contrast to impulsive and unreflective conduct turn out to bèpublic benefits', and that men had to restrain some on one hand, and to rational concern with specific results on the other.

` good' instincts in order to develop the extended order, are conclusions Innate reflexes have no moral quality, and 'sociobiologists' who apply terms that became the source of dissension later too. For example, Rousseau like altruism to them (and who should, to be consistent, regard copulation as took the side of thènatural' although his contemporary Hume clearly the most altruistic) are plainly wrong. Only if we mean to say that we ought saw that `so noble an affection [as generosity] instead of fitting men for to follow àltruistic' emotions does altruism become a moral concept.

large societies, is almost as contrary to them, as the most narrow Admittedly, this is hardly the only way to use these terms. Bernard selfishness' (1739/1886:11, 270).

Mandeville scandalized his contemporaries by arguing that `the grand Constraints

on the practices of the small group, it must be

principle that makes us social creatures, the solid basis, the life and support emphasised and repeated, are hated. For, as we shall see, the individual 1 2

13

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

following them, even though he depend on them for life, does not and thousand particulars which will be learnt by nobody but him who has usually cannot understand how they function or how they benefit him.

an interest in knowing them' (Bailey, 1840:3). Information-gathering He knows so many objects that seem desirable but for which he is not institutions such as the market enable us to use such dispersed and permitted to grasp, and he cannot see how other beneficial features of unsurveyable knowledge to form super-individual patterns.

After

his environment depend on the discipline to which he is forced to institutions and traditions based on such patterns evolved, it was no submit - a discipline forbidding him to reach out for these same longer necessary for people to strive for agreement on a unitary purpose appealing objects. Disliking these constraints so much, we hardly can be (as in the small band), for widely dispersed knowledge and skills could said to have selected them; rather, these constraints selected us: they now readily be brought into play for diverse ends.

enabled us to survive.

This development is readily apparent in biology as well as in economics. Even within biology in the strict sense èvolutionary change It is no accident that many abstract rules, such as those treating in general tends towards a maximum economy in the use of resources'

individual responsibility and several property, are associated with and èvolution thus "blindly" follows the route of maximum resources economics. Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an use'

( Howard, 1982:83). Further, a modern biologist has rightly extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a observed that èthics is the study of the way to allocate resources'

process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our vision or ( Hardin, 1980:3) - all of which points to the close interconnections our capacity to design. Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we among evolution, biology, and ethics.

have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His ìnvisible The concept of order is difficult - like its near equivalents `system', hand' had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or

`structure' and `pattern'. We need to distinguish two different but related unsurveyable pattern. We are led - for example by the pricing system in conceptions of order. As a verb or noun, òrder' may be used to describe market exchange - to do things by circumstances of which we are either the results of a mental activity of arranging or classifying objects or largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend. In events in various aspects according to our sense perception, as the scientific our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor re-arrangement of the sensory world tells us to do (Hayek, 1 952), or as the the sources of the things which we get. Almost all of us serve people particular physical arrangements that objects or events either are supposed to whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; possess or which are attributed to them at a certain time. Regularity, derived and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom from the Latin regula for rule, and order are of course simply the temporal we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great and the spatial aspects of the same sort of relation between elements.

framework of institutions and traditions - economic, legal, and moral -

Bearing this distinction in mind, we may say that humans acquired the into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we ability to bring about factually ordered arrangements serving their needs never made, and which we have never understood in the sense in which because they learned to order the sensory stimuli from their surroundings we understand how the things that we manufacture function.

according to several different principles, rearrangements superimposed over the Modern economics explains how such an extended order can come order or classification effected by their senses and instincts. Ordering in the into

being, and how it itself constitutes an information-gathering sense of classifying objects and events is a way of actively rearranging them process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information to produce desired results.

that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as We learn to classify objects chiefly through language, with which we not a whole, possess or control. Man's knowledge, as Smith knew, is merely label known kinds of objects but specify what we are to regard as dispersed. As he wrote, `What is the species of domestic industry his objects or events of the same or different kinds. We also learn from custom, capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the morality and law about effects expected from different kinds of action. For greatest value, every individual, it is evident, in his local situation, example, the values or prices formed by interaction in markets prove to be judges much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him'

further superimposed means of classifying kinds of actions according to the (1776/1976:11, 487). Or as an acute economic thinker of the nineteenth significance they have for an order of which the individual is merely one century put it, economic enterprise requires `minute knowledge of a element in a whole which he never made.

1 4

1 5

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

The extended order did not of course arise all at once; the process increasingly

distinguished

man from other animals, although the

lasted longer and produced a greater variety of forms than its eventual propensity to instinctive mass action remains one of several beastly development into a world-wide civilisation

might suggest (taking

haracteristics that man has retained (Trotter, 1916). Even man's c

perhaps hundreds of thousands of years rather than five or six animal ancestors had already acquired certain `cultural' traditions thousand); and the market order is comparatively late. The various before they became, anatomically, modern man. Such cultural tradi-structures, traditions, institutions and other components of this order tions have also helped to shape some animal societies, as among birds arose gradually as variations of habitual modes of conduct were and apes, and probably also among many other mammals (Bonner, selected. Such new rules would spread not because men understood that 1980). Yet the decisive change from animal to man was due to such they were more effective, or could calculate that they would lead to culturally-determined restraints on innate responses.

expansion, but simply because they enabled those groups practising Whilst learnt rules, which the individual came to obey habitually them to procreate more successfully and to include outsiders.

and almost as unconsciously as inherited instincts, increasingly replaced the latter, we cannot precisely distinguish between these two deter-This evolution came about, then, through the spreading of new minants of conduct because they interact in complicated ways. Practices practices by a process of transmission of acquired habits analogous to, learnt as infants have become as much part of our personalities as what but also in important respects different from, biological evolution. I governed us already when we began to learn. Even some structural shall consider some of these analogies and differences below, but we changes in the human body have occurred because they helped man to might mention here that biological evolution would have been far too take fuller advantage of opportunities provided by cultural develop-slow to alter or replace man's innate responses in the course of the ten ments. Neither is it important for our present purposes how much of the or twenty thousand years during which civilisation has developed - not abstract structure that we call mind is transmitted genetically and to speak of being too slow to have influenced the far greater numbers embodied in the physical structure of our central nervous system, or whose ancestors joined the process only a few hundred years ago. Yet so how far it serves only as a receptacle enabling us to absorb cultural far as we know, all currently civilised groups appear to possess a similar tradition. The results of genetic and cultural transmission may both be capacity for acquiring civilisation by learning certain traditions. Thus it called traditions. What is important is that the two often conflict in the hardly seems possible that civilisation and culture are genetically ways mentioned.

determined and transmitted. They have to be learnt by all alike through Not even the near universality of some cultural attributes proves that tradition.

they are genetically determined. There may exist just one way to satisfy certain requirements for forming an extended order - just as the The earliest clear statement of such matters known to me was made by development of wings is apparently the only way in which organisms A. M. Carr-Saunders who wrote that `man and groups are naturally can become able to fly (the wings of insects, birds and bats have quite selected on account of the customs they practice just as they are selected on different genetic origins). There may also be fundamentally only one account of their mental and physical characters. Those groups practising the way to develop a phonetic language, so that the existence of certain most advantageous customs will have an advantage in the constant struggle common attributes possessed by all languages also does not by itself between adjacent groups over those that practise less advantageous customs'

show that they must be due to innate qualities.

(1922:223, 302). Carr-Saunders, however, stressed the capacity to restrict rather than to increase population. For more recent studies see Alland (1967); Farb (1968:13);

Two Moralities in Cooperation and Conflict

Simpson, who described culture, as opposed to

biology, as `the more powerful means of adaptation' (in B. Campbell, 1 972); Although cultural evolution, and the civilisation that it created, brought Popper, who argued that `cultural evolution continues genetic evolution by differentiation, individualisation, increasing wealth, and great expan-other means' (Popper and Eccles, 1977:48); and Durham (in Chagnon and sion to mankind, its gradual advent has been far from smooth. We have Irons, 1979:19), who emphasises the effect of particular customs and not shed our heritage from the face-to-face troop, nor have these attributes in enhancing human reproduction.

instincts either àdjusted' fully to our relatively new extended order or been rendered harmless by it.

This gradual replacement of innate responses

by learnt rules

Yet the lasting benefits of some instincts should not be overlooked, 1 6

1 7

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

including the particular endowment that enabled some other instinctual later, I believe that an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage modes to be at least partly displaced. For example, by the time culture is the main source of the collectivist tradition.

began to displace some innate modes of behaviour, genetic evolution had probably also already endowed human individuals with a great Natural Man Unsuited to the Extended Order

variety of characteristics which were better adjusted to the many different environmental niches into which men had penetrated than One can hardly expect people either to like an extended order that runs those of any non-domesticated animal - and this was probably so even counter to some of their strongest instincts, or readily to understand before growing division of labour within groups provided new chances that it brings them the material comforts they also want. The order is of survival for special types. Among the most important of these innate even ùnnatural' in the common meaning of not conforming to man's characteristics which helped to displace other instincts was a great biological endowment. Much of the good that man does in the extended capacity for learning from one's fellows, especially by imitation. The order is thus not due to his being naturally good; yet it is foolish to prolongation of infancy and adolescence, which contributed to this deprecate civilisation as artificial for this reason. It is artificial only in capacity, was probably the last decisive step determined by biological the sense in which most of our values, our language, our art and our evolution.

very reason are artificial: they are not genetically embedded in our Moreover, the structures of the extended order are made up not only biological structures. In another sense, however, the extended order is of individuals but also of many, often overlapping, sub-orders within perfectly natural: in the sense that it has itself, like similar biological which old instinctual responses, such as solidarity and altruism, phenomena, evolved naturally in the course of natural selection (see continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collabor-Appendix A).

ation, even though they are incapable, by themselves, of creating a basis Nonetheless it is true that the greater part of our daily lives, and the for the more extended order. Part of our present difficulty is that we pursuit of most occupations, give little satisfaction to deep-seated must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in àltruistic' desires to do visible good. Rather, accepted practices often order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to require us to leave undone what our instincts impel us to do. It is not so different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of much, as is often suggested, emotion and reason that conflict, but innate the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our instincts and learnt rules. Yet, as we shall see, following these learnt families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts rules generally does have the effect of providing a greater benefit to the and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.

community at large than most direct àltruistic' action that a particular Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our individual might take.

more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in One revealing mark of how poorly the ordering principle of the two sorts of world at once. To apply the namèsociety' to both, or even market is understood is the common notion that `cooperation is better to either, is hardly of any use, and can be most misleading (see chapter than competition'. Cooperation, like solidarity, presupposes a large seven).

measure of agreement on ends as well as on methods employed in their Yet despite the advantages attending our limited ability to live pursuit. It makes sense in a small group whose members share simultaneously within two orders of rules, and to distinguish between particular habits, knowledge and beliefs about possibilities. It makes them, it is anything but easy to do either. Indeed, our instincts often hardly any sense when the problem is to adapt to unknown threaten to topple the whole edifice. The topic of this book thus circumstances; yet it is this adaptation to the unknown on which the resembles, in a way, that of Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), except coordination of efforts in the extended order rests. Competition is a that my conclusions differ greatly from Freud's. Indeed, the conflict procedure of discovery, a procedure involved in all evolution, that led between what men instinctively like and the learnt rules of conduct that man unwittingly to respond to novel situations; and through further enabled them to expand - a conflict fired by the discipline of `repressive competition,

not through agreement, we gradually increase our

or inhibitory moral traditions', as D. T. Campbell calls it - is perhaps efficiency.

the major theme of the history of civilisation. It seems that Columbus To operate beneficially, competition requires that those involved recognised at once that the life of thèsavages' whom he encountered observe rules rather than resort to physical force. Rules alone can unite was more gratifying to innate human instincts. And as I shall argue an extended order. (Common ends can do so only during a temporary 18

1 9

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

emergency that creates a common danger for all. Thèmoral equivalent superiority of market institutions, a historical and evolutionary survey of war' offered to evoke solidarity is but a relapse into cruder principles of the emergence of capitalism (such as that presented in chapters two of coordination.) Neither all ends pursued, nor all means used, are and three) helps to explain how such productive, albeit unpopular and known or need to be known to anybody, in order for them to be taken

. unintended, traditions happened to emerge, and how deep is their account of within a spontaneous order. Such an order forms of itself.

significance for those immersed in the extended order. First, however, I That rules become increasingly better adjusted to generate order want to remove from the path just outlined a major stumbling-block, in happened not because men better understood their function, but the form of a widely shared misconception of the nature of our capacity because those groups prospered who happened to change them in a way to adopt useful practices.

that rendered them increasingly adaptive. This evolution was not linear, but resulted from continued trial and error, constant èxperimentation'

Mind Is Not a Guide but a Product of Cultural Evolution, and Is Based More on in arenas wherein different orders contended. Of course there was no Imitation than on Insight or Reason

intention to experiment - yet the changes in rules thrown forth by historical accident, analogous to genetic mutations, had something of We have mentioned the capacity to learn by imitation as one of the the same effect.

prime benefits conferred during our long instinctual development.

The evolution of rules was far from unhindered, since the powers Indeed, perhaps the most important capacity with which the human enforcing the rules generally resisted rather than assisted changes individual is genetically endowed, beyond innate responses, is his ability conflicting with traditional views about what was right or just. In turn, to acquire skills by largely imitative learning. In view of this, it is enforcement of newly learnt rules that had fought their way to important to avoid, right from the start, a notion that stems from what I acceptance sometimes blocked the next step of evolution, or restricted a call thèfatal conceit': the idea that the ability to acquire skills stems further extension of the coordination of individual efforts. Coercive from reason. For it is the other way around: our reason is as much the authority has rarely initiated such extensions of coordination, though it result of an evolutionary selection process as is our morality. It stems has from time to time spread a morality that had already gained however from a somewhat separate development, so that one should acceptance within a ruling group.

never suppose that our reason is in the higher critical position and that All this confirms that the feelings that press against the restraints of only those moral rules are valid that reason endorses.

civilisation are anachronistic, adapted to the size and conditions of I shall examine these matters in subsequent chapters, but a foretaste groups in the distant past. Moreover, if civilisation has resulted from of my conclusions may be in place here. The title of the present chapter, unwanted gradual changes in morality, then, reluctant as we may be tò Between Instinct and Reason', is meant literally. I want to call accept this, no universally valid system of ethics can ever be known to attention to what does indeed lie between instinct and reason, and which us.

on that account is often overlooked just because it is assumed that there is nothing between the two. That is, I am chiefly concerned with It would however be wrong to conclude, strictly from such evolutionary cultural and moral evolution, evolution of the extended order, which is, premises, that whatever rules have evolved are always or necessarily on the one hand (as we have just seen), beyond instinct and often conducive to the survival and increase of the populations following opposed to it, and which is, on the other hand (as we shall see later), them. We need to show, with the help of economic analysis (see chapter incapable of being created or designed by reason.

five), how rules that emerge spontaneously tend to promote human My views, some of which have been sketched earlier (1952/79, 1973, survival. Recognising that rules generally tend to be selected, via 1976, 1979), can be summarised simply. Learning how to behave is competition, on the basis of their human survival-value certainly does more the source than the result of insight, reason, and understanding.

not protect those rules from critical scrutiny. This is so, if for no other Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to reason, because there has so often been coercive interference in the become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human process of cultural evolution.

interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason Yet an understanding of cultural evolution will indeed tend to shift and those capabilities associated with it.

Man became intelligent

the benefit of the doubt to established rules, and to place the burden of because there was tradition - that which lies between instinct and reason proof on those wishing to reform them. While it cannot prove the

- for him to learn. This tradition, in turn, originated not from a 2 0

21

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

capacity rationally to interpret observed facts but from habits of its effects are on the group. Shaped by the environment in which responding. It told man primarily what he ought or ought not to do individuals

grow up, mind in turn conditions the preservation, under certain conditions rather than what he must expect to happen.

development, richness, and variety of traditions on which individuals Thus I confess that I always have to smile when books on evolution, draw. By being transmitted largely through families, mind preserves a even ones written by great scientists, end, as they often do, with multiplicity of concurrent streams into which each newcomer to the exhortations which,

while conceding that everything has hitherto

community can delve. It may well be asked whether an individual who developed by a process of spontaneous order, call on human reason -

did not have the opportunity to tap such a cultural tradition could be now that things have become so complex - to seize the reins and control said even to have a mind.

future development. Such wishful thinking is encouraged by what I Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the have elsewhere called the 'constructivist rationalism' (1973) that affects latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and much scientific thinking, and which was made quite explicit in the title reason - logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to of a highly successful book by a well-known socialist anthropologist, what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to Man Makes Himself (V. Gordon Childe, 1936), a title that was adopted rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience by many socialists as a sort of watchword (Heilbroner, 1970:106). These in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were assumptions include the unscientific, even animistic, notion that at not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from some stage the rational human mind or soul entered the evolving an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though human body and became a new, active guide of further cultural governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know development (rather than, as actually happened, that this body why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively gradually

acquired the capacity to absorb exceedingly complex displaced innate responses, not because men recognised by reason that principles that enabled it to move more successfully in its own they were better but because they made possible the growth of an environment). This notion that cultural evolution entirely postdates extended order exceeding anyone's vision, in which more effective biological or genetic evolution passes over the most important part of collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more the evolutionary process, that in which reason itself was formed. The people and to displace other groups.

idea that reason, itself created in the course of evolution, should now be in a position to determine its own future evolution (not to mention any The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution Is Not Darwinian number of other things which it is also incapable of doing) is inherently contradictory, and can readily be refuted (see chapters five and six). It We are led by our argument to consider more closely the relationship is less accurate to suppose that thinking man creates and controls his between the theory of evolution and the development of culture. It is an cultural evolution than it is to say that culture, and evolution, created issue that raises a number of interesting questions, to many of which his reason. In any case, the idea that at some point conscious design economics provides an access that few other disciplines offer.

stepped in and displaced evolution substitutes a virtually supernatural There has however been great confusion about the matter, some of postulate for scientific explanation. So far as scientific explanation is which should be mentioned if only to warn the reader that we do not concerned, it was not what we know as mind that developed civilisation, intend to repeat it here. Social Darwinism, in particular, proceeded let alone directed its evolution, but rather mind and civilisation which from the assumption that any investigator into the evolution of human developed or evolved concurrently. What we call mind is not something culture has to go to school with Darwin. This is mistaken. I have the that the individual is born with, as he is born with his brain, or greatest admiration for Charles Darwin as the first who succeeded in something that the brain produces, but something that his genetic elaborating a consistent (if still incomplete) theory of evolution in any equipment (e.g., a brain of a certain size and structure) helps him to field.

Yet his painstaking efforts to illustrate how the process of acquire, as he grows up, from his family and adult fellows by absorbing evolution operated in living organisms convinced the scientific com-the results of a tradition that is not genetically transmitted. Mind in this munity of what had long been a commonplace in the humanities - at sense consists less of testable knowledge about the world, less in least

since

Sir

William Jones in 1787 recognised the striking

interpretations of man's surroundings, more in the capacity to restrain resemblance of Latin and Greek to Sanskrit, and the descent of all instincts - a capacity which cannot be tested by individual reason since

' Indo-Germanic' languages from the latter. This example reminds us 2 2

23

THE FATAL CONCEIT

BETWEEN INSTINCT AND REASON

that the Darwinian or biological theory of evolution was neither the first well known, it is also almost always forgotten.

nor the only such theory, and actually is wholly distinct, and differs Of course the theory of cultural evolution (sometimes also described somewhat from, other evolutionary accounts. The idea of biological as psycho-social, super-organic, or exosomatic evolution) and the theory evolution stems from the study of processes of cultural development of biological evolution are, although analogous in some important ways, which had been recognised earlier: processes that lead to the hardly identical. Indeed, they often start from quite different assump-formulation of institutions like language (as in the work of Jones), law, tions. Cultural evolution is, as Julian Huxley justly stated, à process morals, markets, and money.

differing radically from biological evolution, with its own laws and mechanisms and modalities, and not capable of explanation on purely Thus perhaps the chief error of contemporary `sociobiology' is to suppose biological grounds' (Huxley, 1947). Just to mention several important that language, morals, law, and such like, are transmitted by thègenetic'

differences: although biological theory now excludes the inheritance of processes that molecular biology is now illuminating, rather than being the acquired characteristics,

all

cultural

development rests on such

products of selective evolution transmitted by imitative learning. This idea is inheritance - characteristics in the form of rules guiding the mutual as wrong - although at the other end of the spectrum - as the notion that relations among individuals which are not innate but learnt. To refer to man consciously invented or designed institutions like morals, law, language terms now used in biological discussion, cultural evolution simulates or money, and thus can improve them at will, a notion that is a remnant of the superstition that evolutionary theory in biology had to combat: namely, Lamarckism (Popper, 1972). Moreover, cultural evolution is brought about through transmission of habits and information not merely from that wherever we find order there must have been a personal orderer. Here again we find that an accurate account lies

the individual's physical parents, but from an indefinite number of between i nstinct and reason.

àncestors'. The processes furthering the transmission and spreading of Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social cultural properties by learning also, as already noted, make cultural sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue evolution incomparably faster than biological evolution. Finally, that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics. As we cultural evolution operates largely through group selection; whether learn from his notebooks, Darwin was reading Adam Smith just when, group selection also operates in biological evolution remains an open in 1838, he was formulating his own theory (see Appendix A below).'

question - one on which my argument does not depend (Edelman, In any case, Darwin's work was preceded by decades, indeed by a 1987;

Ghiselin, 1969:57-9, 132-3;

Hardy, 1965:153ff, 206;

Mayr,

century, of research concerning the rise of highly complex spontaneous 1970:114; Medawar, 1983:134-5; Ruse, 1982:190-5, 203-6, 235-6).

orders through a process of evolution. Even words likègenetic' and

`genetics',

It is wrong for Bonner (1980:10) to claim that culture is às biological as any which have today become technical expressions of biology, other function of an organism, for instance respiration or locomotion'. To were by no means invented by biologists. The first person I know to label `biological' the formation of the tradition of language, morals, law, have spoken of genetic development was the German philosopher and money, even of the mind, abuses language and misunderstands theory. Our cultural historian Herder. We find the idea again in Wieland, and again in

genetic inheritance may determine what we are capable of learning but Humboldt. Thus modern biology has borrowed the concept of certainly not what tradition is there to learn. What is there to learn is not evolution from studies of culture of older lineage. If this is in a sense even the product of the human brain. What is not transmitted by genes is not a biological phenomenon.

See Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, together with

Despite such differences, all evolution, cultural as well as biological, Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett ( New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974), pp. 13, 57, 302, 305, 321, 360, 380. In 1838

is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseeable events, to Darwin read Smith's Essays on Philosophical Subjects, to which was prefixed Dugald Stewart's contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast. This is An

Account of the Life and Writings of the Author ( London: Cadell and Davies, 1795, pp. xxvi-xxvii).

another reason why evolutionary theory can never put us in the position Of the latter, Darwin noted that he had read it and that it was `worth reading as giving of rationally predicting and controlling future evolution. All it can do is abstract of Smith's views'. In 1839 Darwin read Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments; or, An to show how complex structures carry within themselves a means of Essay Towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men Naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbours, and afterwards of themselves, to which is added, A Dissertation on the correction that leads to further evolutionary developments which are, Origin of Languages, 1 0th ed., 2 vols. (London: Cadell & Davies, 1804). There does not appear however, in accordance with their very nature, themselves unavoidably to be any evidence that Darwin read The Wealth of Nations. - Ed.

unpredictable.

2 4

25

THE FATAL CONCEIT

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Having mentioned several differences between cultural and biological of explanation is also expressed in the new work of some distinguished evolution, I should stress that in one important respect they are at one: physical scientists, which shows that the idea of evolution is in no way neither biological nor cultural evolution knows anything likèlaws of li mited to organisms, but rather that it begins in a sense already with evolution' or ìnevitable laws of historical development' in the sense of atoms, which have developed out of more elementary particles, and that laws governing necessary stages or phases through which the products we can thus explain molecules, the most primitive complex organisms, of evolution

must pass, and enabling the prediction of future

and even the complex modern world through various processes of developments. Cultural evolution is determined neither genetically nor evolution (see Appendix A).

otherwise, and its results are diversity, not uniformity. Those philosophers like

No one who takes an evolutionary approach to the study of culture Marx and Auguste Comte who have contended that our can, however, fail to be aware of the hostility often shown towards such studies can lead to laws of evolution enabling the prediction of approaches. Such hostility often stems from reactions to just those inevitable future developments are mistaken. In the past, evolutionary

`social scientists' who in the nineteenth century needed Darwin to approaches to ethics have been discredited chiefly because evolution recognise what they ought to have learnt from their own predecessors, was wrongly connected with such alleged `laws of evolution', whereas in and who did a lasting disservice to the advance of the theory of cultural fact the theory of evolution must emphatically repudiate such laws as i

evolution, which they indeed brought into discredit.

mpossible. As I have argued elsewhere (1952), complex phenomena are Social Darwinism is wrong in many respects, but the intense dislike of confined to what I call pattern prediction or predictions of the principle.

it shown today is also partly due to its conflicting with the fatal conceit One of the main sources of this particular misunderstanding results that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.

from confusing two wholly different processes which biologists distin-Although this too has nothing to do with evolutionary theory properly guish as ontogenetic and phylogenetic. Ontogenesis has to do with the understood, constructivist students of human affairs often use the predetermined development of individuals, something indeed set by inappropriateness (and such plain mistakes) of Social Darwinism as a inherent mechanisms built into the genom of the germ cell. By contrast, pretext for rejecting any evolutionary approach at all.

phylogeny - that with which evolution is concerned - deals with the Bertrand Russell provides a good example in his claim that ìf evolutionary history of the species or type.

While biologists have

evolutionary ethics were sound, we ought to be entirely indifferent to generally been protected against confusing these two by their training, what the course of evolution might be, since whatever it is is thereby students of affairs unfamiliar with biology often fall victim to their proved to be best' (1910/1966:24). This objection, which A.G.N. Flew ignorance and are led to 'historicist' beliefs that imply that phylogenesis (1967:48) regards as `decisive', rests on a simple misunderstanding. I operates in the same way as does ontogenesis. These historicist notions have no intention to commit what is often called the genetic or were effectively refuted by Sir Karl Popper (1945, 1957).

naturalistic fallacy. I do not claim that the results of group selection of Biological and cultural evolution share other features too. For traditions are necessarily `good' - any more than I claim that other example, they both rely on the same principle of selection: survival or things that have long survived in the course of evolution, such as reproductive advantage. Variation, adaptation and competition are cockroaches, have moral value.

essentially the same kind of process, however different their particular I do claim that, whether we like it or not, without the particular mechanisms, particularly those pertaining to propagation. Not only traditions I have mentioned, the extended order of civilisation could not does all evolution rest on competition; continuing competition is continue to exist (whereas, were cockroaches to disappear, the resulting necessary even to preserve existing achievements.

ecological `disaster' would perhaps not wreak permanent havoc on mankind); and that if we discard these traditions, out of ill-considered Although I wish the theory of evolution to be seen in its broad historical notions (which may indeed genuinely commit the naturalistic fallacy) of setting, the differences between biological and cultural evolution to be what it is to be reasonable, we shall doom a large part of mankind to understood, and the contribution of the social sciences to our knowledge poverty and death. Only when these facts are fully faced do we have of evolution to be recognized, I do not wish to dispute that the working any business - or are we likely to have any competence - to consider out of Darwin's theory of biological evolution, in all of its ramifications, is

what the right and good thing to do may be.

one of the great intellectual achievements of modern times - one that While facts alone can never determine what is right, ill-considered gives us a completely new view of our world. Its universality as a means notions of what is reasonable, right and good may change the facts and 2 6

27

THE FATAL CONCEIT

TWO

the circumstances in which we live; they may destroy, perhaps forever, not only developed individuals and buildings and art and cities (which THE ORIGINS OF LIBERTY,

we have long known to be vulnerable to the destructive powers of PROPERTY AND JUSTICE

moralities

and ideologies of various sorts), but also traditions, institutions, and interrelations without which such creations could hardly have come into being or ever be recreated.

Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say that he values civilisation. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.

Henry Sumner Maine

Property ... is therefore inseparable from human economy in its social form.

Carl Menger

Men are qualified for civil liberties, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.

Edmund Burke

Freedom and the Extended Order

If morals and tradition, rather than intelligence and calculating reason, lifted men above the savages, the distinctive foundations of modern civilisation were laid in antiquity in the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. There, possibilities of long-distance trade gave, to those communities whose individuals were allowed to make free use of their individual knowledge, an advantage over those in which common local knowledge or that of a ruler determined the activities of all. So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognised private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relations among different communities. Such a network worked independently of the views and desires of local chiefs, for the movements of naval traders could hardly be centrally directed in those days. If we may accept the account of a highly respected authority (and one certainly not biased in favour of the market order), `the Graeco-Roman world was essentially and precisely one of private ownership, whether of a few acres or of the enormous domains of Roman senators and emperors, a world of private trade and manufacture' (Finley, 1973:29).

Such an order serving a multiplicity of private purposes could in fact 2 8

29

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE ORIGINS OF LIBERTY, PROPERTY AND JUSTICE

have been formed only on the basis of what I prefer to call several probably became attached to their makers because they were the only property, which is H. S. Maine's more precise term for what is usually ones who had the skill to use them - and here again the story of Arthur described as private property. If several property is the heart of the and Excalibur is appropriate, for while Arthur did not make Excalibur, morals of any advanced civilisation, the ancient Greeks seem to have he was the only one able to use it. Separate ownership of perishable been the first to see that it is also inseparable from individual freedom.

goods, on the other hand, may have appeared only later as the The makers of the constitution of ancient Crete are reported to have solidarity of the group weakened and individuals became responsible for

` taken it for granted that liberty is a state's highest good and for this more limited groups such as the family. Probably the need to keep a reason alone make property belong specifically to those who acquire it, workable holding intact gradually led from group ownership to whereas in ' a condition of slavery everything belongs to the rulers'

individual property in land.

(Strabo, 10, 4, 16).

There is however little use in speculating about the particular An important aspect of this freedom - the freedom on the part of sequence of these developments, for they probably varied considerably different individuals or sub-groups to pursue distinct aims, guided by among the peoples who progressed through nomadic herding and those their differing knowledge and skills - was made possible not only by the who developed agriculture.

The crucial point is that the prior

separate control of various means of production, but also by another development of several property is indispensable for the development of practice, virtually inseparable from the first: the recognition of approved trading,

and thereby for the formation of larger coherent and methods of transferring this control. The individual's ability to decide cooperating structures, and for the appearance of those signals we call for himself how to use specific things, being guided by his own prices.

Whether individuals, or extended families, or voluntary knowledge and expectations as well as by those of whatever group he groupings of individuals were recognised as owning particular objects is might join, depends on general recognition of a respected private less important than that all were permitted to choose which individuals domain of which the individual is free to dispose, and an equally would determine what use was to be made of their property. There will recognised

way in which the right to particular things can be also have developed, especially with regard to land, such arrangements transferred from one person to another. The prerequisite for the as `vertical' division of property rights between superior and inferior existence of such property, freedom, and order, from the time of the owners, or ultimate owners and lessees, such as are used in modern Greeks to the present, is the same: law in the sense of abstract rules estate developments, of which more use could perhaps be made today enabling any individual to ascertain at any time who is entitled to than some more primitive conceptions of property allow.

dispose over any particular thing.

Nor should tribes be thought of as the stock from which cultural With respect to some objects, the notion of individual property must evolution began; they are, rather, its earliest product. These èarliest'

have appeared very early, and the first hand-crafted tools are perhaps coherent groups were of common descent and community of practice an appropriate example. The attachment of a unique and highly useful with other groups and individuals with whom they were not necessarily tool or weapon to its maker might, however, be so strong that transfer familiar (as will be discussed in the next chapter). Hence we can hardly became so psychologically difficult that the instrument must accompany say when tribes first appeared as preservers of shared traditions, and him even into the grave - as in the tholos or beehive tombs of the cultural evolution began.

Yet somehow, however slowly, however

Mycenaean period. Here the fusion of inventor with `rightful owner'

marked by setbacks, orderly cooperation was extended, and common appears, and with it numerous elaborations of the basic idea, sometimes concrete ends were replaced by general, end-independent abstract rules accompanied also by legend, as in the later story of Arthur and his of conduct.

sword Excalibur - a story in which the transfer of the sword came about not by human law but by àhigher' law of magic or `the powers'.

The extension and refinement of the concept of property were, as The Classical Heritage of European Civilisation such examples suggest, necessarily gradual processes that are hardly It appears also to have been the Greeks, and especially the Stoic completed even today. Such a concept cannot yet have been of much philosophers, with their cosmopolitan outlook, who first formulated the significance in the roving bands of hunters and gatherers among whom moral tradition which the Romans later propagated throughout their the discoverer of a source of food or place of shelter was obliged to Empire. That this tradition arouses great resistance we already know reveal his find to his fellows. The first individually crafted durable tools and will witness again repeatedly. In Greece it was of course chiefly the 3 0

31

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE ORIGINS OF LIBERTY, PROPERTY AND JUSTICE

Spartans, the people who resisted the commercial revolution most during recurrent `times of trouble' when government control was strongly, who did not recognise individual property but allowed and temporarily

weakened.

But these rebellions or aberrances were

even encouraged theft. To our time they have remained the prototype of regularly smothered by the might of a state preoccupied with the literal savages who rejected civilisation (for representative 18th-century views preservation of traditional order (J. Needham, 1954).

on them compare Dr. Samuel Johnson in Boswell's Life or Friedrich Schiller's essay Uber die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgos and Solon). Yet already This is also well illustrated in Egypt, where we have quite good information in Plato and Aristotle, however, we find a nostalgic longing for return to about the role that private property played in the initial rise of this great Spartan practice, and this longing persists to the present. It is a craving civilisation. In his study of Egyptian institutions and private law, Jacques for a micro-order determined by the overview of omniscient authority.

Pirenne describes the essentially individualistic character of the law at the It is true that, for a time, the large trading communities that had end of the third dynasty, when property was ìndividual and inviolable, grown up in the Mediterranean were precariously protected against depending wholly on the proprietor' (Pirenne, 1934:I1, 338-9), but records marauders by the still more martial Romans who, as Cicero tells us, the beginning of its decay already during the fifth dynasty. This led to could dominate the region by subduing the most advanced commercial the state socialism of the eighteenth dynasty described in another French centres of Corinth and Carthage, which had sacrificed military prowess work of the same date (Dairaines, 1934), which prevailed for the next two to mercandi et navigandi cupiditas (De re publica, 2, 7-10). But during the thousand years and largely explains the stagnant character of Egyptian last years of the Republic and the first centuries of the Empire, civilisation during that period.

governed by a senate whose members were deeply involved in commercial interests, Rome gave the world the prototype of private law Similarly, of the revival of European civilisation during the later based on the most absolute conception of several property. The decline Middle Ages it could be said that the expansion of capitalism - and and final collapse of this first extended order came only after central European civilisation - owes its origins and raison d'etre to political administration in Rome increasingly displaced free endeavour. This anarchy (Baechler,

1975:77).

It was not under the more powerful

sequence has been repeated again and again: civilisation might spread, governments, but in the towns of the Italian Renaissance, of South but is not likely to advance much further, under a government that Germany and of the Low Countries, and finally in lightly-governed takes over the direction of daily affairs from its citizens. It would seem England, i.e., under the rule of the bourgeoisie rather than of warriors, that no advanced civilisation has yet developed without a government that modern industrialism grew. Protection of several property, not the which saw its chief aim in the protection of private property, but that direction of its use by government, laid the foundations for the growth again and again the further evolution and growth to which this gave rise of the dense network of exchange of services that shaped the extended was halted by àstrong' government. Governments strong enough to order.

protect individuals against the violence of their fellows make possible Nothing is more misleading, then, than the conventional formulae of the evolution of an increasingly complex order of spontaneous and historians who represent the achievement of a powerful state as the voluntary cooperation. Sooner or later, however, they tend to abuse that culmination of cultural evolution: it as often marked its end. In this power and to suppress the freedom they had earlier secured in order to respect students of early history were overly impressed and greatly enforce their own presumedly greater wisdom and not to allow `social misled by monuments and documents left by the holders of political institutions to develop in a haphazard manner' (to take a characteristic power, whereas the true builders of the extended order, who as often as expression that is found under the heading `social engineering' in the not created the wealth that made the monuments possible, left less Fontana/Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977)).

tangible and ostentatious testimonies to their achievement.

If the Roman decline did not permanently terminate the processes of evolution even in Europe, similar beginnings in Asia (and later

` Where There Is No Property There Is No justice'

independently in Meso-America) were stopped by powerful governments which (similar to but exceeding in power mediaeval feudal Nor did wise observers of the emerging extended order much doubt that systems in Europe) also effectively suppressed private initiative. In the it was rooted in the security, guaranteed by governments, that limited most remarkable of these, imperial China, great advances towards coercion to the enforcement of abstract rules determining what was to civilisation and towards sophisticated industrial technology took place belong to whom. Thèpossessive individualism' of John Locke was, for 3 2

33

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE ORIGINS OF LIBERTY, PROPERTY AND JUSTICE

example, not just a political theory but the product of an analysis of the first clearly to perceive that general freedom becomes possible by the conditions to which England and Holland owed their prosperity. It was natural moral instincts being `checked and restrained by a subsequent based in the insight that the justice that political authority must enforce, judgement' according to 'justice, or a regard to the property of others, if it wants to secure the peaceful cooperation among individuals on fidelity, or the observance of promises [which have] become obligatory, which prosperity rests, cannot exist without the recognition of private and acquire[d] an authority over mankind' (1741, 1742/1886:111, 455).

property: ' "Where there is no property there is no justice," is a Hume did not make the error, later so common, of confusing two senses proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of of freedom: that curious sense in which an isolated individual is property being a right to anything, and the idea to which the name of supposed to be able to be free, and that in which many persons injustice is given being the invasion or violation of that right; it is collaborating with one another can be free. Seen in the latter context of evident that these ideas being thus established, and these names such collaboration, only abstract rules of property - i.e., the rules of law annexed to them, I can as certainly know this proposition to be true as

- guarantee freedom.

that a triangle has three angles equal to two right ones' (John Locke: When Adam Ferguson summed up such teaching by defining the 1690/1924:IV, iii, 18). Soon afterwards, Montesquieu made known his savage as a man who did not yet know property (1767/73:136), and message that it had been commerce that spread civilisation and sweet when Adam Smith remarked that `nobody ever saw one animal by its manners among the barbarians of Northern Europe.

gestures or natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that is yours'

For David Hume and other Scottish moralists and theorists of the (1776/1976:26), they expressed what, in spite of recurrent revolts by eighteenth century, it was evident that the adoption of several property rapacious or hungry bands, had for practically two millennia been the marks the beginning of civilisation; rules regulating property seemed so view of the educated. As Ferguson put it, Ìt must appear very evident, central to all morals that Hume devoted most of his Treatise on morals that property is a matter of progress' (ibid.). Such matters were, as we to them. It was to restrictions on government power to interfere with have noticed, also then investigated in language and the law; they were property that he later, in his History of England (Vol. V), ascribed that well understood in the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century; country's greatness; and in the

Treatise

itself (III, ii)

he clearly

and it was probably through Edmund Burke, but perhaps even more explained that if mankind were to execute a law which, rather than through the influence of German linguists and lawyers like F. C. von establishing

general rules governing ownership and exchange of

Savigny, that these themes were then taken up again by H. S. Maine.

property, instead àssigned the largest possession to the most extensive Savigny's statement (in his protest against the codification of the civil virtue, . . . so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from the natural law) deserves to be reproduced at length: Ìf in such contacts free agents obscurity,

and from the self-conceit of every individual, that no are to exist side by side, mutually supporting and not impeding each determinate rule of conduct would ever follow from it, and the total other in their development, this can be achieved only by recognising an dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence'. Later, in the invisible boundary within which the existence and operation of each Enquiry, he remarked: `Fanatics may suppose, that domination is founded on individual is assured a certain free space. The rules by which these grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth; but the civil magistrate very boundaries and through it the free range of each is determined is the justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with the common law' (Savigny, 1840:1, 331-2).

robbers, and teaches them by severe discipline, that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive' (1777/1886:IV, The Various Forms and Objects of Property and the Improvement Thereof 187).

The institutions of property, as they exist at present, are hardly perfect; Hume noticed clearly the connection of these doctrines to freedom, indeed, we can hardly yet say in what such perfection might consist.

and how the maximum freedom of all requires equal restraints on the Cultural and moral evolution do require further steps if the institution freedom of each through what he called the threèfundamental laws of of several property is in fact to be as beneficial as it can be. For nature': `the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of example, we need the general practice of competition to prevent abuse the performance of promises' (1739/1886:11, 288, 293). Though his of property. This in turn requires further restraint on the innate feelings views evidently derived in part from those of theorists of the common of the micro-order, the small group discussed earlier (see chapter one law, such as Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76), Hume may have been the above, and Schoeck, 1966/69), for these instinctual feelings are often 3 4

35

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE ORIGINS OF LIBERTY, PROPERTY AND JUSTICE

threatened not only by several property but sometimes even more so by other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, competition, and this leads people to long doubly for non-competitive they could freely be reproduced.

`solidarity'.

Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demon-While property is initially a product of custom, and jurisdiction and strated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances legislation have merely developed it in the course of millennia, there is the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful then no reason to suppose that the particular forms it has assumed in concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future the contemporary world are final. Traditional concepts of property can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits rights have in recent times been recognised as a modifiable and very upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive complex bundle whose most effective combinations have not yet been use for a prolonged period (Machlup, 1962).

discovered in all areas. New investigations of these matters, originating largely in the stimulating but unfortunately uncompleted work of the Organisations as Elements of Spontaneous Orders late Sir Arnold Plant, have been taken up in a few brief but most influential essays by his former student Ronald Coase (1937 and 1960) Having written of the pretence of reason and the dangers of `rational'

which have stimulated the growth of an extensivèproperty rights interference with spontaneous order, I need to add yet another word of school' (Alchian, Becker, Cheung, Demsetz, Pejovich). The results of caution. My central aim has made it necessary to stress the spontaneous these investigations, which we cannot attempt to summarise here, have evolution of rules of conduct that assist the formation of self-organising opened new possibilities for future improvements in the legal framework structures. This emphasis on the spontaneous nature of the extended or of the market order.

macro-order could mislead if it conveyed the impression that, in the Just to illustrate how great our ignorance of the optimum forms of macro-order, deliberate organisation is never important.

delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the The elements of the spontaneous macro-order are the several i ndispensability of the general institution of several property - a few economic arrangements of individuals as well as those of deliberate remarks about one particular form of property may be made.

organisations. Indeed, the evolution of individualist law consists in The slow selection by trial and error of a system of rules delimiting great measure in making possible the existence of voluntary associations individual ranges of control over different resources has created a without compulsory powers. But as the overall spontaneous order curious position. Those very intellectuals who are generally inclined to expands, so the sizes of the units of which it consists grow. Increasingly, question those forms of material property which are indispensable for its

elements

will

not be economies of individuals, but of such

the efficient organisation of the material means of production have become organisations as firms and associations, as well as of administrative the most enthusiastic supporters of certain immaterial property rights bodies. Among the rules of conduct that make it possible for extensive invented only relatively recently, having to do, for example, with literary spontaneous orders to be formed, some will also facilitate deliberate productions and technological inventions (i.e., copyrights and patents).

organisations suited to operate within the larger systems. However, The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is many of these various types of more comprehensive deliberate this: while ownership of material goods guides the use of scarce means organisation

actually

have a place only within an even more

to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as comprehensive spontaneous order, and would be inappropriate within literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce an overall order that was itself deliberately organised.

them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be Another, related, matter could also mislead. Earlier we mentioned the i ndefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to growing differentiation of various kinds of property rights in a vertical create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that or hierarchical dimension. If, elsewhere in this book, we occasionally such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human speak about the rules of several property as if the contents of individual creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of property

were uniform and constant, this should be seen as a literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to simplification that could mislead if understood without the qualifi-obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for cations already stated. This is in fact a field in which the greatest copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such advances in the governmental framework of the spontaneous order may exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and be expected, but which we cannot consider further here.

3 6

37

THREE

EVOLUTION OF THE MARKET: TRADE AND CIVILISATION

that people obtained over long distances; but the remuneration that the THE EVOLUTION OF THE MARKET:

producers of salt received for selling it sometimes does remain. Yet it TRADE AND CIVILISATION

was not the desire for luxury but necessity that made trade an indispensable institution to which ancient communities increasingly owed their very existence.

However these things may be, trade certainly came very early, and trade over great distances, and in articles whose source is unlikely to have been known to those traders engaged in it, is far older than any other contact among remote groups that can now be traced. Modern What is worth Anything

archaeology confirms that trade is older than agriculture or any other But as Much Money as it Will Bring?

sort of regular production (Leakey, 1981:212). In Europe there is Samuel Butler

evidence of trade over very great distances even in the Palaeolithic age, at least 30,000 years ago (Herskovits, 1948, 1960). Eight thousand years Ou il y a du commerce

ago, Catal Huyuk

in Anatolia and Jericho in Palestine had become

Il y a des moeurs douces.

centres of trade between the Black and the Red Seas, even before trade Montesquieu

in pottery and metals had begun. Both also provide early instances of thosèdramatic increases of population' often described as cultural revolutions. Later, à network of shipping and land routes existed by the The Expansion of Order into the Unknown

late seventh millennium B.C. for carrying obsidian from the island of Having reviewed some of the circumstances in which the extended order Melos to the mainland' of Asia Minor and Greece (see S. Green's arose, and how this order both engenders and requires several property, introduction to Childe, 1936/1981; and Renfrew, 1973:29, cf. also liberty and justice, we may now trace some further connections by Renfrew, 1972:297-307). There is èvidence for extensive trade networks looking more closely at some other matters already alluded to - in linking Baluchistan (in West Pakistan) with regions in western Asia particular, the development of trade, and the specialisation that is even before 3200 B.C.' (Childe, 1936/1981:19). We also know that the linked to it. These developments, which also contributed greatly to the economy of predynastic Egypt was firmly based on trade (Pirenne, growth of an extended order, were little understood at the time, or 1934).

indeed for centuries afterwards, even by the greatest scientists and The importance of regular trade in Homeric times is indicated by the philosophers; certainly no one ever deliberately arranged them.

story in the

Odyssey (I,

180-184) in which Athena appears to

The times, circumstances, and processes of which we write are Telemachos in the guise of the master of a ship carrying a cargo of iron cloaked in the mists of time, and details cannot be discerned with any to be exchanged for copper. The great expansion of trade which made confidence of accuracy. Some specialisation and exchange may already possible the later rapid growth of classical civilisation appears from have developed in early small communities guided entirely by the archaeological evidence also to have occurred at a time for which almost consent of their members. Some nominal trade may have taken place as no historical documentation is available, that is, during the two primitive men, following the migration of animals, encountered other hundred years from about 750 to 550 B.C. The expansion of trade also men and groups of men. While archaeological evidence for very early seems to have brought about, at roughly the same time, rapid increases trade is convincing it is not only rare but also tends to be misleading.

of population in Greek and Phoenician centres of trade. These centres The essentials that trade served to procure were mostly consumed so rivalled each other in establishing colonies that by the beginning of without leaving a trace - whereas rarities brought to tempt their owners the classical era life at the great centres of culture had become wholly to part with these necessities were often meant to be kept and therefore dependent on a regular market process.

more durable. Ornaments, weapons, and tools provide our chief positive The existence of trade in these early times is incontestable, as is its evidence, while we can only infer from the absence in the locality of role in spreading order. Yet the establishment of such a market process essential natural resources used in their manufacture that these must could hardly have been easy, and must have been accompanied by a have been acquired by trade. Nor is archaeology likely to find the salt substantial disruption of the early tribes. Even where some recognition 3 8

39

THE FATAL CONCEIT

EVOLUTION OF THE MARKET: TRADE AND CIVILISATION

of several property had emerged, further and previously unheard of The Density of Occupation of the World Made Possible by Trade practices would have been required before communities would be inclined to permit members to carry away for use by strangers (and for This `chain reaction' sparked by new settlement and trade may be purposes only partly understood even by the traders themselves, let studied more closely. While some animals are adapted to particular and alone the local populace) desirable items held within the community rather limited environmental `niches' outside of which they can hardly that might otherwise have been available for local common use. For exist, men and a few other animals such as rats have been able to adapt example, the shippers of the rising Greek cities who took pottery jugs themselves almost everywhere on the surface of the earth. This is hardly filled with oil or wine to the Black Sea, Egypt or Sicily to exchange due merely to adaptations by individuals. Only a few and relatively small them for grain, in the process took away, to people of whom their localities would have provided small bands of hunters and gatherers all neighbours knew virtually nothing, goods which those neighbours that even the most primitive tool-using groups need for a settled themselves much desired. By allowing this to happen, members of the existence, and still less all they needed to till the earth. Without support small group must have lost their very bearings and begun to reorient to from fellows elsewhere, most humans would find the places they wish to a new comprehension of the world, one in which the importance of the occupy either uninhabitable or able to be settled only very thinly.

small group itself was much reduced. As Piggott explains in Ancient Those few relatively self-sustaining niches that did exist would likely Europe, ` Prospectors and miners, traders and middlemen, the organis-be the first in any particular area to be permanently occupied and ation of shipments and caravans, concessions and treaties, the concept defended against intruders. Yet people living there would come to know of alien peoples and customs in distant lands - all these are involved in of neighbouring places that provided most but not all their needs, and the enlargement of social comprehension demanded by the techno-which would lack some substance they would require only occasionally: logical step of entering ... a bronze age' (Piggott, 1965:72). As the flint, strings for their bows, glues to fix cutting blades into handles, same author writes about the middle bronze age of the second tanning materials for hides, and such like. Confident that such needs millennium, `The network of routes by sea, river and land gives an could be met by infrequent return visits to their present homes, they i nternational character to much of the bronze-working of that time, and would stride out from their groups, and occupy some of these we find techniques and styles widely distributed from one end of Europe neighbouring places, or other new territory even further away in other to the other' (ibid., 118).

parts of the thinly populated continents on which they lived. The What practices eased these new departures and ushered in not only a i mportance of these early movements of persons and of necessary new comprehension of the world but even a kind of ìnternationalisation'

goods cannot be gauged by volume alone. Without the availability of (the word is of course anachronistic) of style, technique, and attitudes?

i mports, even if they formed only an insignificant fraction of what was They must at least have included hospitality, protection, and safe currently being consumed in any particular place, it would have been passage (see next section). The vaguely defined territories of primitive i mpossible for early settlers to maintain themselves, let alone to tribes were presumably, even at an early date, interlaced by trading multiply.

connections among individuals based on such practices. Such personal Return visits to replenish supplies would raise no difficulties so long connections would provide successive links in chains over which small as the migrants were still known to those who had remained at home.

yet indispensable amounts of `trace elements', as it were, were Within a few generations, however, descendants of these original groups transmitted over great distances. This made sedentary occupations, and would begin to seem strangers to one another; and those inhabiting the thus specialisation, possible in many new localities - and likewise original more self-sustaining localities would often begin to defend eventually increased the density of population. A chain reaction began: themselves and their supplies in various ways. To gain permission to the

greater

density

of population, leading to the discovery of

enter the original territory for the purpose of obtaining whatever special opportunities for specialisation, or division of labour, led to yet further substances could be obtained only there, visitors would, to herald their increases of population and per capita income that made possible peaceful intentions and to tempt the desires of its occupants, have had another increase in the population. And so on.

to bring presents. To be most effective, these gifts had best not satisfy everyday needs readily met locally, but would need to be enticingly new and unusual ornaments or delicacies. This is one reason why objects offered on one side of such transactions were, in fact, so often `luxuries'

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- which hardly means that the objects exchanged were not necessities to be common; but the particular knowledge and ends of those for the other side.

individuals following such practices could differ, and could be based on Initially, regular connections involving exchange of presents would privileged information. This, in turn, would have spurred individual probably have developed between families with mutual obligations of initiative.

hospitality connected in complex ways with the rituals of exogamy. The For only an individual, not his group, could gain peaceful admission transition from the practice of giving presents to such family members to an alien territory, and thereby acquire knowledge not possessed by and relations, to the appearance of more impersonal institutions of hosts his fellows. Trade could not be based on collective knowledge, only on or `brokers' who routinely sponsored such visitors and gained for them distinctive individual knowledge.

Only the growing recognition of

permission to stay long enough to obtain what they needed, and on to several property could have made such use of individual initiative the practice of exchanging particular things at rates determined by their possible. The shippers and other traders were guided by personal gain; relative scarcity, was no doubt slow. But from the recognition of a yet soon the wealth and livelihood of the growing population of their minimum still regarded as appropriate, and of a maximum at which the home towns, which they made possible through the pursuit of gain transaction seemed no longer worthwhile, specific prices for particular through trade rather than production, could be maintained only by objects

will

gradually

have emerged. Also inevitably, traditional

their continuing initiative in discovering ever new opportunities.

equivalents will steadily have adapted to changed conditions.

In any case, in early Greek history we do find the important Lest what we have just written mislead, it must be remembered that why institution

of the xenos,

the

guest-friend,

who assured individual

men should ever have adopted any particular new custom or innovation is of admission and protection within an alien territory. Indeed, trade must secondary importance. What is more important is that in order for a custom have developed very much as a matter of personal relations, even if the or innovation to be preserved, there were two distinct prerequisites. Firstly, warrior aristocracy disguised it as being no more than mutual exchange there must have existed some conditions that made possible the preservation of gifts. And it was not only those who were already wealthy who could through generations of certain practices whose benefits were not necessarily afford hospitality to members of particular families in other regions: understood or appreciated. Secondly, there must have been the acquisition such relations also would have made people rich by providing channels of distinct advantages by those groups that kept to such customs, thereby through which important needs of their community could be satisfied.

enabling them to expand more rapidly than others and ultimately to The xenos at Pylos and Sparta to whom Telemachos goes to get news of supersede (or absorb) those not possessing similar customs.

his `much travelled father Odysseus' ( Odyssey: III) was probably such a trading partner who by his wealth had risen to become king.

Trade Older than the State

Such enlarged opportunities to deal advantageously with outsiders no doubt also helped to reinforce the break that had by then already That the human race eventually was able to occupy most of the earth as occurred away from the solidarity, common aims, and collectivism of densely as it has done, enabling it to maintain large numbers even in the original small groups. In any case, some individuals did tear away, regions where hardly any necessities of life can be produced locally, is or were released, from the hold and obligations of the small community, the result of mankind's having learnt, like a single colossal body and began not only to settle other communities, but also to lay the stretching itself, to extend to the remotest corners and pluck from each foundations for a network of connections with members of still other area different ingredients needed to nourish the whole. Indeed, it will communities - a network that ultimately, in countless relays and perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable thousands of ramifications, has covered the whole earth. Such individuals were miners to earn an ample livelihood. To an observer from space, this enabled to contribute their shares, albeit unknowingly and unintention-covering of the earth's surface,

with the increasingly changing

ally, towards the building of a more complex and extensive order - an appearance that it wrought, night seem like an organic growth. But it order far beyond their own or their contemporaries' purview.

was no such thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not To create such an order, such individuals had to be able to use instinctual demands but traditional customs and rules.

information for purposes known only to themselves. They could not These individual traders and hosts rarely know (as their predecessors have done so without the benefit of certain practices, such as that of the rarely knew) all that much about the particular individual needs they xenos, shared in common with distant groups. The practices would have serve. Nor do they need such knowledge. Many of these needs will 4 2

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indeed not even arise until a time so far in the future that nobody can owed its later stagnation, but not its early progress, to the manipulatory foresee even its general outlines.

power of its governments. What led the greatly advanced civilisation of The more one learns about economic history, the more misleading China to fall behind Europe was its governments' clamping down so then seems the belief that the achievement of a highly organised state tightly as to leave no room for new developments, while, as remarked in constituted the culmination of the early development of civilisation. The the last chapter, Europe probably owes its extraordinary expansion in role played by governments is greatly exaggerated in historical accounts the Middle Ages to its political anarchy (Baechler, 1975:77).

because we necessarily know so much more about what organised government did than about what the spontaneous coordination of individual efforts accomplished. This deception, which stems from the The Philosopher's Blindness

nature of those things preserved, such as documents and monuments, is How little the wealth of the leading Greek trading centers, especially at exemplified by the story (which I hope is apocryphal) about the Athens and later at Corinth, was the result of deliberate governmental archaeologist who concluded from the fact that the earliest reports of policy, and how little the true source of this prosperity was understood, particular prices were inscribed on a stone pillar that prices had always is perhaps best illustrated by Aristotle's utter incomprehension of the been set by governments. Yet this is hardly worse than finding, in a advanced market order in which he lived. Although he is sometimes well-known work, the argument that, since no suitable open spaces were cited as the first economist, what he discussed as oikonomia was found in the excavation of Babylonian cities, no regular markets could exclusively the running of a household or at most of an individual as yet have existed there - as if in a hot climate such markets would enterprise such as a farm. For the acquisitive efforts of the market, the have been held in the open!

study of which he called chrematistika, he had only scorn. Although the Governments have more often hindered than initiated the develop-lives of the Athenians of his day depended on grain trade with distant ment of long-distance trade. Those that gave greater independence and countries, his ideal order remained one that was autarkos, self-sufficient.

security to individuals engaged in trading benefited from the increased Although also acclaimed as a biologist, Aristotle lacked any perception i nformation and larger population that resulted. Yet, when governments of two crucial aspects of the formation of any complex structure, became aware how dependent their people had become on the namely, evolution and the self-formation of order. As Ernst Mayr i mportation of certain essential foodstuffs and materials, they them-

(1982:306) puts it: `The idea that the universe could have developed selves often endeavoured to secure these supplies in one way or another.

from an original chaos, or that higher organisms could have evolved Some early governments, for instance, after first learning from from lower ones, was totally alien to Aristotle's thought. To repeat, individual trade of the very existence of desirable resources, tried to Aristotle was opposed to evolution of any kind.' He seems not to have obtain these resources by organising military or colonising expeditions.

noticed the sense of `nature' (or physis) as describing the process of The Athenians were not the first and certainly not the last to attempt to growth (see Appendix A), and also seems to have been unfamiliar with do so. But it is absurd to conclude from this, as some modern writers several distinctions among self-forming orders that had been known to have done (Polanyi, 1945, 1977), that, at the time of Athens's greatest the pre-Socratic philosophers, such as that between a spontaneously prosperity and growth, its trade was àdministered', regulated by grown kosmos and a deliberately arranged order as that of an army, government through treaties and conducted at fixed prices.

which earlier thinkers had called a taxis ( Hayek, 1973:37). For Aristotle, Rather, it

would seem as if, over and over again, powerful

all

order of human activities was

taxis,

the result of deliberate

governments so badly damaged spontaneous improvement that the organisation of individual action by an ordering mind. As we saw process of cultural evolution was brought to an early demise. The earlier (chapter one), he expressly stated that order could be achieved Byzantine government of the East Roman Empire may be one instance only in a place small enough for everyone to hear the herald's cry, a of this (Rostovtzeff, 1930, and Einaudi, 1948). And the history of China place which could be easily surveyed (eusynoptos, Politeia: 1326b and provides many instances of government attempts to enforce so perfect 1327a). Àn excessively large number', he declared (1326a), `cannot an order that innovation became impossible (Needham, 1954). This participate in order'.

country, technologically and scientifically developed so far ahead of To Aristotle, only the known needs of an existing population provided Europe that, to give only one illustration, it had ten oil wells operating a natural or legitimate justification for economic effort. Mankind, and on one stretch of the river Po already in the twelfth century, certainly even nature, he treated as if they had always existed in their present 4 4

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

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form. This static view left no room for a conception of evolution, and The repercussions of Aristotle's systematisation of the morals of the prevented him from even asking how existing institutions had arisen.

micro-order were amplified with the adoption of Aristotelian teaching in That most existing communities, and certainly the greater number of the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas, which later led to the his fellow Athenians, could not have come into existence had their proclamation of Aristotelian ethics as virtually the official teaching of forefathers remained content to satisfy their known present needs, the Roman Catholic Church. The anti-commercial attitude of the appears never to have occurred to him. The experimental process of mediaeval and early modern Church, condemnation of interest as adaptation to unforeseen change by the observation of abstract rules usury, its teaching of the just price, and its contemptuous treatment of which, when successful, could lead to an increase of numbers and the gain is Aristotelian through and through.

formation of regular patterns, was alien to him. Thus Aristotle also set By the eighteenth century, of course, Aristotle's influence in such the pattern for a common approach to ethical theory, one under which matters (as in others) was weakening. David Hume saw that the market clues to the usefulness of rules that are offered by history go made it possiblèto do a service to another without bearing him a real unrecognised, one under which no thought of analysing usefulness from kindness' (1739/1886:11, 289) or even knowing him; or to act to the an economic standpoint ever occurs - since the theorist is oblivious to àdvantage of the public, though it be not intended for that purpose by the problems whose solutions might be embodied in such rules.

another' (1739/1886:11, 296), by an order in which it was in the Since only actions aiming at perceived benefit to others were, to Aristotle's ìnterest, even of bad men to act for the public good'. With such mind, morally approved, actions solely for personal gain must be bad.

insights, the conception of a self-organising structure began to dawn That commercial considerations may not have affected the daily upon mankind, and has since become the basis of our understanding of activities of most people does not mean however that over any all those complex orders which had, until then, appeared as miracles prolonged period their very lives did not depend on the functioning of a that could be brought about only by some super-human version of what trade that enabled them to buy essentials. That production for gain man knew as his own mind. Now it gradually became understood how which Aristotle denounced as unnatural had - long before his time -

the market enabled each, within set limits, to use his own individual already become the foundation of an extended order far transcending knowledge for his own individual purposes while being ignorant of most the known needs of other persons.

of the order into which he had to fit his actions.

As we now know, in the evolution of the structure of human activities, Notwithstanding, and indeed wholly neglecting, the existence of this profitability works as a signal that guides selection towards what makes great advance, a view that is still permeated by Aristotelian thought, a man more fruitful; only what is more profitable will, as a rule, nourish naive and childlike animistic view of the world (Piaget, 1929:359), has more people, for it sacrifices less than it adds. So much was at least come to dominate social theory and is the foundation of socialist sensed by some Greeks prior to Aristotle. Indeed, in the fifth century -

thought.

that is, before Aristotle - the first truly great historian began his history of the Peloponnesian War by reflecting how early peoplèwithout commerce, without freedom of communication either by land or sea, cultivating no more of their territory than the exigencies of life required, could never rise above nomadic life' and consequently `neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness' (Thucydides, Crawly translation, 1,1,2). But Aristotle ignored this insight.

Had the Athenians followed Aristotle's counsel - counsel blind both to economics and to evolution - their city would rapidly have shrunk into a village, for his view of human ordering led him to an ethics appropriate only to, if anywhere at all, a stationary state. Nonetheless his doctrines came to dominate philosophical and religious thinking for the next two thousand years - despite the fact that much of that same philosophical and religious thinking took place within a highly dynamic, rapidly extending, order.

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THE REVOLT OF INSTINCT AND REASON

a new world, a new morality, a new law, even a new and purified THE REVOLT OF INSTINCT AND REASON

language, from itself alone. Although the theory is plainly false (see also Popper, 1934/1959, and 1945/66), it still dominates the thinking of most scientists, and also of most literati, artists, and intellectuals.

I should perhaps immediately qualify what I have just written by adding that there are other strands within what might be called rationalism which treat these matters differently, as for example that which views rules of moral conduct as themselves part of reason. Thus John Locke had explained that 'by reason, however, I do not think is It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the meant here the faculty of understanding which forms trains of thoughts scientific method enlarges the powers of the human mind. Nothing is and deduces proofs, but definite principles of action from which spring more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man all virtues and whatever is necessary for the moulding of morals'

distinguished in one or even more departments of science, is more likely (1954:11). Yet views such as Locke's remain much in the minority to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.

among those who call themselves rationalists.

Wilfred Trotter

The second, related development which challenged the extended order arose from the work and influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

This peculiar thinker - although often described as irrationalist or The Challenge to Property

romantic - also latched on to and deeply depended on Cartesian Although Aristotle was blind to the importance of trade, and lacked any thought. Rousseau's heady brew of ideas came to dominatèprogressive'

comprehension of evolution; and though Aristotelian thought, once thought, and led people to forget that freedom as a political institution embedded in the system of Thomas Aquinas, supported the anti-had arisen not by human beings `striving for freedom' in the sense of commercial attitudes of the mediaeval and early modern Church, it was release from restraints, but by their striving for the protection of a nonetheless only rather later, and chiefly among seventeenth- and known secure individual domain. Rousseau led people to forget that eighteenth-century French thinkers, that several important develop-rules of conduct necessarily constrain and that order is their product; ments occurred which, taken together, began effectively to challenge the and that these rules, precisely by limiting the range of means that each central values and institutions of the extended order.

individual may use for his purposes, greatly extend the range of ends The first of these developments was the growing importance, each can successfully pursue.

associated with the rise of modern science, of that particular form of It was Rousseau who - declaring in the opening statement of The rationalism that I call 'constructivism' or `scientism' (after the French), Social Contract that `man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', which for the following several centuries virtually captured serious and wanting to free men from all àrtificial' restraints - made what had thought about reason and its role in human affairs. This particular form been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, of rationalism has been the point of departure of investigations that I urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their have conducted over the past sixty years, investigations in which I tried productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that to show that it is particularly ill-considered, embedding a false theory of became the greatest obstacle to its attainment. After asserting that science and of rationality in which reason is abused, and which, most animal instinct was a better guide to orderly cooperation among men i mportant here, leads invariably to an erroneous interpretation of the than either tradition or reason, Rousseau invented the fictitious will of nature and coming into being of human institutions. That interpretation the people, or `general will', through which the peoplèbecomes one is one by which, in the name of reason and the highest values of single being, one individual' (Social Contract, I, vii; and see Popper, civilisation, moralists end up flattering the relatively unsuccessful and 1945/1966:11, 54). This is perhaps the chief source of the fatal conceit inciting people to satisfy their primitive desires.

of modern intellectual rationalism that promises to lead us back to a Descending in the modern period from Rene Descartes, this form of paradise wherein our natural instincts rather than learnt restraints upon rationalism not only discards tradition, but claims that pure reason can them will enable us `to subdue the world', as we are instructed in the directly serve our desires without any such intermediary, and can build book of Genesis.

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The admittedly great seductive appeal of this view hardly owes its displays its inability to comprehend economic phenomena most crudely power (whatever it may claim) to reason and evidence. As we have in sociology (and even worse in the so-called `sociology of knowledge').

seen, the savage was far from free; nor could he have subdued the Sociology itself might almost be called a socialist science, having been world. He could indeed do little unless the whole group to which he openly presented as capable of creating a new order of socialism (Ferri, belonged agreed. Individual decision presupposed individual spheres of 1895), or more recently ablèto predict the future development and to control, and thus became possible only with the evolution of several shape the future, or ... create the future of mankind' (Segerstedt, property, whose development, in turn, laid the foundation for the 1969:441). Like the 'naturology' that once pretended to replace all growth of an extended order transcending the perception of the specialised investigations of nature, sociology proceeds in sovereign headman or chief - or of the collectivity.

disregard of knowledge gained by established disciplines that have long Despite these contradictions, there is no doubt that Rousseau's outcry studied such grown structures as law, language, and the market.

was effective or that, during the past two centuries, it has shaken our I have just written that the study of traditional institutions such as civilisation. Moreover, irrationalist as it is, it nonetheless did appeal property `fell under a ban'. This is hardly an exaggeration, for it is precisely to progressivists by its Cartesian insinuation that we might use highly curious that so interesting and important a process as the reason to obtain and justify direct gratification of our natural instincts.

evolutionary selection of moral traditions has been so little studied, and After Rousseau gave intellectual license to throw off cultural restraints, the direction these traditions gave to the development of civilisation so to confer legitimacy on attempts to gain `freedom' from the restraints largely ignored.

Of course this will not seem so peculiar to a

that had made freedom possible, and to

call

this attack on the

constructivist. If one suffers under the delusion of `social engineering', foundation of freedom `liberation', property became increasingly suspect the notion that man can consciously choose where he wants to go, it will and was no longer so widely recognised as the key factor that had not seem so important to discover how he reached his present situation.

brought about the extended order. It was increasingly supposed, rather, that rules regulating the delimitation and transfer of several property might be replaced by central decision about its use.

It may be mentioned in passing, although I cannot explore the matter here, Indeed, by the nineteenth century, serious intellectual appreciation that challenges to property and traditional values came not only from and discussion of the role of property in the development of civilisation followers of Rousseau: they also stemmed, although perhaps less would seem to have fallen under a kind of ban in many quarters.

i mportantly, from religion. For the revolutionary movements of this period During this time property gradually became suspect among many of (rationalistic socialism and then communism) helped to revive old heretical those who might have been expected to investigate it, a topic to be traditions of religious revolt against basic institutions of property and family avoided by progressive believers in a rational reshaping of the structure

- revolts directed in earlier centuries by heretics such as the Gnostics, the of human cooperation. (That this ban has persisted into the twentieth Manichaeans, the Bogomils, and the Cathars. By the nineteenth century, century is evinced by, for example, Brian Barry's declarations (1961:80) these particular heretics were gone, but thousands of new religious about usage and ànalyticity', wherein justice ìs now analytically tied to revolutionaries appeared who directed much of their zeal against both

"desert" and "need", so that one could say quite properly that some of property and the family, also appealing to primitive instincts against such what Hume called "rules of justice" were unjust', and Gunnar Myrdal's restraints. Rebellion against private property and the family was, in short, later mocking remark about thètaboos of property and contract'

not restricted to socialists. Mystic and supernatural beliefs were invoked not (1969:17).) The founders of anthropology, for instance, increasingly only to justify customary restraints upon instincts, as for example in the neglected the cultural role of property, so that in E. B. Tylor's two dominant streams of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, but also, in volumes on Primitive Culture (1871), for instance, neither property nor more peripheral movements, to support the release of instincts.

ownership appear in the index, while E. Westermarck - who did devote Limits of space as well as insufficient competence forbid me to deal in this a long chapter to property - already treats it, under the influence of book with the second of the traditional objects of atavistic reaction that I Saint-Simon and

Marx, as the objectionable source of ùnearned

have just mentioned: the family. I ought however at least to mention that I income', and concludes from this that thèlaw of property will sooner or believe that new factual knowledge has in some measure deprived traditional later undergo a radical change' (1908:11, 71). The socialist bias of rules of sexual morality of some of their foundation, and that it seems likely constructivism has also influenced contemporary archaeology, but it that in this area substantial changes are bound to occur.

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Having mentioned Rousseau and his pervasive influence, as well as indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more these other historical developments, if only to remind readers that the intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not revolt against property and traditional morality on the part of serious only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of thinkers is not just comparatively recent, I shall turn now to some whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views twentieth-century intellectual heirs of Rousseau and Descartes.

any label, including `socialist'). The higher we climb up the ladder of First, however, I should emphasise that I am largely neglecting here intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are the long history of this revolt, as well as the different turns it has taken to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and in different lands. Long before Auguste Comte introduced the term intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialists.

` positivism' for the view that represented àdemonstrated ethics'

(demonstrated by reason, that is) as the only possible alternative to a If I may insert two personal remarks here, I suppose that I can claim to supernaturally `revealed ethics' (1854:1, 356), Jeremy Bentham had speak with some experience about this outlook because these rationalist developed the most consistent foundations of what we now call legal views that I have been systematically examining and criticising now for so and moral positivism: that is, the constructivistic interpretation of many years are those on which I, in common with most non-religious systems of law and morals according to which their validity and European thinkers of my generation, formed my own outlook in the early meaning are supposed to depend wholly on the will and intention of part of this century. At that time they appeared self-evident, and following their designers. Bentham is himself a late figure in this development.

them seemed the way to escape pernicious superstitions of all sorts. Having This constructivism includes not only the Benthamite tradition, myself spent some time in struggling free from these notions - indeed, represented and continued by John Stuart Mill and the later English discovering in the process that they themselves are superstitions - I can Liberal Party, but also practically all contemporary Americans who call hardly intend personally some of my rather harsh remarks about particular themselves `liberals' (as opposed to some other very different thinkers, authors in the pages that follow.

more often found in Europe, who are also called liberals, who are better Moreover, it is perhaps appropriate to remind readers in this place of my called òld Whigs', and whose outstanding thinkers were Alexis de essay Òn Why I Am Not a Conservative' (1960: Postscript), lest they draw Tocqueville and Lord Acton). This constructivist way of thinking inaccurate conclusions. Although my argument is directed against socialism, becomes virtually inevitable if, as an acute contemporary Swiss analyst I am as little a Tory-Conservative as was Edmund Burke. My conservatism, suggests, one accepts the prevailing liberal (read `socialist') philosophy such as it is, is entirely confined to morals within certain limits. I am entirely that assumes that man, so far as the distinction between good and bad in favour of experimentation - indeed for very much more freedom than has any significance for him at all, must, and can, himself deliberately conservative governments tend to allow. What I object to among rationalist draw the line between them (Kirsch, 1981:17).

intellectuals such as those I shall be discussing is not that they experiment; rather, they experiment all too little, and what they fancy to be experimentation turns out mostly to be banal - after all, the idea of Our Intellectuals and Their Tradition of Reasonable Socialism returning to instinct is really as common as rain and has by now been tried What I have suggested about morals and tradition, about economics out so often that it is no longer clear in what sense it can any longer be and the market, and about evolution, obviously conflicts with many called experimental. I object to such rationalists because they declare their influential ideas, not only with the old Social Darwinism discussed in experiments, such as they are, to be the results of reason, dress them up in the first chapter, which is no longer widely held, but also with many pseudo-scientific methodology, and thus, whilst wooing influential recruits other viewpoints past and present: with the views of Plato and Aristotle, and subjecting invaluable traditional practices (the result of ages of of Rousseau and the founders of socialism, with those of Saint-Simon, evolutionary trial-and-error experiment) to unfounded attack, shelter their Karl Marx, and many others,

own èxperiments' from scrutiny.

Indeed, the basic point of my argument - that morals, including, especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be creation of man's reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on socialists diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people him by cultural evolution - runs counter to the main intellectual will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has the

advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to 5 2

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deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise Morals and Reason: Some Examples

to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligent reflection, and still Lest I be thought to exaggerate, I shall provide, in a moment, a few more appropriate design and `rational coordination' of our undertakings.

examples. But I do not want to be unfair to our great scientists and This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic philosophers, some of whose ideas I shall discuss. Although they, in planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism. Of course their own opinions, illustrate the significance of the problem - that our intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected philosophy and natural science are far from understanding the role to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen played by our chief traditions - they themselves are not usually directly to govern the communities into which they happen to have been born; responsible for the wide dissemination of these ideas, for they have and this will lead them into conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, better things to do. On the other hand, it should also not be supposed those who quietly accept prevailing rules of conduct. Moreover, they that the remarks I am about to cite are merely momentary or also understandably will want to align themselves with science and idiosyncratic aberrations on the part of their distinguished authors: reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical rather, they are consistent conclusions drawn from a well-established sciences during the past several centuries, and since they have been rationalist tradition. And indeed I do not doubt that some of these great taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use thinkers have striven to comprehend the extended order of human of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist cooperation - if only to end as determined, and often unwitting, any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, opponents of this order.

or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition Those who have really done most to spread these ideas, the real of reason. Thus a distinguished historian has written in this vein: bearers of constructivist rationalism and socialism, are, however, not

` Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be these distinguished scientists. They rather tend to be the so-called mocked and deplored' (Seton-Watson, 1983:1270).

ìntellectuals' that I have elsewhere (1949/1967:178-94) unkindly called professional `second-hand dealers in ideas': teachers, journalists and By definition: Barry (1961, mentioned above) wanted to make morality and

` media representatives' who, having absorbed rumours in the corridors justice immoral and unjust by ànalytic definition'; here Seton-Watson of science, appoint themselves as representatives of modern thought, as would try the same manoeuvre with tradition, making it by definition persons superior in knowledge and moral virtue to any who retain a reprehensible. We shall return to these words, to this 'Newspeak', in chapter high regard for traditional values, as persons whose very duty it is to seven. Meanwhile let us look more closely at the facts.

offer new ideas to the public - and who must, in order to make their wares seem novel, deride whatever is conventional. For such people, These reactions are all understandable, but they have consequences.

due to the positions in which they find themselves, `newness', or `news', The consequences are particularly dangerous - to reason as well as to and not truth, becomes the main value, although that is hardly their morality - when preference not so much for the real products of reason intention - and although what they offer is often no more new than it is as for this conventional tradition of reason leads intellectuals to ignore true. Moreover, one might wonder whether these intellectuals are not the theoretical limits of reason, to disregard a world of historical and sometimes inspired by resentment that they, knowing better what ought scientific information, to remain ignorant of the biological sciences and to be done, are paid so much less than those whose instructions and the sciences of man such as economics, and to misrepresent the origin activities in fact guide practical affairs. Such literary interpreters of and functions of our traditional moral rules.

scientific and technological advance, of which H. G. Wells, because of Like other traditions, the tradition of reason is learnt, not innate. It the unusually high quality of his work, would be an excellent example, too lies between instinct and reason; and the question of the real reasonableness have done far more to spread the socialist ideal of a centrally directed and truth of this tradition of proclaimed reason and truth must now also economy in which each is assigned his due share than have the real scrupulously be examined.

scientists from whom they have cadged many of their notions. Another such example is that of the early George Orwell, who once argued that ànyone who uses his brain knows perfectly well that it is within the range of possibility [that] the world, potentially at least, is extremely 5 4

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rich' such that we could `develop it as it might be developed, and we may owe to these religions the preservation - admittedly for false could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to'.

reasons - of practices that were more important in enabling man to I shall concentrate here not on the work of men like Wells and survive in large numbers than most of what has been accomplished Orwell, but on views propounded by some of the greatest scientists. We through reason (see chapter nine below).

might begin with Jacques Monod. Monod was a great figure whose Monod is not the only biologist to argue along such lines. A scientific work I much admire, and was, essentially, the creator of statement by another great biologist and very learned scholar illustrates modern molecular biology. His reflections on ethics, however, were of a better than almost any other I have come across the absurdities to different quality. In 1970, in a Nobel Foundation symposium concern-which supreme intelligence can be led by a misinterpretation of the ing `The Place of Values in a World of Facts', he stated: `Scientific

`laws of evolution' (see chapter one above). Joseph Needham writes that development has finally destroyed, reduced to absurdity, relegated tòthe new world order of social justice and comradeship, the rational and the state of nonsensical wishful thinking, the idea that ethics and values classless state, is no wild idealistic dream, but a logical extrapolation are not a matter of our free choice but are rather a matter of obligation from the whole course of evolution, having no less authority than that for us' (1970:20-21). Later that year, to re-emphasise his views, he behind it, and therefore of all faiths the most rational' (J. Needham, argued the same case in a book now famous, Chance and Necessity 1943:41).

(1970/1977). There he enjoins us, ascetically renouncing all other I shall return to Monod, but want first to assemble a few further spiritual nourishment, to acknowledge science as the new and virtually examples. A particularly appropriate instance that I have discussed exclusive source of truth, and to revise the foundations of ethics elsewhere (1978), is John

Maynard

Keynes,

one of the most

accordingly. The book ends like so many similar pronouncements with representative intellectual leaders of a generation emancipated from the idea that èthics, in essence nonobjective, is forever barred from the traditional

morals.

Keynes believed that, by taking account of

sphere of knowledge' (1970/77:162). The new èthic of knowledge does foreseeable effects, he could build a better world than by submitting not impose itself on man; on the contrary, it is he who imposes it upon himself to traditional abstract rules. Keynes used the phrasèconventional (1970/77:164). This new èthic of knowledge' is, Monod says, `the only wisdom' as a favourite expression of scorn, and, in a revealing attitude which is both rational and resolutely idealistic, and on which a autobiographical account (1938/49/72:

X, 446), he told how the

real socialism might be built' (1970/77:165-66).

Monod's ideas are

Cambridge circle of his younger years, most of whose members later characteristic in that they are deeply rooted in a theory of knowledge belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, èntirely repudiated a personal that has attempted to develop a science of behaviour - whether called liability on us to obey general rules', and how they were ìn the strict eudaimonism, utilitarianism, socialism, or whatever - on the grounds sense of the term, immoralists'. He modestly added that, at the age of that certain sorts of behaviour better satisfy our wishes. We are advised to fifty-five, he was too old to change and would remain an immoralist.

behave in such a way as will permit given situations to satisfy our This extraordinary man also characteristically justified some of his desires, and make us happier, and such like. In other words, what is economic views, and his general belief in a management of the market wanted is an ethics that men can deliberately follow to reach known, order, on the ground that ìn the long run we are all dead' (i.e., it does desired, and pre-selected aims.

not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment Monod's conclusions stem from his opinion that the only other alone, the short run - consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and possible way to account for the origin of morals - apart from ascribing all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery - which counts). The slogan them to human invention - is by animistic or anthropomorphic that ìn the long run we are all dead' is also a characteristic accounts such as are given in many religions. And it is indeed true that manifestation

of an unwillingness to recognise that morals arè for mankind as a whole all religions have been intertwined with the concerned with effects in the long run - effects beyond our possible perception anthropomorphic view of the deity as a father, friend or potentate to

- and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view.

whom men must do service, pray, etc.' (M. R. Cohen, 1931:112). This aspect of religion I can as little accept as can Monod and the majority Keynes also argued against the moral tradition of thèvirtue of saving', of natural scientists. It seems to me to lower something far beyond our refusing, along with thousands of crank economists, to admit that a comprehension to the level of a slightly superior manlike mind. But to reduction of the demand for consumers' goods is generally required to make reject this aspect of religion does not preclude our recognising that we an increase of the production of capital goods (i.e., investment) possible.

5 6

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

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And this in turn led him to devote his formidable intellectual powers to Einstein was concerned with a different yet closely related theme. Using develop his `general' theory of economics - to which we owe the unique a popular socialist slogan, he wrote that `production for use' ought to world-wide inflation of the third quarter of our century and the inevitable replace thèproduction for profit' of the capitalist order (1956:129).

consequence of severe unemployment that has followed it (Hayek, 1972/1978).

` Production for use' means here the kind of work which, in the small group, Thus it was not philosophy alone that confused Keynes. It was also is guided by anticipating for whose use the product is intended. But this economics. Alfred Marshall, who understood the matter, seems to have sentiment fails to take into account the sorts of considerations advanced in failed to impress adequately upon Keynes one of the important insights that the foregoing chapters, and to be argued again in the following: only the John Stuart Mill had gained in his youth: namely, that `the demand for differences between expected prices for different commodities and services commodities is not a demand for labour'. Sir Leslie Stephen (the father of and their costs, in the self-generating order of the market, tell the individual Virginia Woolf, another member of the Bloomsbury group) described this how best to contribute to the pool from which we all draw in proportion to doctrine in 1876 as àdoctrine so rarely understood, that its complete our contribution. Einstein appears to have been unaware that only appreciation is, perhaps, the best test of an economist' - and was ridiculed calculation and distribution in terms of market prices make it possible to for saying so by Keynes. (See Hayek, 1970/78:15-16, 1973:25, and (on Mill utilise our discoverable resources intensively, to guide production to serve and Stephen) 1941:4331f.)

ends lying beyond the range of the producer's perception, and to enable the individual to participate usefully in productive exchange (first, by serving Although Keynes was, in spite of himself, to contribute greatly to the people, mostly unknown to him, to the gratification of whose needs he can weakening of freedom, he shocked his Bloomsbury friends by not nonetheless effectively contribute; and second, by himself being supplied as sharing their general socialism; yet most of his students were socialists well as he is only because people who know nothing about his existence are of one sort or other. Neither he nor these students recognised how the induced, also by market signals, to provide for his needs: see the previous extended order must be based on long-run considerations.

chapter). In following such sentiments Einstein shows his lack of The philosophic illusion that lay behind the views of Keynes, that comprehension of, or real interest in, the actual processes by which human there exists an indefinable attribute of `goodness' - one to be discovered efforts are coordinated.

by every individual, which imposes on each a duty to pursue it, and whose recognition justifies contempt for and disregard of much of Einstein's biographer reports that Einstein regarded it as obvious that traditional morals (a view which through the work of G. E. Moorè human reason must be capable of finding a method of distribution (1903) dominated the Bloomsbury group) - produced a characteristic which would work as effectively as that of production' (Clark, 1971:559) enmity to the sources on which he fed. This was evident for instance

- a description that reminds one of the philosopher Bertrand Russell's also in E. M. Forster, who seriously argued that freeing mankind from claim that a society could not be regarded as `fully scientific' unless ìt the evils of `commercialism' had become as urgent as had been freeing it has been created deliberately with a certain structure to fulfil certain from slavery.

purposes' (1931:203). Such demands, particularly in Einstein's mouth, Sentiments similar to those of Monod and Keynes come from a less seemed so superficially plausible that even a sensible philosopher, distinguished yet still influential scientist: the psychoanalyst who twitting Einstein for talking beyond his competence in some of his became the first Secretary General of the World Health Organisation, popular writings, stated approvingly that Èinstein is clearly aware that G. B. Chisholm. Chisholm advocated no less than `the eradication of the the present economic crisis is due to our system of production for profit concept of right and wrong' and maintained that it was the task of the rather than for use, to the fact that our tremendous increase of psychiatrist to free the human race from `the crippling burden of good productive power is not actually followed by a corresponding increase in and evil' - advice which at the time received praise from high American the purchasing power of the great masses' (M. R. Cohen, 1931:119).

legal

authority.

Here again,

morality is seen - since it is not

We also find Einstein repeating (in the essay cited) familiar phrases

`scientifically' grounded - as irrational, and its status as embodiment of of socialist agitation about the èconomic anarchy of capitalist society'

accumulated cultural knowledge goes unrecognised.

in which `the payment of the workers is not determined by the value of Let us turn, however, to a scientist even greater than Monod or the product', while à planned economy ... would distribute the work Keynes, to Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest genius of our age.

to be done among all those able to work', and such like.

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A similar but more guarded view appears in an essay by Einstein's gathered from the very useful Fontana/Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought collaborator Max Born (1968: chap.5). While Born evidently realised (1977) a few short definitions of four basic philosophical concepts that that our extended order no longer gratified primitive instincts, he too generally guide contemporary thinkers educated along scientistic and failed to examine closely the structures that create and maintain this constructivistic lines: rationalism, empiricism, positivism, and utilitar-order, or to see that our instinctual morals have over the past five ianism - concepts which have, during the past several hundred years, thousand years or more gradually been replaced or restrained. Thus, come to be regarded as representative expressions of the scientific `spirit although perceiving that `science and technology have destroyed the of the age'. According to these definitions, which are written by Lord ethical basis of civilisation, perhaps irreparably', he imagines that they Quinton, a British philosopher who is President of Trinity College, have done so by the facts they have uncovered rather than by their Oxford,

rationalism

denies the acceptability of beliefs founded on

having systematically discredited beliefs that fail to satisfy certain anything but experience and reasoning, deductive or inductive.

` standards of acceptability' demanded by constructivist rationalism (see Empiricism maintains that all statements claiming to express knowledge below). While admitting that `no one has yet devised a means of are limited to those depending for their justification on experience.

keeping society together without traditional ethical principles', Born yet Positivism is defined as the view that all true knowledge is scientific, in hopes that these can be replaced `by means of the traditional method the sense of describing the coexistence and succession of observable used in science'. He too fails to see that what lies between instinct and phenomena. And utilitarianism `takes the pleasure and pain of everyone reason cannot be replaced by `the traditional method used in science'.

affected by it to be the criterion of the action's rightness'.

In such definitions one finds quite explicitly, just as one finds My examples are taken from statements of important twentieth-century i mplicitly in the examples cited in the preceding section, the figures; I have not included countless other such figures, such as R. A.

declarations of faith of modern science and philosophy of science, and Millikan, Arthur Eddington, F. Soddy, W. Ostwald, E. Solvay, J. D.

their declarations of war against moral traditions. These declarations, Bernal, all of whom talked much nonsense on economic matters.

definitions, postulates, have created the impression that only that which Indeed, one could cite hundreds of similar statements by scientists and is rationally justifiable, only that which is provable by observational philosophers of comparable renown - both from centuries past and from experiment, only that which can be experienced, only that which can be the present time. But we can, I believe, learn more by taking a closer surveyed, deserves belief; that only that which is pleasurable should be l ook at these particular contemporary examples - and at what lies acted upon, and that all else must be repudiated. This in turn leads behind them - than simply by piling up citations and examples.

directly to the contention that the leading moral traditions that have Perhaps the first thing to notice is that, although far from identical, created and are creating our culture - which certainly cannot be these examples have a certain family resemblance.

justified in such ways, and which are often disliked - are unworthy of adherence, and that our task must be to construct a new morality on the basis of scientific knowledge - usually the new morality of socialism.

A Litany of Errors

These definitions, together with our earlier examples, when examined The ideas raised in these examples have in common a number of closely more closely, prove indeed to contain the following presuppositions: interconnected thematic roots, roots that are not just matters of 1) The idea that it is unreasonable to follow what one cannot justify common historical antecedents. Readers unfamiliar with some of the scientifically or prove observationally (Monod, Born).

background literature may not immediately see some of the intercon-2) The idea that it is unreasonable to follow what one does not nections. Hence I should like, before further probing these ideas understand. This notion is implicit in all our examples, but I must themselves, to identify a number of recurring themes - most of which confess that I too once held it, and have also been able to find it in a may appear at first glance' to be unobjectionable and all of which are philosopher with whom I generally agree. Thus Sir Karl Popper once familiar - which, taken together, form a sort of argument. This claimed (1948/63:122; emphasis added) that rationalist thinkers `will àrgument' could also be described as a litany of errors, or as a recipe not submit blindly to any tradition', which is of course just as impossible for producing the presumptive rationalism that I call scientism and as obeying no tradition. This must, however, have been a slip of the constructivism. To start on our way, let us consult that ready `source of pen, for elsewhere he has rightly observed that `we never know what we knowledge', the dictionary, a book containing many recipes. I have are talking about' (1974/1976:27, on which see also Bartley, 1985/1987).

6 0

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

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(Though the free man will insist on his right to examine and, when which

we opened this book - that moral tradition does seem appropriate, to reject any tradition, he could not live among other burdensome to many - but can only be answered by observing again, people if he refused to accept countless traditions without even thinking here and in subsequent chapters, what we derive from bearing this about them, and of whose effects he remains ignorant.) burden, and what the alternative would be. Virtually all the benefits of 3) The related idea that it is unreasonable to follow a particular civilisation, and indeed our very existence, rest, I believe, on our course unless its purpose is fully specified in advance (Einstein, Russell, continuing willingness to shoulder the burden of tradition. These Keynes).

benefits in no way 'justify' the burden. But the alternative is poverty 4) The idea, also closely related, that it is unreasonable to do and famine.

anything unless its effects are not only fully known in advance but also Without attempting to recount or review all these benefits, tòcount fully observable and seen to be beneficial (the utilitarians). (Assump-our blessings', as it were, I may mention again, in a somewhat different tions 2, 3, and 4, are, despite their different emphases, nearly identical; context, perhaps the most ironic benefit of all - for I have in mind our but I have distinguished them here to call attention to the fact that the very freedom. Freedom requires that the individual be allowed to arguments for them turn, depending on who is defending them, either pursue his own ends: one who is free is in peacetime no longer bound by on lack of understandability generally, or, more particularly, on lack of the

common concrete ends of his community. Such freedom of specified purpose or lack of complete and observable knowledge of individual decision is made possible by delimiting distinct individual effects.)

rights (the rights of property, for example) and designating domains within which each can dispose over means known to him for his own One could name further requirements, but these four - which we shall ends. That is, a recognisable free sphere is determined for each person.

examine in the following two chapters - will suffice for our (largely This is all-important. For to have something of one's own, however illustrative)

purposes.

Two things might be noticed about these

little, is also the foundation on which a distinctive personality can be requirements from the very start. First, not one of them shows any formed and a distinctive environment created within which particular awareness that there might be limits to our knowledge or reason in individual aims can be pursued.

certain areas, or considers that, in such circumstances, the most But confusion has been created by the common supposition that it is i mportant task of science might be to discover what these limits are. We possible to have this kind of freedom without restraints. This shall learn below that there are such limits and that they can indeed supposition appears in the apercu

ascribed to Voltaire that 'quand je

partially be overcome, as for example through the science of economics peux faire ce que je veux, voila la liberte', in Bentham's declaration that or 'catallactics', but that they cannot be overcome if one holds to the above four èvery law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty'

requirements.

Second,

one

finds in the approach underlying the

(1789/1887:48), in Bertrand

Russell's definition of liberty as the

requirements not only lack of understanding, not only the failure to àbsence of obstacles to the realisation of our desires' (1940:251), and in consider or deal with such problems, but also a curious lack of curiosity countless other sources. General freedom in this sense is nevertheless about how our extended order actually came into being, how it is i mpossible, for the freedom of each would founder on the unlimited maintained, and what the consequences might be of destroying those freedom, i.e., the lack of restraint, of all others.

traditions that created and maintain it.

The question then is how to secure the greatest possible freedom for all. This can be secured by uniformly restricting the freedom of all by abstract rules that preclude arbitrary or discriminatory coercion by or Positive and Negative Liberty

of other people, that prevent any from invading the free sphere of any Some rationalists would want to advance an additional complaint that other (see Hayek 1960 and 1973, and chapter two above). In short, we have hardly considered: namely, that the morality and institutions of common concrete ends are replaced by common abstract rules.

capitalism not only fail to meet the logical, methodological, and Government is needed only to enforce these abstract rules, and thereby epistemological requirements reviewed already, but also impose a to protect the individual against coercion, or invasion of his free sphere, crippling burden on our freedom - as, for example, our freedom to by others. Whereas enforced obedience to common concrete ends is èxpress' ourselves unrestrainedly.

tantamount to slavery, obedience to common abstract rules (however This complaint cannot be met by denying the obvious, a truth with burdensome they may still feel) provides scope for the most extra-6 2

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ordinary freedom and diversity. Although it is sometimes supposed that b

general rules one's natural reactions of hostility to strangers and y

such diversity brings chaos threatening the relative order that we also solidarity with those who are like oneself- an ever more severe threat to associate with civilisation, it turns out that greater diversity bring s political liberty. Thus the notion of `liberation', although allegedly new, greater order. Hence the type of liberty made possible by adhering t o is actually archaic in its demand for release from traditional morals.

abstract rules, in contrast to freedom from restraint, is, as Proudhon Those who champion such liberation would destroy the basis of once put it, `the mother, not the daughter, of order'.

freedom, and permit men to do what would irreparably break down There is in fact no reason to expect that the selection by evolution of those conditions that make civilisation possible. One example appears habitual practices should produce happiness. The focus on happiness in so-called `liberation theology', especially within the Roman Catholic was introduced by rationalist philosophers who supposed that a church in South America. But this movement is not confined to South conscious reason had to be discovered for the choice of men's morals, America.

Everywhere, in the name of liberation, people disavow and that that reason might prove to be the deliberate pursuit of practices that enabled mankind to reach its present size and degree of happiness. But to ask for the conscious reason why man adopted his cooperation because they do not rationally see, according to their lights, morals is as mistaken as to ask for what conscious reason man adopted how certain limitations on individual freedom through legal and moral his reason.

rules make possible a greater - and freer! - order than can be attained Nevertheless, the possibility that the evolved order in which we live through centralised control.

provides us with opportunities for happiness that equal or exceed those Such demands stem chiefly from the tradition of rationalistic provided by primitive orders to far fewer people should not be dismissed liberalism that we have already discussed (so different from the political ( which is not to say that such matters can be calculated). Much of the liberalism deriving from the English Old Whigs), which implies that àlienation' or unhappiness of modern life stems from two sources, one freedom is incompatible with any general restriction on individual of which affects primarily intellectuals, the other, all beneficiaries of action. This tradition voices itself in the passages cited earlier from material abundance. The first is a self-fulfilling prophecy of unhappiness Voltaire, Bentham, and Russell. Unfortunately it also pervades even the for those within any `system' that does not satisfy rationalistic criteria of work of the English `saint of rationalism', John Stuart Mill.

conscious control. Thus intellectuals from Rousseau to such recent Under the influence of these writers, and perhaps especially Mill, the figures in French and German thought as Foucault and Habermas fact that we must purchase the freedom enabling us to form an extended regard alienation as rampant in any system in which an order is order at the cost of submitting to certain rules of conduct has been used ì mposed' on individuals without their conscious consent; consequently, as a justification for the demand to return to the state of `liberty'

their followers tend to find civilisation unbearable - by definition, as it enjoyed by the savage who - as eighteenth-century thinkers defined him were. Secondly, the persistence of instinctual feelings of altruism and

- `did not yet know property'. Yet the savage state - which includes the solidarity subject those who follow the impersonal rules of the extended obligation or duty to share in pursuit of the concrete goals of one's order to what is now fashionably called `bad conscience'; similarly, the fellows, and to obey the commands of a headman - can hardly be acquisition of material success is supposed to be attended with feelings described as one of freedom (although it might involve liberation from of guilt (or `social conscience'). In the midst of plenty, then, there is some particular burdens) or even as one of morals. Only those general unhappiness not only born of peripheral poverty, but also of the and abstract rules that one must take into account in individual incompatibility, on the part of instinct and of a hubristic reason, with decisions in accordance with individual aims deserve the name of an order that is of a decidedly non-instinctive and extra-rational morals.

character.

`Liberation' and Order

On a less sophisticated level than the argument against àlienation' are the demands for `liberation' from the burdens of civilisation - including the burdens of disciplined work, responsibility, risk-taking, saving, honesty, the honouring of promises, as well as the difficulties of curbing 6 4

65

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

with which I am not concerned in this book), fail to meet these THE FATAL CONCEIT

requirements, but also the specific moral traditions that do concern me here, such as private property, saving, exchange, honesty, truthfulness, contract.

The situation may look even worse if one considers that the traditions, institutions and beliefs mentioned not only fail to meet the logical, methodological, and epistemological requirements stated, but that they are also often rejected by socialists on other grounds too. For example, they are seen, as by Chisholm and Keynes, as àcrippling Traditional Morals Fail to Meet Rational Requirements burden', and also, as by Wells and Forster, as closely associated with despicable trade and commerce (see chapter six). And they also may be The four requirements just listed - that whatever is not scientifically seen, as is especially fashionable today, as sources of alienation and proven, or is not fully understood, or lacks a fully specified purpose, or oppression, and of `social injustice'.

has some unknown effects, is unreasonable - are particularly well suited After such objections, the conclusion is reached that there is an to constructivist rationalism and to socialist thought.

These two

urgent need to construct a new, rationally revised and justified morality approaches themselves flow from a mechanistic or physicalist interpre-which does meet these requirements, and which is, for that matter, one tation of the extended order of human cooperation, that is, from which will not be a crippling burden, be alienating, oppressive, or conceiving ordering as the sort of arranging and controlling one could ùnjust', or be associated with trade. Moreover, this is only part of the do with a group if one had access to all the facts known to its members.

great task that these new lawgivers - socialists such as Einstein, Monod But the extended order is not, and could not be, such an order.

and Russell, and self-proclaimed 'immoralists' such as Keynes - set for Hence I wish to concede forthwith that most tenets, institutions, and themselves. A new rational language and law must be constructed too, practices of traditional morality and of capitalism do not meet the for existing language and law also fail to meet these requirements, and requirements or criteria stated and are -from the perspective of this theory of for what turn out to be the same reasons. (For that matter, even the reason and science - ùnreasonable' and ùnscientific'. Moreover, since, as laws of science do not meet these requirements (Hume, 1739/1951; and we have also admitted, those who continue to follow traditional see Popper, 1934/59).) This awesome task may seem the more urgent to practices do not themselves usually understand how these practices them in that they themselves no longer believe in any supernatural were formed or how they endure, it is hardly surprising that alternative sanction for morality (let alone for language, law, and science) and yet justifications', so-called, that traditionalists sometimes offer for their remain convinced that some justification is necessary.

practices are often rather naive (and hence have provided fair game for So, priding itself on having built its world as if it had designed it, and our intellectuals), and have no connection with the real reasons for their blaming itself for not having designed it better, humankind is now to set success. Many traditionalists do not even bother with justifications that out to do just that. The aim of socialism is no less than to effect a could not be provided anyway (thus allowing intellectuals to denounce complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and them as anti-intellectual or dogmatic), but go on following their on this basis to stamp out the old order and the supposedly inexorable, practices out of habit or religious faith. Nor is this in any way `news'.

unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfilment, After all, it was over 250 years ago that Hume observed that `the rules true freedom, and justice.

of morality are not the conclusions of our reason'. Yet Hume's claim has not sufficed to deter most modern rationalists from continuing to believe justification and Revision of Traditional Morals

- curiously enough often quoting Hume in their support - that something not derived from reason must be either nonsense or a matter The rationalist standards on which this whole argument, indeed this for arbitrary preference, and, accordingly, to continue to demand whole programme, rest, are however at best counsels of perfection and rational justifications.

at worst the discredited rules of an ancient methodology which may Not only the traditional tenets of religion, such as the belief in God, have been incorporated into some of what is thought of as science, but and much traditional morality concerning sex and the family (matters which has nothing to do with real investigation. A highly evolved, 6 6

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE FATAL CONCEIT

rather sophisticated moral system exists side by side, in our extended ppropriate also to the argument of the following section) one popular a

order, with the primitive theory of rationality and of science sponsored way of attempting to justify morality, it should be noticed that there is by constructivism, scientism, positivism, hedonism, and socialism. This no point to assuming, as rationalist and hedonistic theories of ethics do, does not speak against reason and science but against these theories of that our morality is justified just to the extent, say, that it is directed rationality and science, and some of the practice thereof. All this begins towards the production of, or striving after, some specific goal such as to become evident when it is realised that nothing is justifiable in the way happiness. There is no reason to suppose that the selection by evolution demanded. Not only is this so of morals, but also of language and law of such habitual practices as enabled men to nourish larger numbers and even science itself.

had much if anything to do with the production of happiness, let alone that it was guided by the striving after it. On the contrary, there is That what I have just written applies to science too may be unfamiliar to much to indicate that those who aimed simply at happiness would have some who are not informed of current advances and controversies within the been overwhelmed by those who just wanted to preserve their lives.

philosophy of science. But it is indeed true not only that our current While our moral traditions cannot be constructed, justified or scientific laws are not justified or justifiable in the way that constructivist demonstrated in the way demanded, their processes of formation can be methodologists demand, but that we have reason to suppose that we shall partially reconstructed, and in doing so we can to some degree eventually learn that many of our present scientific conjectures are untrue.

understand the needs that they serve. To the extent we succeed in this, Any conception that guides us more successfully than what we hitherto we are indeed called upon to improve and revise our moral traditions by believed may, moreover, although a great advance, be in substance as remedying recognisable defects by piecemeal improvement based on mistaken as its predecessor. As we have learnt from Karl Popper i mmanent criticism (see Popper, 1945/66, and 1983:29-30), that is, by (1934/1959), our aim must be to make our successive mistakes as quickly as analysing the compatibility and consistency of their parts, and tinkering possible. If we were meanwhile to abandon all present conjectures that we with the system accordingly.

cannot prove to be true, we would soon be back at the level of the savage who trusts only his instincts. Yet this is what all versions of scientism have As examples of such piecemeal improvement, we have mentioned new advised - from Cartesian rationalism to modern positivism.

contemporary studies of copyright and patents. To take another example, much as we owe to the classical (Roman law) concept of several property as Moreover,

while it is true that traditional morals, etc., are not the exclusive right to use or abuse a physical object in any manner we like, it rationally justifiable, this is also true of any possible moral code, including oversimplifies the rules required to maintain an efficient market economy, any that socialists might ever be able to come up with. Hence no matter what and a whole new sub-discipline of economics is growing up, devoted to rules we follow, we will not be able to justify them as demanded; so no ascertaining how the traditional institution of property can be improved to argument about morals - or science, or law, or language - can make the market function better.

legitimately turn on the issue of justification (see Bartley, 1962/1984; 1964, 1982). If we stopped doing everything for which we do not know What is needed as a preliminary for such analyses includes what is the reason, or for which we cannot provide a justification in the sense sometimes called àrational reconstruction' (using the word 'construc-demanded, we would probably very soon be dead.

tion' in a sense very different from 'constructivism') of how the system The issue of justification is indeed a red herring, owing in part to might have come into being. This is in effect an historical, even natural-mistaken, and inconsistent, assumptions arising within our main historical, investigation,

not an attempt to construct, justify, or

epistemological and methodological tradition which in some cases go demonstrate the system itself. It would resemble what followers of back to antiquity. Confusion about justification also stems, particularly Hume used to call `conjectural history', which tried to make intelligible so far as the issues that mainly occupy us are concerned, from Auguste why some rules rather than others had prevailed (but never overlooked Comte, who supposed that we were capable of remaking our moral Hume's basic contention, which cannot often enough be repeated, that system as a whole, and replacing it by a completely constructed and

`the rules of morality are not the conclusions of our reason'). This is the justified (or as Comte himself said, `demonstrated') body of rules.

path taken not only by the Scottish philosophers but by a long chain of I shall not state here all the reasons for the irrelevance of traditional students of cultural evolution, from the classical Roman grammarians demands for justification. But just to take as an example (one and linguists, to Bernard Mandeville, through Herder, Giambattista 68

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Vico (who had the profound insight that homo non intelligendo fit omnia The Limits of Guidance by Factual Knowledge; The Impossibility of Observing (' man became all he is without understanding it' (1854: V,183)), and the Effects of Our Morality

the German historians of law that we have mentioned, such as von Savigny, and on to Carl Menger. Menger was the only one of these to False assumptions about the possibility of justification, construction or have come after Darwin, yet all attempted to provide a rational demonstration are perhaps at the root of scientism. But even if they reconstruction, conjectural history, or evolutionary account of the were to understand this, proponents of scientism would undoubtedly emergence of cultural institutions.

want to fall back on the other requirements of their ancient At this point I find myself in the embarrassing position of wanting to methodology, which are connected to, but are not strictly dependent on, claim that it must be the members of my own profession, the the demand for justification. For example (to hark back to our list of economists, specialists who understand the process of formation of requirements), it would be objected that one cannot fully understand extended orders, who are most likely to be able to provide explanations traditional morals and how they work; following them serves no purpose of those moral traditions that made the growth of civilisation possible.

that one can specify fully i n advance; following them produces effects that are Only someone who can account for effects such as those connected with not immediately observable and hence cannot be determined to be beneficial - and several property can explain why this type of practice enabled those which are in any case not fully known or foreseen.

groups following it to outstrip others whose morals were better suited to In other words, traditional morals do not conform to the second, the achievement of different aims. But my desire to plead for my fellow third, and fourth requirements. These requirements are, as noted, so economists, while partly in order, would perhaps be more appropriate closely interrelated that one

may, after

marking their different

were not so many of them themselves infected with constructivism.

emphases, treat them together. Thus, briefly to indicate their interconnections, it would be said that one does not understand what one is How then do morals arise? What is our ` rational reconstruction'? We doing, or what one's purpose is, unless one knows and can specify fully have already sketched it in the foregoing chapters. Apart from the in advance the observable effects of one's action. Action, it is contended, constructivist contention that an adequate morality can be designed and if it is to be rational, must be deliberate and foresighted.

constructed afresh by reason, there are at least two other possible Unless one were to interpret these requirements in so broad and sources of morality. There is, first, as we saw, the innate morality, so-trivial a manner that they would lose all specific practical meaning - as called, of our instincts (solidarity, altruism, group decision, and such by saying that the understood purpose of the market order, for example, like), the practices flowing from which are not sufficient to sustain our is to produce the beneficial effect of `generating wealth' - following present extended order and its population.

traditional practices, such as those that generate the market order, Second, there is the evolved morality (savings, several property, clearly does not meet these requirements. I do not believe that any honesty, and so on) that created and sustains the extended order. As we party to our discussion would wish to consider these requirements in so have already seen, this morality stands between i nstinct and reason, a trivial an interpretation; certainly they are not so intended either by position that has been obscured by the false dichotomy of instinct versus their proponents or their opponents. Consequently we may get a clearer reason.

view of the situation in which we actually find ourselves by conceding The extended order depends on this morality in the sense that it came that, indeed, our traditional institutions are not understood, and do not i nto being through the fact that those groups following its underlying have their purposes or their effects, beneficial or otherwise, specified in rules increased in numbers and in wealth relative to other groups. The advance. And so much the better for them.

paradox of our extended order, and of the market - and a stumbling In the marketplace (as in other institutions of our extended order), block for socialists and constructivists - is that, through this process, we unintended consequences are paramount: a distribution of resources is are able to sustain more from discoverable resources (and indeed in that effected by an impersonal process in which individuals, acting for their very process discover more resources) than would be possible by a own ends (themselves also often rather vague), literally do not and personally directed process. And although this morality is not justified'

cannot know what will be the net result of their interactions.

by the fact that it enables us to do these things, and thereby to survive, Take the requirements that it is unreasonable to follow or do it does enable us to survive, and there is something perhaps to be said for that.

anything blindly (i.e., without understanding) and that the purposes and effects of a proposed action must not only be fully known in advance 70

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but also fully observable and maximally beneficial. Now apply these transcendent ordering, which also happens to be a purely naturalistic requirements to the notion of an extended order. When we consider this ordering (not derived from any supernatural power), as for example in order in the vast evolutionary frame in which it developed, the evolution, abandons the animism still present in religion: the idea that a absurdity of the demands becomes evident. The decisive effects that led single brain or will (as for example, that of an omniscient God) could to the creation of the order itself, and to certain practices predominating control and order.

over others, were exceedingly remote results of what earlier individuals The rejection of rationalistic requirements on grounds such as these had done, results exerting themselves on groups of which earlier thus also has an important consequence for anthropomorphism and individuals could hardly have been aware, and which effects, had earlier animism of all sorts - and thus for socialism. If market coordination of individuals been able to know them, may not have appeared at all individual activities, as well as other moral traditions and institutions, beneficial to them, whatever later individuals may think. As for those results

from natural, spontaneous, and self-ordering processes of later individuals, there is no reason why all (or any) of them should be adaptation to a greater number of particular facts than any one mind endowed with a full knowledge of history, let alone of evolutionary can perceive or even conceive, it is evident that demands that these theory, economics, and everything else they would have to know, so as processes be just, or possess other moral attributes (see chapter seven), to perceive why the group whose practices they follow should have derive from a naive anthropomorphism. Such demands of course might flourished more than others - although no doubt some persons are be appropriately addressed to the directors of a process guided by always adept at inventing justifications of current or local practice.

rational control or to a god attentive to prayers, but are wholly Many of the evolved rules which secured greater cooperation and inappropriate to the impersonal self-ordering process actually at work.

prosperity for the extended order may have differed utterly from In an order so extended as to transcend the comprehension and anything that could have been anticipated, and might even seem possible guidance of any single mind, a unified will can indeed hardly repugnant to someone or other, earlier or later in the evolution of that determine the welfare of its several members in terms of some particular order. In the extended order, the circumstances determining what each conception of justice, or according to an agreed scale. Nor is this due must do to achieve his own ends include, conspicuously, unknown merely to the problems of anthropomorphism. It is also becausèwelfare decisions of many other unknown people about what means to use for

. . . has no principle, neither for him who receives it, nor for him who their

own purposes. Hence, at no moment in the process could distributes it (one places it here, another there); because it depends on individuals have designed, according to their purposes, the functions the material content of the will, which is dependent on particular facts of the rules that gradually did form the order; and only later, and therefore is incapable of a general rule' (Kant, 1798:11, 6, note 2).

and imperfectly and retrospectively, have we been able to begin The insight that general rules must prevail for spontaneity to flourish, to explain these formations in principle (see Hayek, 1967, essays 1

as reaped by Hume and Kant, has never been refuted, merely neglected and 2).

or forgotten.

Although `welfare has no principle' - and hence cannot generate There is no ready English or even German word that precisely spontaneous order - resistance to those rules of justice that made the characterises an extended order, or how its way of functioning contrasts extended order possible, and denunciation of them as anti-moral, stem with the rationalists' requirements.

The only appropriate word,

from the belief that welfare must have a principle, and from refusal (and

`transcendent', has been so misused that I hesitate to use it. In its literal here is where anthropomorphism reenters the picture) to accept that the meaning, however, it does concern that which far surpasses the reach of our extended order arises out of a competitive process in which success understanding, wishes and purposes, and our sense perceptions, and that which decides, not approval of a great mind, a committee, or a god, or incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual brain, or any conformity with some understood principle of individual merit. In this single organisation, could possess or invent. This is conspicuously so in order the advance of some is paid for by the failure of equally sincere its religious meaning, as we see for example in the Lord's Prayer, where and even meritorious endeavours of others. Reward is not for merit it is asked that ' Thy will [i.e., not mine] be done in earth as it is in (e.g., obedience to moral rules, cf. Hayek 1960:94). For instance, we may heaven'; or in the Gospel, where it is declared: 'Ye have not chosen me fulfil the needs of others, regardless of their merit or the reason for our but I have chosen you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that ability to fulfil them. As Kant saw, no common standard of merit can your fruit should remain' (St. John, 15:26). But a more purely judge between different opportunities open to different individuals with 7 2

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different information, different abilities, and different desires. This latter which we live, we must now do in order to keep the stream of situation is indeed the usual one. Discoveries enabling some to prevail production flowing and, if possible, increasing.

are mostly unintended or unforeseen - by those who prevail as well as Intellectuals may of course claim to have invented new and better by those who fail. The value of products resulting from necessary

`social' morals that will accomplish just this, but thesènew' rules changes of individual activities will rarely seem just since they are made represent a recidivism to the morals of the primitive micro-order, and necessary by unforeseen events. Nor can the steps of a process of can hardly maintain the life and health of the billions supported by the evolution towards what was previously unknown appear just in the macro-order.

sense of conforming to preconceptions of rightness and wrongness, of

` welfare', or of possibilities open in circumstances previously obtaining.

It is easy to understand anthropomorphism, even though we must reject Understandable aversion to such morally blind results, results it for its mistakes. And this brings us back to the positive and inseparable from any process of trial-and-error, leads men to want to sympathetic aspect of the standpoint of the intellectuals whose views we achieve a contradiction in terms: namely, to wrest control of evolution -

have contested.

Man's inventiveness contributed so much to the

i.e., of the procedure of trial and error - and to shape it to their present formation of super-individual structures within which individuals found wishes. But invented moralities resulting from this reaction give rise to great opportunities that people came to imagine that they could irreconcilable claims that no system can satisfy and which thus remain deliberately design the whole as well as some of its parts, and that the the source of unceasing conflict. The fruitless attempt to render a situation mere existence of such extended structures shows that they can be just whose outcome, by its nature, cannot be determined by what deliberately designed. Although this is an error, it is a noble one, one anyone does or can know, only damages the functioning of the process that is, in Mises's words, `grandiose ... ambitious ... magnificent itself.

. . . daring'.

Such demands for justice are simply inappropriate to a naturalistic evolutionary process - inappropriate not just to what has happened in Unspecified Purposes: In the Extended Order Most Ends of Action Are Not the past, but to what is going on at present. For of course this Conscious or Deliberate

evolutionary process is still at work. Civilisation is not only a product of evolution - it is a process; by establishing a framework of general rules There are a number of distinct points and questions, mostly and individual freedom it allows itself to continue to evolve. This elaborations of what has just been stated, that help make clearer how evolution cannot be guided by and often will not produce what men these matters work together.

demand. Men may find some previously unfulfilled wishes satisfied, but only at the price of disappointing many others. Though by moral First, there is the question of how our knowledge really does arise. Most conduct an individual may increase his opportunities, the resulting knowledge - and I confess it took me some time to recognise this - is evolution will not gratify all his moral desires. Evolution cannot be just.

obtained not from immediate experience or observation, but in the Indeed, to insist that all future change be just would be to demand continuous

process

of sifting a learnt tradition,

which requires

that evolution come to a halt. Evolution leads us ahead precisely in individual recognition and following of moral traditions that are not bringing about much that we could not intend or foresee, let alone justifiable in terms of the canons of traditional theories of rationality.

prejudge for its moral properties. One only need ask (particularly in The tradition is the product of a process of selection from among light of the historical account given in chapters two and three) what irrational, or,

rather, ùnjustified' beliefs which, without anyone's would have been the effect if, at some earlier date, some magic force had knowing or intending it, assisted the proliferation of those who followed been granted the power to enforce, say, some egalitarian or meritocratic them (with no necessary relationship to the reasons - as for example creed. One soon recognises that such an event would have made the religious reasons - for which they were followed). The process of evolution of civilisation impossible. A Rawlsian world (Rawls, 1971) selection that shaped customs and morality could take account of more could thus never have become civilised: by repressing differentiation factual circumstances than individuals could perceive, and in conse-due to luck, it would have scotched most discoveries of new possibilities.

quence tradition is in some respects superior to, or `wiser' than, human In such a world we would be deprived of those signals that alone can reason (see chapter one above). This decisive insight is one that only a tell each what, as a result of thousands of changes in the conditions in very critical rationalist could recognise.

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Second, and closely related to this, there is the question raised earlier of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions what, in the evolutionary selection of rules of conduct, is really decisive.

order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively The immediately perceived effects of actions that humans tend to by decentralising decisions, and that a division of authority will actually concentrate on are fairly unimportant to this selection; rather, selection extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralisation actually is made according to the consequences of the decisions guided by the leads to more information being taken into account. This is the main rules of conduct in the long run - the same long run sneered at by reason for rejecting the requirements of constructivist rationalism. For the Keynes (1971, C.W.:IV, 65). These consequences depend - as argued same reason, only the alterable division of the power of disposal over above and discussed again below - chiefly on rules of property and particular resources among many individuals actually able to decide on contract securing the personal domain of the individual. Hume had their use - a division obtained through individual freedom and several already noticed this, writing that these rules àre not derived from any property - makes the fullest exploitation of dispersed knowledge possible.

utility or advantage which either the particular person or the public may Much of the particular information which any individual possesses reap from his enjoyment of any particular good' (1739/1886:II, 273).

can be used only to the extent to which he himself can use it in his own Men did not foresee the benefits of rules before adopting them, though decisions. Nobody can communicate to another all that he knows, some people gradually have become aware of what they owe to the because much of the information he can make use of he himself will whole system.

elicit only in the process of making plans for action. Such information Our earlier claim, that acquired traditions serve as àdaptations to will be evoked as he works upon the particular task he has undertaken the unknown', must then be taken literally. Adaptation to the unknown in the conditions in which he finds himself, such as the relative scarcity is the key in all evolution, and the totality of events to which the of various

materials to which he has access. Only thus can the modern market order constantly adapts itself is indeed unknown to individual find out what to look for, and what helps him to do this in anybody. The information that individuals or organisations can use to the market is the responses others make to what they find in their own adapt to the unknown is necessarily partial, and is conveyed by signals environments. The overall problem is not merely to make use of given (e.g., prices) through long chains of individuals, each person passing on knowledge, but to discover as much information as is worth searching in modified form a combination of streams of abstract market signals.

for in prevailing conditions.

Nonetheless, the whole structure of activities tends to adapt, through these partial It is often objected that the institution of property is selfish in that it and fragmentary signals, to conditions foreseen by and known to no individual, benefits only those who own some, and that it was indeed ìnvented' by even if this adaptation is never perfect. That is why this structure some persons who, having acquired some individual possessions, wished survives, and why those who use it also survive and prosper.

for their exclusive benefit to protect these from others. Such notions, There can be no deliberately planned substitutes for such a self-which of course underlie Rousseau's resentment, and his allegation that ordering process of adaptation to the unknown. Neither his reason nor our `shackles' have been imposed by selfish and exploitative interests, his innatènatural goodness' leads man this way, only the bitter fail to take into account that the size of our overall product is so large necessity of submitting to rules he does not like in order to maintain only because we can, through market exchange of severally owned himself against competing groups that had already begun to expand property, use widely dispersed knowledge of particular facts to allocate because they stumbled upon such rules earlier.

severally owned resources. The market is the only known method of If we had deliberately built, or were consciously shaping, the providing information enabling individuals to judge comparative structure of human action, we would merely have to ask individuals advantages of different uses of resources of which they have immediate why they had interacted with any particular structure. Whereas, in fact, knowledge and through whose use, whether they so intend or not, they specialised students, even after generations of effort, find it exceedingly serve the needs of distant unknown individuals. This dispersed difficult to explain such matters, and cannot agree on what are the knowledge is essentially dispersed, and cannot possibly be gathered causes or what will be the effects of particular events. The curious task together and conveyed to an authority charged with the task of of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about deliberately creating order.

what they imagine they can design.

Thus the institution of several property is not selfish, nor was it, nor could it have been, ìnvented' to impose the will of property-owners To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of upon the rest. Rather, it is generally beneficial in that it transfers the 7 6

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guidance of production from the hands of a few individuals who, A pre-formation of an order or pattern in a brain or mind is not only not a whatever they may pretend, have limited knowledge, to a process, the, superior but an inferior method of securing an order. For it must always be a extended order, that makes maximum use of the knowledge of all, small part of the overall system in which some features of that larger system thereby benefiting those who do not own property nearly as much as can reflect themselves. As little as it is possible for the human brain ever those who do.

fully to explain itself (Hayek, 1952:8.66-8.86) is it possible for that brain to Nor does freedom of all under the law require that all be able to own account for, or predict, the result of the interaction of a large number of individual property but that many people do so. I myself should human brains.

certainly prefer to be without property in a land in which many others own something, than to have to live where all property is `collectively Fourth, there is the important point that an order arising from the separate owned' and assigned by authority to particular uses.

decisions of many individuals on the basis of different information cannot be But this argument too is challenged, even ridiculed, as the selfish determined by a common scale of the relative importance of different ends. This excuse of privileged classes. Intellectuals, thinking in terms of limited brings us close to the issue of marginal utility, an important matter that causal processes they had learnt to interpret in areas such as physics, we shall postpone discussing until chapter six. Here, however, it is found it easy to persuade manual workers that selfish decisions of appropriate to discuss in a general way the advantages of the individual owners of capital - rather than the market process itself -

differentiation that an extended order makes possible. Freedom involves made use of widely dispersed opportunities and constantly changing freedom to be different - to have one's own ends in one's own domain; relevant facts. The whole process of calculating in terms of market yet order everywhere, and not only in human affairs, also presupposes prices was, indeed, sometimes even represented as part of a devious differentiation of its elements. Such differentiation might be confined manoeuvre on the part of owners of capital to conceal how they merely to the local or temporal position of its elements, but an order exploited workers. But such retorts quite fail to address the arguments would hardly be of any interest unless the differences were greater than and facts already rehearsed: some hypothetical body of objective facts is no more this. Order is desirable not for keeping everything in place but for available to capitalists for manipulating the whole than it is to the managers that generating new powers that would otherwise not exist. The degree of the socialists would like to replace them. Such objective facts simply do not orderliness - the new powers that order creates and confers - depends exist and are unavailable to anyone.

more on the variety of the elements than on their temporal or local position.

Third, there is a difference between following rules of conduct, on the one hand, Illustrations

are

everywhere.

Consider

how genetic evolution

and knowledge about something, on the other (a difference pointed to by favoured the unique extension of the infancy and childhood of various persons in various ways, for instance by Gilbert Ryle in his humankind because that made possible extremely great diversity, and distinction between `knowing how' and `knowing that' (1945-46:1-16; thereby a great acceleration of cultural evolution and a quickening of 1949)). The habit of following rules of conduct is an ability utterly the increase of the species

homo.

Though biologically determined

different from the knowledge that one's actions will have certain kinds differences among individual men are probably smaller than those of of effects. This conduct ought to be seen for what it is, the skill to fit some domesticated animals (especially dogs), this long learning period oneself into, or align oneself with, a pattern of whose very existence one after birth allows individuals more time to adapt themselves to may barely be aware and of whose ramifications one has scarcely any particular environments and to absorb the different streams of tradition knowledge. Most people can, after all, recognise and adapt themselves into which they are born. The varieties of skills that make division of to several different patterns of conduct without being able to explain or labour possible, and with it the extended order, are largely due to these describe them. How one responds to perceived events would thus by no different streams of tradition, encouraged by underlying dissimilarities means necessarily be determined by knowledge of the effects of one's in natural gifts and preferences. The whole of tradition is, moreover, so own actions, for we often do not and cannot have such knowledge. If we incomparably

more complex than what any individual mind can

cannot have it, there is hardly anything rational about the demand that command that it can be transmitted at all only if there are many we ought to have it; and indeed we should be the poorer if what we did different individuals to absorb different portions of it. The advantage of were guided solely by the limited knowledge that we do have of such individual differentiation is all the greater in that it makes large groups effects.

more efficient.

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Thus, differences among individuals increase the power of the efforts

of its members. Once most of the productive activities of collaborating group beyond the sum of individual efforts. Synergetic members of a cooperating group transcend the range of the individual's collaboration brings into play distinctive talents that would have been perception, the old impulse to follow inborn altruistic instincts actually left unused had their possessors been forced to strive alone for hinders the formation of more extensive orders.

sustenance. Specialisation releases and encourages the development of a In the sense of inculcating conduct that benefits others, all systems of few individuals whose distinctive contributions may suffice to provide morality of course commend altruistic action; but the question is how to them a living or even to exceed the contributions others make to the accomplish this. Good intentions will not suffice - we all know what total. Civilisation is, in the famous phrase of Wilhelm von Humboldt road they pave. Guidance strictly by perceivable favourable effects on which Stuart Mill placed on the title page of his essay On Liberty, based particular other persons is insufficient for, and even irreconcilable with, on `human development in its richest diversity'.

the extended order. The morals of the market do lead us to benefit The knowledge that plays probably the chief role in this differentiation -

others, not by our intending to do so, but by making us act in a manner far from being the knowledge of any one human being, let alone that of which, nonetheless, will have just that effect. The extended order a directing superbrain - arises in a process of experimental interaction circumvents

individual ignorance (and thus also adapts us to the of widely dispersed, different and even conflicting beliefs of millions of unknown, as discussed above) in a way that good intentions alone communicating individuals. The increasing intelligence shown by man cannot do - and thereby does make our efforts altruistic in their effects.

is, accordingly, due not so much to increases in the several knowledge of In an order taking advantage of the higher productivity of extensive individuals but to procedures for combining different and scattered division of labour, the individual can no longer know whose needs his i nformation which, in turn, generate order and enhance productivity.

efforts do or ought to serve, or what will be the effects of his actions on Thus the development of variety is an important part of cultural those unknown persons who do consume his products or products to evolution, and a great part of an individual's value to others is due to which he has contributed. Directing his productive efforts altruistically his differences from them. The importance and value of order will grow thus becomes literally impossible for him. In so far as we can still call with the variety of the elements, while greater order in turn enhances his motives altruistic in that they eventually redound to the benefit of the value of variety, and thus the order of human cooperation becomes others, they will do this not because he aims at or intends to serve the indefinitely extensible. If things were otherwise, if for example all men concrete needs of others, but because he observes abstract rules. Our were alike and could not make themselves different from one another, àltruism', in this new sense, is very different from instinctual altruism.

there would be little point in division of labour (except perhaps among No longer the end pursued but the rules observed make the action good people in different localities), little advantage from coordinating efforts, or bad. Observing these rules, while bending most of our efforts towards and little prospect of creating order of any power or magnitude.

earning a living, enables us to confer benefits beyond the range of our Thus individuals had to become different before they could be free to concrete knowledge (yet at the same time hardly prevents us from using combine into complex structures of cooperation. Moreover, they had to whatever extra we earn also to gratify our instinctive longing to do combine into entities of a distinct character: not merely a sum but a visible good). All this is obscured by the systematic abuse of the term structure in some manner analogous to, and in some important respects àltruistic' by sociobiologists.

differing from, an organism.

Another explanation for the demand that one's actions be restricted to the deliberate pursuit of known beneficial ends may also be Fifth, there is the question whence then, in the presence of all these difficulties mentioned. The demand arises not only from archaic and uninstructed and objections, the demand to restrict one's action to the deliberate pursuit of known instinct but also from a characteristic peculiar to those intellectuals who and observable beneficial ends arises.

It is in part a remnant of the

champion it - an entirely understandable characteristic which nonethe-instinctual, and cautious; micro-ethic of the small band, wherein jointly less remains self-defeating. Intellectuals are especially anxious to know perceived purposes were directed to the visible needs of personally for what ultimate purpose what they themselves call their `brain known comrades (i.e., solidarity and altruism). Earlier I claimed that, children' will be used, and thus passionately concern themselves with within an extended order, solidarity and altruism are possible only in a the fate of their ideas, and hesitate much more to release thoughts from li mited way within some sub-groups, and that to restrict the behaviour their control than do manual workers their material products. This of the group at large to such action would work against coordinating the reaction often makes such highly educated people reluctant to integrate 8 0

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themselves into the exchange processes, processes that involve working question whether their own ends are satisfied should depend on the for unperceivable ends in a situation where the only identifiable result of activities of such men - men concerned solely with means - is itself an their efforts, if any, may indeed be someone else's profit. The manual abomination to them.

worker readily assumes that it is indeed his employer's job to know, if anyone does, what needs the work of his hands will ultimately satisfy.

The Ordering of the Unknown

But the place of individual intellectual work in the product of many intellectuals interacting in a chain of services or ideas will be less The English language unfortunately lacks a popular word available in identifiable. That better educated people should be more reluctant to German: namely, Machbarkeit. I sometimes wonder whether a good submit to some unintelligible direction - such as the market (despite cause might not be served by coining an equivalent English term their talk of thèmarketplace of ideas') - thus has the result (alsòmakeability' - 'manufacturability' does not quite do (and my own unintended) that they tend to resist just what (without their

`constructivism' could hardly be rendered by 'constructible') - to understanding it) would increase their usefulness to their fellows.

describe the view that we have confronted, examined and contested This reluctance helps further to explain the hostility intellectuals bear throughout this chapter and the last: namely, that anything produced towards the market order, and something of their susceptibility to by evolution could have been done better by the use of human socialism. Perhaps this hostility and susceptibility would diminish if ingenuity.

such persons understood better the role that abstract and spontaneous This view is untenable. For in fact we are able to bring about an ordering patterns play in all of life, as they no doubt would do if better ordering of the unknown only by causing it to order itself In dealing with informed of evolution, biology, and economics. But when confronted by our physical surroundings we sometimes can indeed achieve our ends information in these fields, they often are reluctant to listen, or even to by relying on the self-ordering forces of nature, but not by deliberately consider conceding the existence of complex entities of whose working trying to arrange elements in the order that we wish them to assume.

our minds can have only abstract knowledge. For mere abstract This is for example what we do when we initiate processes that produce knowledge of the general structure of such entities is insufficient to crystals or new chemical substances (see previous section and also enable us literally tòbuild' them (that is, to put them together from Appendix C). In chemistry, and even more in biology, we must use self-known pieces), or to predict the particular form they will assume. At ordering processes in an increasing measure; we can create the best, it can indicate under what general conditions many such orders or conditions under which they will operate, but we cannot determine systems will form themselves, conditions that we may sometimes be able what will happen to any particular element. Most synthetic chemical to create. This sort of problem is familiar to the chemist concerned with compounds are not 'constructible' in the sense that we can create them similarly complex phenomena but usually unfamiliar to the kind of by placing the individual elements composing them in the appropriate scientist

accustomed to explaining everything in terms of simple places. All we can do is to induce their formation.

connections between a few observable events. The result is that such A similar procedure must be followed to initiate processes that will persons are tempted to interpret more complex structures animistically coordinate individual actions transcending our observation. In order to as the result of design, and to suspect some secret and dishonest induce the self-formation of certain abstract structures of inter-personal manipulation - some conspiracy, as of a dominant `class' - behind relations,

we need to secure the assistance of some very general

` designs' whose designers are nowhere to be found. This in turn helps to conditions, and then allow each individual element to find its own place reinforce their initial reluctance to relinquish control of their own within the larger order. The most we can do to assist the process is to products in a market order. For intellectuals generally, the feeling of admit only such elements as obey the required rules. This limitation of being mere tools of concealed, even if i mpersonal, market forces appears our powers necessarily grows with the complexity of the structure that almost as a personal humiliation.

we wish to bring into being.

It evidently has not occurred to them that the capitalists who are An individual who finds himself at some point in an extended order suspected of directing it all are actually also tools of an impersonal where only his immediate environment is known to him can apply this process, just as unaware of the ultimate effects and purpose of their advice to his own situation. He may need to start by trying continuously actions, but merely concerned with a higher level, and therefore a wider to probe beyond the limits of what he can see, in order to establish and range, of events in the whole structure. Moreover, the idea that the maintain the communication that creates and sustains the overall order.

8 2

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Indeed, maintaining communication within the order requires that intervention to, say, flatten out inequalities in the interest of a random dispersed information be utilised by

many different individuals,

member of the order risks damaging the working of the whole, the self-unknown to one another, in a way that allows the different knowledge of ordering process will secure for any random member of such a group a millions to form an exosomatic or material pattern. Every individual better chance over a wider range of opportunities available to all than becomes a link in many chains of transmission through which he any rival system could offer.

receives signals enabling him to adapt his plans to circumstances he does not know. The overall order thus becomes infinitely expansible, spontaneously supplying information about an increasing range of How What Cannot Be Known Cannot Be Planned

means without exclusively serving particular ends.

Where has the discussion of our last two chapters brought us? The doubts Rousseau cast on the institution of several property became the Earlier, we considered some important aspects of such processes of foundation of socialism and have continued to influence some of the communication, including the market with its necessary and continual greatest thinkers of our century. Even as great a figure as Bertrand variation of prices. Here it need only be added and stressed that, Russell defined liberty as the àbsence of obstacles to the realisation of beyond regulating current production of commodities and supplies of our desires' (1940:251). At least before the obvious economic failure of services, the same traditions and practices also provide for the future; Eastern European socialism, it was widely thought by such rationalists their effects will manifest themselves not only as an interlocal order, but that a centrally planned economy would deliver not only `social justice'

also as an intertemporal one. Actions will be adapted not only to others (see chapter seven below), but also a more efficient use of economic distant in space but also to events beyond the life expectancies of acting resources. This notion appears eminently sensible at first glance. But it individuals. Only a confessed immoralist could indeed defend measures proves to overlook the facts just reviewed: that the totality of resources of policy on the grounds that ìn the long run we are all dead'. For the that one could employ in such a plan is simply not knowable to anybody, and only groups to have spread and developed are those among whom it therefore can hardly be centrally controlled.

became customary to try to provide for children and later descendants Nonetheless, socialists continue to fail to face the obstacles in the way whom one might never see.

of fitting separate individual decisions into a common pattern conceived as àplan'. The conflict between our instincts, which, since Rousseau, Some persons are so troubled by some effects of the market order that have become identified with `morality', and the moral traditions that they overlook how unlikely and even wonderful it is to find such an have survived cultural evolution and serve to restrain these instincts, is order prevailing in the greater part of the modern world, a world in embodied in the separation now often drawn between certain sorts of which we find thousands of millions of people working in a constantly ethical and political philosophy on the one hand and economics on the changing environment, providing means of subsistence for others who other. The point is not that whatever economists determine to be are mostly unknown to them, and at the same time finding satisfied efficient is thereforèright', but that economic analysis can elucidate the their own expectations that they themselves will receive goods and usefulness of practices heretofore thought to be right - usefulness from services produced by equally unknown people. Even in the worst of the perspective of any philosophy that looks unfavourably on the human times something like nine out of ten of them will find these expectations suffering and death that would follow the collapse of our civilisation. It confirmed.

is a betrayal of concern for others, then, to theorise about the 'just Such an order, although far from perfect and often inefficient, can society' without carefully considering the economic consequences of extend farther than any order men could create by deliberately putting implementing such views. Yet, after seventy years of experience with countless elements into selected àppropriate' places. Most defects and socialism, it is safe to say that most intellectuals outside the areas -

i nefficiencies of such spontaneous orders result from attempting to Eastern Europe and the Third World - where socialism has been tried interfere with or to prevent their mechanisms from operating, or to remain content to brush aside what lessons might lie in economics, i mprove the details of their results. Such attempts to intervene in unwilling to wonder whether there might not be a reason why socialism, spontaneous order rarely result in anything closely corresponding to as often as it is attempted, never seems to work out as its intellectual men's wishes, since these orders are determined by more particular facts leaders intended. The intellectuals' vain search for a truly socialist than any such intervening agency can know. Yet, while deliberate community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusion-8 4

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ment with, a seemingly endless string of ùtopias' - the Soviet Union, brought into mutual correspondence to achieve overall order. These then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua - should communicate the different rates of substitution or equivalence that the suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not several parties involved find prevailing between the various goods and conform to certain facts. But such facts, first explained by economists services whose use they command. Certain quantities of any such more than a century ago, remain unexamined by those who pride objects may prove to be equivalents or possible substitutes for one themselves on their rationalistic rejection of the notion that there could another, either for satisfying particular human needs or for producing, be any facts that transcend historical context or present an insurmount-directly or indirectly, means to satisfy them. Surprising as it may be able barrier to human desires.

that such a process exists at all, let alone that it came into being Meanwhile, among those who, in the tradition of Mandeville, Hume, through evolutionary selection without being deliberately designed, I and Smith, did study economics, there gradually emerged not only an know of no efforts to refute this contention or discredit the process itself understanding of market processes, but a powerful critique of the

- unless one so regards simple declarations that all such facts can, possibility of substituting socialism for them. The advantages of these somehow, be known to some central planning authority. (See also, in market procedures were so contrary to expectation that they could be this connection, the discussion of economic calculation, in Babbage explained only retrospectively, through analysing this spontaneous (1832),

Gossen

(1854/1889/1927),

Pierson

(1902/1912),

Mises

formation itself. When this was done, it was found that decentralised (1922/81), Hayek (1935), Rutland (1985), Roberts (1971).) control over resources, control through several property, leads to the Indeed the whole idea of `central control' is confused. There is not, generation and use of more information than is possible under central and never could be, a single directing mind at work; there will always direction. Order and control extending beyond the immediate purview be some council or committee charged with designing a plan of action of any central authority could be attained by central direction only if, for some enterprise. Though individual members may occasionally, to contrary to fact, those local managers who could gauge visible and convince the others, quote particular pieces of information that have potential resources were also currently informed of the constantly influenced their views, the conclusions of the body will generally not be changing relative importance of such resources, and could then based on common knowledge but on agreement among several views communicate full and accurate details about this to some central based on different information. Each bit of knowledge contributed by planning authority in time for it to tell them what to do in the light of one person will tend to lead some other to recall yet other facts of whose all the other, different, concrete information it had received from other relevance he has become aware only by his being told of yet other regional or local managers - who of course, in turn, found themselves in circumstances of which he did not know. Such a process thus remains similar difficulties in obtaining and delivering any such information.

one of making use of dispersed knowledge (and thus simulates trading, Once we realise what the task of such a central planning authority although in a highly inefficient way - a way usually lacking competition would be, it becomes clear that the commands it would have to issue and diminished in accountability), rather than unifying the knowledge could not be derived from the information the local managers had of a number of persons. The members of the group will be able to recognised as important, but could only be determined through direct communicate to one another few of their distinct reasons; they will dealings among individuals or groups controlling clearly delimited communicate chiefly conclusions drawn from their respective individual aggregates of means. The hypothetical assumption, customarily em-knowledge of the problem in hand. Moreover, only rarely will ployed in theoretical descriptions of the market process (descriptions circumstances really be the same for different persons contemplating the made by people who usually have no intention of supporting socialism), same situation - at least in so far as this concerns some sector of the to the effect that all such facts (or `parameters') can be assumed to be extended order and not merely a more or less self-contained group.

known to the explaining theorist, obscures all this, and consequently Perhaps the best illustration of the impossibility of deliberate produces the curious deceptions that help to sustain various forms of

`rational' allocation of resources in an extended economic order without socialist thinking.

the guidance by prices formed in competitive markets is the problem of The order of the extended economy is, and can be, formed only by a allocating the current supply of liquid capital among all the different wholly different process - from an evolved method of communication uses whereby it could increase the final product. The problem is that makes it possible to transmit, not an infinite multiplicity of reports essentially how much of the currently accruing productive resources can about particular facts, but merely certain abstract properties of several be spared to provide for the more distant future as against present particular conditions, such as competitive prices, which must be needs. Adam Smith was aware of the representative character of this 86

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SIX

issue when, referring to the problem faced by an individual owner of such capital, he wrote: `What is the species of domestick industry which THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF TRADE

his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the AND MONEY

greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him'

(1776/1976).

If we consider the problem of the use of all means available for investment in an extended economic system under a single directing authority, the first difficulty is that no such determinate aggregate quantity of capital available Disdain for the Commercial

for current use can be known to anyone, although of course this quantity is li mited in the sense that the effect of investing either more or less than it Not all antipathy to the market order arises from questions of must lead to discrepancies between the demand for various kinds of goods epistemology, methodology, rationality and science. There is a further, and services. Such discrepancies will not be self-correcting but will manifest darker, dislike. To understand it, we must step behind these relatively themselves through some of the instructions given by the directing authority rational areas to something more archaic and even arcane: to attitudes proving to be impossible of execution, either because some of the goods and emotions that arise especially powerfully when commercial activity, required will not be there or because some materials or instruments provided trade

and financial institutions are discussed by socialists - or cannot be used due to the lack of required complementary means (tools, encountered by primitives.

materials, or labour). None of the magnitudes that would have to be taken As we have seen, trade and commerce often depend importantly on into account could be ascertained by inspecting or measuring any `given'

confidentiality, as well as on specialised or individual knowledge; and objects, but all will depend on possibilities among which other persons will this is even more so of financial institutions. In commercial activities, have to choose in the light of knowledge that they possess at the time. An for example, more is at risk than one's own time and effort, and special approximate solution of this task will become possible only by the interplay information enables individuals to judge their chances, their competitive of those who can ascertain particular circumstances which the conditions of edge, in particular ventures. Knowledge of special circumstances is only the moment show, through their effects on market prices, to be relevant. The worth striving for if its possession confers some advantage compensating

` quantity of capital' available then proves, for example, what happens when for the cost of acquiring it. If every trader had to make public how and the share of current resources used to provide for needs in the more distant where to obtain better or cheaper wares, so that all his competitors future is greater than what people are prepared to spare from current could at once imitate' him, it would hardly be worth his while to engage consumption in order to increase provision for that future, i.e., their in the process at all - and the benefits accruing from trade would never willingness to save.

arise. Moreover, so much knowledge of particular circumstances is Comprehending the role played by the transmission of information unarticulated, and hardly even articulable (for example, an entrepren-

(or of factual knowledge) opens the door to understanding the extended eur's hunch that a new product might be successful) that it would prove order. Yet these issues are highly abstract, and are particularly hard to i mpossible to make it `public' quite apart from considerations of grasp for those schooled in the mechanistic, scientistic, constructivist motivation.

canons of rationality that dominate our educational systems - and who Of course action in accordance with what is not perceived by all and consequently tend to be ignorant of biology, economics, and evolution. I fully specified in advance - what Ernst Mach called the òbservable and confess that it took me too a long time from my first breakthrough, in tangible' - violates the rationalist requirements discussed earlier.

my essay on Èconomics and Knowledge' (1936/48), through the Moreover, what is intangible is also often an object of distrust and even recognition of `Competition as a Discovery Procedure' (1978:179-190), fear. (It may be mentioned in passing that not only socialists fear (if for and my essay on `The Pretence of Knowledge' (1978:23-34), to state my somewhat different reasons) the circumstances and conditions of trade.

theory of the dispersal of information, from which follows my Bernard Mandevillèshuddered' when confronted by `the most frightful conclusions about the superiority of spontaneous formations to central prospect [which] is left behind when we reflect on the toil and hazard direction.

that are undergone abroad, the vast seas we are to go over, the different 88

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climates we are to endure, and the several nations we must be obliged to for their assistance' (1715/1924:1, 356). To become aware that we Japan that `the makers of money were almost a class of untouchables'.

The ostracism of traders becomes even more understandable when it depend heavily on human efforts that we cannot know about or control is remembered that merchant activity is indeed often cloaked in is indeed unnerving - to those who engage in them as well as those who mystery. `The mysteries of the trades' meant that some gained from would refrain.)

knowledge that others lacked, a knowledge the more mysterious in that Such distrust and fear have, since antiquity and in many parts of the it often dealt with foreign - and perhaps even disgusting - customs, as world, led ordinary people as well as socialist thinkers to regard trade well as unknown lands: lands of legend and rumour. Èx nihilo nihil fit'

not only as distinct from material production, not only as chaotic and may no longer be part of science (see Popper, 1977/84:14; and Bartley, superfluous in itself, not only as a methodological mistake, as it were, 1978:675-76), but it still dominates common sense. Activities that but also as suspicious, inferior, dishonest, and contemptible. Through-appear to add to available wealth, òut of nothing', without physical out history `merchants were objects of very general disdain and moral creation and by merely rearranging what already exists, stink of sorcery.

opprobrium ... a man who bought cheap and sold dear was A neglected influence reinforcing such prejudices has to do with fundamentally dishonest.... Merchant behaviour violated patterns of physical effort, muscular activity, and thèsweat of one's brows'.

mutuality that prevailed within primary groupings' (McNeill, 1981:35).

Physical strength, and the ordinary tools and weapons that often As I recall Eric Hoffer once remarking: `The hostility, in particular of accompany its employment, are not only observable but tangible. There the scribe, towards the merchant is as old as recorded history'.

is nothing mysterious about them, even for most people who lack them There are many reasons for such attitudes, and many forms in which themselves. The conviction that physical effort, and the capacity for it, they express themselves. Often, in early days, traders were set apart are in themselves meritorious and confer rank hardly had to wait for from the rest of the community. Nor was this so only of them. Even feudal times. It was part of the inherited instinct of the small group, and some handiworkers, especially blacksmiths, suspected of sorcery by was preserved among farmers, tillers of the soil, herdsmen, warriors, tillers of the soil and herdsmen, were often kept outside the village.

and even simple householders and handicraftsmen. People could see After all, did not the smiths, with their `mysteries', transform material how the physical effort of the farmer or artisan added to the total of substances? But this was so to a far higher degree of traders and visible useful things - and account for differences of wealth and power merchants, who partook in a network wholly outside the perception and in terms of recognisable causes.

understanding of ordinary people. They engaged in something like the Thus physical competition was introduced and appreciated early, as transformation of the non-material in altering the value of goods. How primitive man became familiar, both in competition for leadership and could the power of things to satisfy human needs change without a in games of skill (see Appendix E), with ways of testing visible change in their quantity? The trader or merchant, the one who seemed superiority of strength. But as soon as knowledge - which was not to effect such changes, standing outside the seen, agreed and understood òpen' or visible - was introduced as an element in competition, order of daily affairs, also was thrust outside the established hierarchy knowledge not possessed by other participants, and which must have of status and respect. So it was that traders were held in contempt even seemed to many of them also to be beyond the possibility of possession, by Plato and Aristotle, citizens of a city which in their day owed her the familiarity and sense of fairness vanished. Such competition leading position to trade. Later, under feudal conditions, commercial threatened solidarity and the pursuit of agreed purposes. Viewed from pursuits continued to be held in relatively low esteem, for traders and the perspective of the extended order, of course, such a reaction must craftsmen, at least outside a few small towns, then depended for security appear quite selfish, or perhaps as a curious kind of group egotism in of life and limb, as well as of goods, on those who wielded the sword which the solidarity of the group outweighs the welfare of its and, with it, protected the roads. Trade could develop only under the individuals.

protection of a class whose profession was arms, whose members Such sentiment was still vigorous in the nineteenth century. Thus, depended on their physical prowess, and who claimed in return high when Thomas Carlyle, who had great influence among the literati of the status and a high standard of life. Such attitudes, even when conditions last

century,

preached that `work alone is noble' (1909:160), he began to change, tended to linger wherever feudalism persisted, or was explicitly meant physical, even muscular, effort. To him, as to Karl unopposed by a wealthy bourgeoisie or trading centres in self-governing Marx, labour was the real source of wealth. This particular sentiment towns. Thus, even as late as the end of the last century, we are told of may today be waning. Indeed, the connection of productivity with 9 0

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human physical prowess, though still valued by our instincts, plays an they like', from which he concluded that `society can subject this distribution ever smaller role in human endeavour, wherein power now less often of wealth to whatever rules it can think out'. Mill, who is here considering means physical might as legal right. Of course we can still not do the size of the product as a purely technological problem, independent of its without some very strong individuals, but they are becoming merely one distribution, overlooks the dependence of size on the use made of existing kind of an increasing number of ever smaller groups of specialists. Only opportunities, which is an economic and not a technological problem. We among primitives do the physically strong still dominate.

owe it to methods of `distribution', that is, to the determination of prices, However this may be, activities such as barter and exchange and that the product is as large as it is. What there is to share depends on the more elaborate forms of trade, the organisation or direction of activities, principle by which production is organised - that is, in a market economy, and the shifting about of available goods for sale in accordance with on pricing and distribution. It is simply wrong to conclude that `the things profitability, are still not always even regarded as real work. It remains once there', we are free to do with them as we like, for they will not be there hard for many to accept that quantitative increases of available supplies unless individuals have generated price information by securing for of physical means of subsistence and enjoyment should depend less on themselves certain shares of the total.

the visible transformation of physical substances into other physical There is a further error. Like Marx, Mill treated market values exclusively substances than on the shifting about of objects which thereby change as effects and not also as causes of human decisions. We shall see later, when their relevant magnitudes and values. That is, the market process deals we turn to discuss marginal utility theory explicitly, how inaccurate this is -

with material objects, but its shifting around of them does not seem to and how wrong was Mill's declaration that `there is nothing in the laws of add (whatever might be claimed or really be so) to their perceptible value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the quantities. The market transmits information about them rather than theory of the subject is complete' (1848:111, I, sect. 1, in Works, 11: 199-200).

producing them, and the crucial function played by the conveying of i nformation escapes the notice of persons guided by mechanistic or Trade - regarded as real work or not - brought not only individual scientistic

habits

who take for granted factual information about

but also collective wealth through effort of brain rather than of muscles.

physical objects and disregard the role played, in the determination of That a mere change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all value, by the relative scarcity of different kinds of objects.

participants, that it need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others (or what has come to be called exploitation), was and is There is an irony here: that precisely those who do not think of economic nonetheless intuitively difficult to grasp. The example of Henry Ford is events in literally materialistic terms - that is, in terms of physical quantities sometimes brought forward to allay suspicions, to illustrate how striving of material substances - but are guided by calculations in terms of value, for profit benefits the masses. The example is indeed illuminating i.e., by the appreciation that men have for these objects, and particularly because in it one does easily see how an entrepreneur could directly aim those differences between costs and price that are called profits, should at satisfying an observable need of large numbers of people, and how his habitually be denounced as materialists. Whereas it is precisely the striving efforts did in fact succeed in raising their standard of living. But the for profit that makes it possible for those engaged in it not to think in terms example is also insufficient; for in most cases the effects of increases of of material quantities of particular concrete needs of known individuals, but productivity are too indirect to trace them so plainly. An improvement of the best way in which they can contribute to an aggregate output that in, say, the production of metal screws, or string, or window glass, or results from the similar separate efforts of countless unknown others.

paper,

would spread its benefits so widely that far less concrete There is also an error in economics here - an idea that even Carl perception of causes and effects would remain.

Menger's brother Anton propagated, the notion that thèwhole product of As a consequence of all these circumstances, many people continue to labour' stems mainly from physical effort; and although this is an old find the mental feats associated with trade easy to discount even when mistake, it is probably John Stuart Mill as much as anyone who is they do not attribute them to sorcery, or see them as depending on trick responsible for spreading it. Mill wrote in his Principles of Political Economy or fraud or cunning deceit. Wealth so obtained appeared even less (1848, Òf Property', Book II, ch. I, sect. 1; Works, 11:260) that whilèthe related to any visible desert (i.e., desert dependent on physical exertion) laws and the conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character than did the luck of the hunter or fisher.

of physical truths', distribution is à matter of human institutions only. The But if wealth generated by such `rearrangements' bewildered folk, the things once there, mankind individually or collectively can do with them as information-searching activities of tradesmen evoked truly great dis-9 2

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trust. The transport involved in trade can usually be at least partly Exchange is productive; it does increase the satisfaction of human understood by the layman, at least after some patient explanation and needs from available resources. Civilisation is so complex - and trade so argument, to be productive. For example, the view that trade only shifts productive - because the subjective worlds of the individuals living in about already existing things can be readily corrected by pointing out the civilised world differ so much. Apparently paradoxically, diversity of that many things can be made only by assembling substances from individual purposes leads to a greater power to satisfy needs generally widely distant places. The relative value of these substances will depend than does homogeneity, unanimity and control - and, also paradoxi-not on the attributes of the individual material components of which cally, this is so because diversity enables men to master and dispose of they consist but on relative quantities available together at the locations more information. Only a clear analysis of the market process can resolve required. Thus trade in raw materials and semi-finished products is a these apparent paradoxes.

precondition for increase in the physical quantities of many final An increase of value - crucial in exchange and trade - is indeed products that could only be manufactured at all thanks to the different from increases in quantity observable by our senses. Increase availability of (perhaps small quantities of) materials fetched from far in value is something for which laws governing physical events, at least away. The quantity of a particular product that can be produced from as understood within materialist and mechanistic models, do not resources found at a particular place may depend on the availability of account. Value indicates the potential capacities of an object or action a very much smaller quantity of another substance (such as mercury or to satisfy human needs, and can be ascertained only by the mutual phosphor, or perhaps even a catalyst) that can be obtained only at the adjustment through exchange of the respective (marginal) rates of other end of the earth. Trade thus creates the very possibility of substitution (or equivalence) which different goods or services have for physical production.

various individuals. Value is not an attribute or physical property The idea that such productivity, and even such bringing together of possessed by things themselves, irrespective of their relations to men, supplies, also depends on a continuous successful search for widely but solely an aspect of these relations that enables men to take account, dispersed and constantly changing information remains harder to grasp, in

their decisions

about the use of such things, of the better

however obvious it may seem to those who have understood the process opportunities others might have for their use. Increase in value appears by which trade creates and guides physical production when steered by only with, and is relevant only with regard to, human purposes. As Carl i nformation about the relative scarcity of different things at different Menger made clear (1871/1981:121), value ìs a judgement economising places.

men make about the importance of goods at their disposal for the Perhaps the main force behind the persistent dislike of commercial maintenance of their lives and well-being'. Economic value expresses dealings is then no more than plain ignorance and conceptual difficulty.

changing degrees of the capacity of things to satisfy some of the This is however compounded with preexisting fear of the unfamiliar: a multiplicity of separate, individual scales of ends.

fear of sorcery and the unnatural, and also a fear of knowledge itself Each person has his own peculiar order for ranking the ends that he harking back to our origins and indelibly memorialised in the first few pursues. These individual rankings can be known to few, if any, others, chapters of the book of Genesis, in the story of man's expulsion from the and are hardly known fully even by the person himself. The efforts of Garden of Eden. All superstitions, including socialism, feed on such fear.

millions of individuals in different situations, with different possessions and desires, having access to different information about means, knowing little or nothing about one another's particular needs, and aiming at different scales of ends, are coordinated by means of exchange Marginal Utility versus Macro-economics

systems.

As individuals reciprocally align with one another, an The fear may be powerful, but it is unfounded. Such activities are of undesigned system of a higher order of complexity comes into being, course not

really

incomprehensible.

Economics and the biological

and a continuous flow of goods and services is created that, for a sciences, as we have seen in the foregoing chapters, now give a good remarkably high number of the participating individuals, fulfils their account of self-organising processes, and we have sketched a partial guiding expectations and values.

rational reconstruction of some of their history and beneficial effects in The multiplicity of different ranks of different ends produces a the rise and spread of civilisation in chapters two and three above (see common, and uniform, scale of intermediate or reflected values of the also Hayek, 1973).

material means for which these ends compete. Since most material 9 4

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means can be used for many different ends of varying importance, and becomes conspicuous in the extended order, in which most people earn diverse means can often be substituted for one another, the ultimate their living by providing means for others unknown to them, and values of the ends come to be reflected in a single scale of values of equally obtain the means they require for their own purposes from still means - i.e., prices - that depends on their relative scarcity and the others also unknown to them. The only common scales of values thus possibility of exchange among their owners.

become those of means, whose importance does not chiefly depend on Since changing factual circumstances require constant adaptation of effects perceived by those who use a particular item but are readily particular ends to whose service particular kinds of means must be substitutable for one another. Owing to demands for a great variety of assigned, the two sets of scales of value are bound to change in different ends by a multiplicity of individuals, the concrete uses for which a manners and at different rates. The several orders of ranking of particular thing is wanted by others (and therefore the value each will individual ultimate ends, while different, will show a certain stability, put on it) will not be known. This abstract character of the merely but the relative values of the means toward whose production those instrumental value of means also contributes to the disdain for what is individuals' efforts are directed will be subject to continuous fortuitous felt to be the àrtificial' or ùnnatural' character of their value.

fluctuations that cannot be anticipated and whose causes will be unintelligible to most people.

Adequate explanations of such puzzling and even alarming phenomena, That the hierarchy of ends is relatively stable (reflecting what many first discovered scarcely a hundred years ago, were disseminated as the may regard as their constant or `lasting' value), whereas the hierarchy work of William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras was of means fluctuates so much, leads many idealistic persons to prize the developed, especially by the Austrian school following Menger, into former and disdain the latter. To serve a constantly changing scale of what became known as thèsubjective' or `marginal utility' revolution values may indeed seem repulsive. This is perhaps the fundamental in economic theory. If what has been said in the preceding paragraphs reason why those most concerned about ultimate ends nonetheless sounds unfamiliar as well as difficult, this suggests that the most often, contrary to their own objectives, attempt to thwart the procedure elementary and important discoveries of this revolution have even now by which they can best contribute to their realisation. Most people not reached general awareness. It was the discovery that economic must, to achieve their own ends, pursue what are merely means for events could not be explained by preceding events acting as determining themselves as well as for others. That is, they must engage at some causes that enabled these revolutionary thinkers to unify economic point in a long chain of activities which will eventually lead to the theory into a coherent system. Although classical economics, or what is satisfaction of an unknown need at some remote time and place, after often called `classical political economy', had already provided an passing through many intermediate stages directed to different ends.

analysis of the process of competition, and particularly of the manner in The label which the market process attaches to the immediate product which international trade integrated national orders of cooperation into is all the individual can know in most instances. No person engaged in an international one, only

marginal utility theory brought real

some stage of the process of making metallic screws, for instance, can understanding of how demand and supply were determined, of how possibly rationally determine when, where, or how the particular piece quantities were adapted to needs, and of how measures of scarcity on which he is working will or ought to contribute to the satisfaction of resulting from

mutual adjustment guided individuals. The whole

human needs. Nor do statistics help him to decide which of many market process then became understood as a process of transfer of potential uses to which it (or any other similar item) could be put, information enabling men to use, and put to work, much more should be satisfied, and which not.

information and skill than they would have access to individually.

But also contributing to the feeling that the scale of values of means, That the utility of an object or action, usually defined as its capacity i.e., prices, is common or vulgar, is apparently that it is the same for all, to satisfy human wants, is not of the same magnitude to different while different scales of ends are distinctive and personal. We prove our individuals, now seems so obvious that it is difficult to understand how individuality by asserting our particular tastes or by showing our more serious scientists should ever have treated utility as an objective, general discriminating appreciation of quality. Yet only because of information, and even measurable attribute of physical objects. That the relative through prices, about the relative scarcity of different means are we able utilities of different objects to different persons can be distinguished to realise as many of our ends as we do.

does not provide the least basis for comparisons of their absolute The apparent conflict between the two kinds of hierarchies of values magnitude.

Nor, although people may agree how much they are

9 6

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individually prepared to contribute to the costs of different utilities, does contemporary government and politics are still based on naivècollective utility' denote a discoverable object: it exists as little as a explanations of such economic phenomena as value and prices, collective mind, and is at best a metaphor. Nor does the fact that we all explanations that vainly endeavour to account for them as òbjective'

occasionally decide that some object is more or less important to occurrences independent of human knowledge and aims. Such explan-another person than to ourselves provide any reason to believe in ations cannot interpret the function or appreciate the indispensability of objective interpersonal comparison of utility.

trading and markets for coordinating the productive efforts of large Indeed, in a certain sense the activity that economics sets out to numbers of people.

explain is not about physical phenomena but about people. Economic values are interpretations of physical facts in the light of the degrees of Some habits that have crept into mathematical analysis of the market suitability of kinds of physical objects in particular situations for the process often mislead even trained economists. For example, the practice of satisfaction of needs. Thus one might describe economics (what I now referring tòthe existing state of knowledge', and to information available to prefer to call catallactics (Hayek, 1973)) as a metatheory, a theory about acting members of a market process either as `data' or as `given' (or even by the theories people have developed to explain how most effectively to the pleonasm of `given data'), often leads economists to assume that this discover and use different means for diverse purposes. Under the knowledge exists not merely in dispersed form but that the whole of it might circumstances it is not so surprising that physical scientists, on be available to some single mind. This conceals the character of competition encountering such arguments, often find themselves in strange territory, as a discovery procedure. What in these treatments of the market order is or that such economists often strike them more like philosophers than represented as àproblem' to be solved is not really a problem to anyone in

` real' scientists.

the market, since the determining factual circumstances on which the market Marginal utility theory is, although a basic advance, one that has in such an order depends cannot be known to anyone, and the problem is been obscured from the start. The most accessible early statement of the not how to use given knowledge available as a whole, but how to make it idea in the English-speaking world, by W. S. Jevons, remained after his possible that knowledge which is not, and cannot be, made available to any early death, and also in consequence of the extra-academic position of one mind, can yet be used, in its fragmentary and dispersed form, by many his single eminent follower, Wicksteed, long disregarded due to the interacting individuals - a problem not for the actors but for the dominant academic authority of Alfred Marshall, who was reluctant to theoreticians trying to explain those actions.

depart from the position of John Stuart Mill. The Austrian co-discoverer of the theory, Carl Menger, was more fortunate in finding at The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be once two highly gifted pupils (Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by von Wieser) to continue his work and to establish a tradition, with the objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, result that modern economic theory gradually came to be generally differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that accepted under the name of the Àustrian School'. By its stress on what serve to guide further decisions. When the market tells an individual it called thèsubjective' nature of economic values it produced a new entrepreneur that more profit is to be gained in a particular way, he can paradigm for explaining structures arising without design from human both serve his own advantage and also make a larger contribution to the interaction. Yet, during the last forty years, its contributions have been aggregate (in terms of the same units of calculation that most others obscured by the rise of 'macro-economics', which seeks causal use) than he could produce in any other available way. For these prices connections between hypothetically measurable entities or statistical inform market participants of crucial momentary conditions on which aggregates. These may sometimes, I concede, indicate some vague the whole division of labour depends: the actual rate of convertibility probabilities, but they certainly do not explain the processes involved in (or `substitutability') of different resources for one another, whether as generating them.

means to produce other goods or to satisfy particular human needs. For But because of the delusion that macro-economics is both viable and this it is even irrelevant what quantities are available to mankind as a useful (a delusion encouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, whole.

Such 'macro-economic' knowledge of aggregate quantities which

must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical available of different things is neither available nor needed, nor would it education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic even be useful. Any idea of measuring the aggregate product composed that occurs among professional economists) many opinions ruling of a great variety of commodities in varying combinations is mistaken: 9 8

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

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their equivalence for human purposes depends on human knowledge, primitive group may readily concede superior knowledge to a revered and only after we have translated physical quantities into economic leader, they resent it in the fellow who knows a way to obtain by little values can we begin to estimate such matters.

perceptible effort what others can get only by hard work. To conceal What is decisive for the magnitude of the product, and the chief and to use superior information for individual or private gain is still determinant generating particular quantities, is how those millions of regarded as somehow improper - or at least unneighbourly. And these individuals who have distinctive knowledge of particular resources primitive reactions remain active long after specialisation has become combine them at various places and times into assemblies, choosing the only way to make use of the acquisition of information in its great among the great varieties of possibilities - none of which possibilities variety.

can by itself be called the most effective without knowing the relative Such reactions also continue today to influence political opinion and scarcity of different elements as indicated by their prices.

action, to thwart the development of the most effective organisation of production, and to encourage the false hopes of socialism. That The decisive step towards understanding the role of relative prices in mankind - which owes the supplies on which it lives as much to trade determining the best use of resources was Ricardo's discovery of the as to production - should despise the first but overly esteem the second principle of comparative costs, of which Ludwig von Mises rightly said that creates a state of affairs that cannot help but have a distorting effect on it ought to be called the Ricardian Law of Association (1949:159-64). Price political attitudes.

relations alone tell the entrepreneur where return sufficiently exceeds costs to Ignorance of the function of trade, which led initially to fear, and in make it profitable to devote limited capital to a particular undertaking. Such the Middle Ages to uninformed regulation, and which only compar-signs direct him to an invisible goal, the satisfaction of the distant unknown consumer of the final product.

atively recently yielded to better understanding, has, then, now been revived in a new pseudo-scientific form. In this form it lends itself to attempts at technocratic economic manipulation which, when they The Intellectuals' Economic Ignorance

inevitably fail, encourage a modern form of distrust of `capitalism'. Yet An understanding of trade and of marginal-utility explanations of the the situation may seem worse still when we turn our attention to certain determination of relative values is crucial for comprehending the order further ordering processes, even harder to understand than is trade, i.e., on which the nourishment of the existing multitudes of human beings those governing money and finance.

depends. Such matters ought to be familiar to every educated person.

Such understanding has been thwarted by the general disdain with The Distrust of Money and Finance

which intellectuals tend to treat the entire subject. For the fact made clear by marginal utility theory - namely, that it could become every Prejudice arising from the distrust of the mysterious reaches an even individual's distinct task, by his several knowledge and skills, to help higher pitch when directed at those most abstract institutions of an satisfy the needs of the community through a contribution of his choice -

advanced civilisation on which trade depends, which mediate the most is

equally foreign to the primitive

mind and to the reigning

general, indirect, remote and unperceived effects of individual action, constructivism, as well as to explicit socialism.

and which, though indispensable for the formation of an extended It is no exaggeration to say that this notion marks the emancipation order, tend to veil their guiding mechanisms from probing observation: of the individual. To the development of the individualist spirit are due money and the financial institutions based on it. The moment that (see chapters two and three above) the division of skills, knowledge and barter is replaced by indirect exchange mediated by money, ready labour on which advanced civilisation rests. As contemporary economic intelligibility ceases and abstract interpersonal processes begin that far historians like Braudel (1981-84) have begun to comprehend, the transcend even the most enlightened individual perception.

disdained middleman, striving for gain, made possible the modern Money, the very `coin' of ordinary interaction, is hence of all things extended order, modern technology, and the magnitude of our current the least understood and - perhaps with sex - the object of greatest population. The ability, no less than the freedom, to be guided by one's unreasoning fantasy; and like sex it simultaneously fascinates, puzzles own knowledge and decisions, rather than being carried away by the and repels. The literature treating it is probably greater than that spirit of the group, are developments of the intellect which our emotions devoted to any other single subject; and browsing through it inclines have followed only imperfectly. Here again, although members of a one to sympathise with the writer who long ago declared that no other 10 0

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subject, not even love, has driven more men to madness. `The love of both are alarmed to find that the whole has outgrown our capacity to money', the Bible declares, ìs the root of all evil' (I Timothy, 6:10). But survey or control the sequence of events on which we depend. It seems ambivalence about it is perhaps even more common: money appears as at all to have got out of hand, or as the German expression more tellingly once the most powerful instrument of freedom and the most sinister tool puts it, ist uns uber

den Kopf gewachsen. No wonder the expressions that of oppression. This most widely-accepted medium of exchange conjures refer to money are so emphatic, even hyperbolic. Perhaps some still up all the unease that people feel towards a process they cannot believe, as Cicero ( De officiis, 11:89) tells us of the elder Cato, that understand, that they both love and hate, and some of whose effects money-lending is as bad as murder. Although the Roman followers of they desire passionately while detesting others that are inseparable from the Stoics,

such as Cicero himself and Seneca, did show more

the first.

understanding of such matters, current views about market-determined The operation of the money and credit structure has, however, with rates of interest on loans are hardly more flattering, even though the language and morals, been one of the spontaneous orders most resistant latter are so important in directing capital to its most productive uses.

to efforts at adequate theoretical explanation, and it remains the object Thus we still hear of thècash nexus', `filthy lucre', `the acquisitive of serious disagreement among specialists. Even some professional instinct', and the activities of thèhuckster' (for an account of all this students have resigned themselves to the insight that the particulars see Braudel, 1982b).

necessarily escape perception, and that the complexity of the whole Nor do the problems end with the expression of rude epithets. Like compels one to be content with accounts of abstract patterns that form morality, law, language, and biological organisms, monetary institu-themselves spontaneously, accounts which, however enlightening, give tions result from spontaneous order - and are similarly susceptible to no power to predict any particular result.

variation and selection. Yet monetary institutions turn out to be the Money and finance trouble not only the student. Like trade and for least satisfactorily developed of all spontaneously grown formations.

many of the same reasons, they remain unremittingly suspect to Few will, for example, dare to claim that their functioning has improved moralists. The moralist has several reasons for distrusting this universal during the last seventy years or so, since what had been an essentially means of obtaining and manipulating power over the greatest variety of automatic mechanism based on an international metallic standard was ends in the least visible manner. First, whereas one could readily see replaced,

under the guidance of experts, by deliberate national how many other objects of wealth were used, the concrete or particular

` monetary policies'. Indeed, humankind's experiences with money have effects of the use of money on oneself or on other people often remain given good reason for distrusting it, but not for the reasons commonly indiscernible. Second, even when some of its effects are discernible, it supposed. Rather, the selective processes are interfered with here more than may be used for good and bad ends alike - hence the supreme anywhere else: selection by evolution is prevented by government monopolies that versatility that makes it so useful to its possessor also makes it the more make competitive experimentation impossible.

suspect to the moralist. Finally, its skilful use, and the large gains and Under government patronage the monetary system has grown to magnitudes arising from it, appear, as with commerce, divorced from great complexity, but so little private experimentation and selection physical effort or recognisable merit, and need not even be concerned among alternative means has ever been permitted that we still do not with any material substrate - as in `purely paper transactions'. If quite know what good money would be - or how good it could be. Nor craftsmen and blacksmiths were feared for transforming material is such interference and monopoly a recent creation: it occurred almost substance, if traders were feared for transforming such intangible as soon as coinage was adopted as a generally accepted medium of qualities as value, how much more will the banker be feared for the exchange. Though an indispensable requirement for the functioning of transformations he effects with the most abstract and immaterial of all an extensive order of cooperation of free people, money has almost from economic institutions? Thus we reach the climax of the progressive its first appearance been so shamelessly abused by governments that it replacement of the perceivable and concrete by abstract concepts has become the prime source of disturbance of all self-ordering shaping rules guiding activity: money and its institutions seem to lie processes in the extended order of human cooperation. The history of beyond the boundary of laudable and understandable physical efforts of government management of money has, except for a few short happy creation, in a realm where the comprehension of the concrete ceases and periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception. In this respect, incomprehensible abstractions rule.

governments have proved far more immoral than any private agency Thus the subject at once bewilders specialists and offends moralists: supplying distinct kinds of money in competition possibly could have 1 02

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF TRADE AND MONEY

been. I have suggested elsewhere, and will not argue again here, that things are more irresponsible than the derision of concern with costs by the

market economy might well be better able to develop its intellectuals who, commonly, do not know how to go about finding out potentialities if government monopoly of money were abolished (Hayek, how particular results are to be achieved at the least sacrifice of other 1976/78, and 1986:8-10).

ends. These intellectuals are blinded by indignation about that essential However this may be, our main subject here, the persistent adverse chance of very large gains that seem disproportionate to the effort opinion of `pecuniary considerations', is based on ignorance of the required in a particular case, but that alone makes this kind of indispensable role money plays in making possible the extended order of experimentation practicable.

human cooperation and general calculation in market values. Money is It is hence hard to believe that anyone accurately informed about the indispensable for extending reciprocal cooperation beyond the limits of market can honestly condemn the search for profit. The disdain of profit human awareness - and therefore also beyond the limits of what was is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in explicable and could be readily recognised as expanding opportunities.

the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and The Condemnation of Profit and the Contempt for Trade indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others.

The objections of the beaux esprits of our own time - those intellectuals we have just mentioned again, and with whom we were concerned in earlier chapters - do not differ so very much from the objections of members of primitive groups; and it is this that has inclined me to call their demands and longings atavistic. What intellectuals steeped in constructivist presuppositions find most objectionable in the market order, in trade, in money and the institutions of finance, is that producers, traders, and financiers are not concerned with concrete needs of known people but with abstract calculation of costs and profit.

But they forget, or have not learned, the arguments that we have just rehearsed. Concern for profit is just what makes possible the more effective use of resources. It makes the most productive use of the variety of potential support that can be enlisted from other business undertakings. The high-minded socialist slogan, `Production for use, not for profit', which we find in one form or another from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, from Albert Einstein to Archbishop Camara of Brazil (and often, since Aristotle, with the addition that these profits are made

,

at the expense of others'), betrays ignorance of how productive capacity is multiplied by different individuals obtaining access to different knowledge whose total exceeds what any single one of them could muster. The entrepreneur must i n his activities probe beyond known uses and ends if he is to provide means for producing yet other means which in turn serve still others, and so on - that is, if he is to serve a multiplicity of ultimate ends. Prices and profit are all that most producers need to be able to serve more effectively the needs of men they do not know. They are a tool for searching -just as, for the soldier or hunter, the seaman or air pilot, the telescope extends the range of vision. The market process gives most people the material and information resources that they need in order to obtain what they want. Hence few 1 04

1 05

SEVEN

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

that differs from what that language had traditionally been used to OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

explain. Not only is it difficult to explain, or even to describe something new in received terms, it also may be hard to sort out what language has previously classified in a particular manner - especially a manner based on innate distinctions of our senses.

Such difficulties have driven some scientists to invent new languages for their own disciplines. Reformers, and especially socialists, have been driven by the same urge, and some of them have proposed deliberate reformation of language in order the better to convert people to their When words lose their meaning

own position (see Bloch, 1954-59).

people will lose their liberty.

In view of such difficulties, our vocabulary, and the theories Confucius

embedded in it, are crucial. So long as we speak in language based in erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error. Yet the traditional Words as Guides to Action

vocabulary that still profoundly shapes our perception of the world and Trade, migration, and the increase and mixture of populations must not of human interaction within it - and the theories and interpretations only have opened people's eyes, but also loosened their tongues. It was embedded in that vocabulary - remain in many ways very primitive.

not simply that tradesmen inevitably encountered, and sometimes Much of it was formed during long past epochs in which our minds mastered, foreign languages during their travels, but that this must interpreted very differently what our senses conveyed. Thus, while we have forced them also to ponder the different connotations of key words learn much of what we know through language, the meanings of (if only to avoid either affronting their hosts or misunderstanding the individual words lead us astray: we continue to use terms bearing terms of agreements to exchange), and thereby to come to know new archaic connotations as we try to express our new and better and different views about the most basic matters. I should like now to understanding of the phenomena to which they refer.

consider some of the problems relating to language that attend the A pertinent example is the way transitive verbs ascribe to inanimate conflict between the primitive group and the extended order.

objects some sort of mind-like action. Just as the naive or untutored All people, whether primitive or civilised, organise what they perceive mind tends to assume the presence of life wherever it perceives partly by means of attributes that language has taught them to attach to movement, it also tends to assume the activity of mind or spirit groups of sensory characteristics. Language enables us not only to label wherever it imagines that there is purpose. The situation is aggravated objects given to our senses as distinct entities, but also to classify an by the fact that, to some degree, the evolution of the human race seems infinite variety of combinations of distinguishing marks according to to repeat itself during the early development of each human mind. In what we expect from them and what we may do with them. Such his account of The Child's Conception of the World (1929:359), Jean Piaget labelling, classification, and distinction is of course often vague. More writes: `The child begins by seeing purpose everywhere.' Only i mportantly, all usage of language is laden with interpretations or secondarily is the mind concerned with differentiating between purposes theories about our surroundings. As Goethe recognised, all that we of the things themselves (animism) and purposes of the makers of the i magine to be factual is already theory: what wèknow' of our things (artificialism). Animistic connotations cling to many basic words, surroundings is our interpretation of them.

and particularly to those describing occurrences producing order. Not As a consequence, various difficulties arise in analysing and only `fact' itself but alsòto cause', `coerce', `distribute', `prefer', and criticising our own views. For example, many widely held beliefs live òrganise',

terms indispensable in the description of impersonal only implicitly in words or phrases implying them and may never processes, still evoke in many minds the idea of a personal actor.

become explicit; thus they are never exposed to the possibility of The word òrder' itself is a clear instance of an expression which, criticism, with the result that language transmits not only wisdom but before Darwin, would have been taken almost universally to imply a also a type of folly that is difficult to eradicate.

personal actor. At the beginning of the last century even a thinker of the It is also difficult to explain in a particular vocabulary - because of its stature of Jeremy Bentham maintained that òrder presupposes an end'

own limitations and because of the connotations it bears - something (1789/1887,

Works:II, 399). Indeed, it could be said that, until the 1 06

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGÈsubjective revolution' in economic theory of the 1870's, understanding would have been as little able to àct' or tòtreat' particular persons as of human creation was dominated by animism - a conception from would a people or a population. On the other hand, thèstate' or, which even Adam Smith's ìnvisible hand' provided only a partial better, thègovernment', which before Hegel used to be the common escape until, in the 1870's, the guide-role of competitively-determined (and more honest) English word, evidently connoted for Marx too market prices came to be more clearly understood. Yet even now, openly and clearly the idea of authority while the vague term `society'

outside the scientific examination of law, language and the market, allowed him to insinuate that its rule would secure some sort of studies of human affairs continue to be dominated by a vocabulary freedom.

chiefly derived from animistic thinking.

Thus, while wisdom is often hidden in the meaning of words, so is One of the most important examples comes from socialist writers.

error. Naive interpretations that we now know to be false, as well as The more closely one scrutinises their work, the more clearly one sees profoundly helpful if often unappreciated advice, survive and determine that they have contributed far more to the preservation than to the our decisions through the words we use. Of particular relevance to our reformation of animistic thought and language. Take for instance the discussion is the unfortunate fact that many words that we apply to personification of `society' in the historicist tradition of Hegel, Comte various aspects of the extended order of human cooperation carry and Marx. Socialism, with its `society', is indeed the latest form of those misleading connotations of an earlier kind of community. Indeed, many animistic interpretations of order historically represented by various words embodied in our language are of such a character that, if one religions (with their `gods'). The fact that socialism is often directed habitually employs them, one is led to conclusions not implied by any against religion hardly mitigates this point. Imagining that all order is sober thought about the subject in question, conclusions that also the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable conflict with scientific evidence. It was for this reason that in writing by better design of some superior mind. For this socialism deserves a this book I imposed upon myself the self-denying ordinance never to use place in an authoritative inventory of the various forms of animism -

the

words `society' or `social' (though they unavoidably occur such as that given, in a preliminary way, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in occasionally in titles of books and in quotations I draw from statements his

Theories of Primitive Religion

(1965). In view of the continuing

of others; and I have also, on a few occasions, let the expressions `the influence of such animism, it seems premature even today to agree with social sciences' or `social studies' stand). Yet, while I have not hitherto W. K. Clifford, a profound thinker who, already during Darwin's used these terms, in this chapter I wish to discuss them - as well as some lifetime, asserted that `purpose has ceased to suggest design to instructed other words that function similarly - to expose some of the poison people except in cases where the agency of men is independently concealed in our language, particularly in that language which concerns probable' (1879:117).

the orders and structures of human interaction and interrelationship.

The continuing influence of socialism on the language of intellectuals and scholars is evident also in descriptive studies of history and The somewhat simplified quotation by Confucius that stands at the head anthropology. As Braudel asks: `Who among us has not spoken about of this chapter is probably the earliest expression of this concern that has the class struggle, the modes of production, the labour force, the surplus value, been preserved. An abbreviated form in which I first encountered it the relative pauperisation, the practice, the alienation, the infrastructure, the apparently stems from there being in Chinese no single word (or set of superstructure, the use value, the exchange value, the primitive accumulation, the characters) for liberty. It would also appear, however, that the passage dialectics, the dictatorship of the proletariat ...?'

(supposedly all derived

legitimately renders Confucius's account of the desirable condition of any from or popularised by Karl Marx: see Braudel 1982b).

ordered group of men , as expressed in his Analects (tr. A. Waley, 1938:XIII, In most instances, underlying this sort of talk are not simple 3, 171-2): Ìf the language is incorrect ... the people will have nowhere to statements of fact but interpretations or theories about consequences or put hand and foot'. I am obliged to David Hawkes, of Oxford, for having causes of alleged facts. To' Marx especially we also owe the substitution traced a truer rendering of a passage I had often quoted in an incorrect of the term `society' for the state or compulsory organisation about form.

which he is really talking, a circumlocution that suggests that we can The unsatisfactory character of our contemporary vocabulary of political deliberately regulate the actions of individuals by some gentler and terms results from its descent largely from Plato and Aristotle who, lacking kinder method of direction than coercion. Of course the extended, the conception of evolution, considered the order of human affairs as an spontaneous order that has been the main subject matter of this volume arrangement of a fixed and unchanging number of men fully known to the 1 0 8

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

governing authority - or, like most religions down to socialism, as the inadequate that we can, in using them, not even delimit clearly what we designed product of some superior mind. (Anyone who wishes to pursue the are talking about.

influence of words on political thinking will find rich information in We may as well begin with the terms generally used to distinguish Demandt (1978). In English a helpful discussion of the deceptions brought between the two opposed principles of the order of human collabor-on by metaphorical language will be found in Cohen (1931); but the fullest ation, capitalism and socialism, both of which are misleading and discussions of the political abuse of language known to me occur in the politically biased. While intended to throw a certain light on these German studies of Schoeck (1973), and in H. Schelsky (1975:233-249). I systems, they tell us nothing relevant about their character. The word have myself treated some of these matters earlier in my (1967/78:71-97;

` capitalism' in particular (still unknown to Karl Marx in 1867 and 1973:26-54; 1976:78-80).)

never used by him) `burst upon political debate as the natural opposite of socialism' only with Werner Sombart's explosive book Der moderne Kapitalismus in 1902 (Braudel, 1982a:227). Since this term suggests a system serving the special interests of the owners of capital, it naturally Terminological Ambiguity and Distinctions among Systems of Coordination provoked the opposition of those who, as we have seen, were its main Elsewhere we have tried to disentangle some of the confusions caused beneficiaries, the members of the proletariat. The proletariat was by the ambiguity of terms such as `natural' and àrtificial' (see enabled by the activity of owners of capital to survive and increase, and Appendix A), of `genetic' and `cultural' and the like, and as the reader was in a sense actually called into being by them. It is true that owners will have noticed, I generally prefer the less usual but more precise term of capital made the extended order of human intercourse possible, and

`several property' to the more common expression `private property'.

this might have led to some capitalists proudly accepting that name for There are of course many other ambiguities and confusions, some of the

result

of their efforts. It

was nevertheless an unfortunate

them of greater importance.

development in suggesting a clash of interests which does not really For instance, there was the deliberate deception practiced by exist.

American socialists in their appropriation of the term `liberalism'. As A somewhat more satisfactory name for the extended economic order Joseph A. Schumpeter rightly put it (1954:394): Às a supreme if of collaboration is the term `market economy', imported from the unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise German. Yet it too suffers from some serious disadvantages. In the first have thought it wise to appropriate its label.' The same applies instance, the so-called market economy is not really an economy in the increasingly to European political parties of the middle, which either, as strict sense but a complex of large numbers of interacting individual in Britain, carry the name liberal or, as in West Germany, claim to be economies with which it shares some but by no means all defining liberal but do not hesitate to form coalitions with openly socialist characteristics. If we give to the complex structures resulting from the parties. It has, as I complained over twenty-five years ago (1960, interaction of individual economies a name that suggests that they are Postscript), become almost impossible for a Gladstonian liberal to deliberate constructions, this yields the personification or animism to describe himself as a liberal without giving the impression that he which, as we have seen, so many misconceptions of the processes of believes in socialism. Nor is this a new development: as long ago as human interaction are due, and which we are at pains to escape. It is 1911, L. T. Hobhouse published a book under the title Liberalism that necessary to be constantly reminded that the economy the market would more correctly have been called Socialism, promptly followed by a produces is not really like products of deliberate human design but is a book entitled The Elements of Social Justice (1922).

structure which, while in some respects resembling an economy, in Important as is this particular change - one perhaps now beyond other regards, particularly in not serving a unitary hierarchy of ends, remedying - we must concentrate here, in accordance with the general differs fundamentally from a true economy.

theme of this book, on the ambiguities and vagueness caused by the A second disadvantage of the term market economy is that in English names generally given to phenomena of human interaction. The no convenient adjective can be derived from it, and such an expression inadequacy of the terms we use to refer to different forms of human indicating the appropriateness of particular actions is indeed needed in interaction is just one more symptom, one more manifestation, of the practice. Hence I proposed some time ago (1967/1978b:90) that we prevailing, highly inadequate intellectual grasp of the processes by introduce a new technical term, one obtained from a Greek root that which human efforts are coordinated. These terms are indeed so had already been used in a very similar connection. In 1838 Archbishop 11 0

111

THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

Whately suggested 'catallactics' as a name for the theoretical science ancient, and now obsolete, ideal of general human behaviour. Any real explaining the market order, and his suggestion has been revived from appreciation of the difference between, on the one hand, what actually ti me to time, most recently by Ludwig von Mises. The adjective characterises individual behaviour in a particular group and, on thè catallactic' is readily derived from Whately's coinage, and has already other, wishful thinking about what individual conduct should be (in been used fairly widely. These terms are particularly attractive because accordance with older customs) is increasingly lost. Not only is any the classical Greek word from which they stem, katalattein or katalassein, group of persons connected in practically any manner called àsociety', meant not only `to exchange' but alsòto receive into the community'

but it is concluded that any such group should behave as a primitive and `to turn from enemy into friend', further evidence of the profound group of companions did.

insight of the ancient Greeks in such matters (Liddell and Scott, 1940, Thus the word `society' has become a convenient label denoting s.v. katallasso). This led me to suggest that we form the term catallaxy to almost any group of people, a group about whose structure or reason for describe the object of the science we generally call economics, which coherence nothing need be known - a makeshift phrase people resort to then, following Whately, itself ought to be called catallactics. The when they do not quite know what they are talking about. Apparently a usefulness of such an innovation has been confirmed by the former people, a nation, a population, a company, an association, a group, a term's already having been adopted by some of my younger colleagues horde, a band, a tribe, the members of a race, of a religion, sport, and I am convinced that its more general adoption might really entertainment, and the inhabitants of any particular place, all are, or contribute to the clarity of our discussion.

constitute, societies.

To call by the same name such completely different formations as the companionship of individuals in constant personal contact and the Our Animistic Vocabulary and the Confused Concept of `Society'

structure formed by millions who are connected only by signals As such examples illustrate all too well, in the study of human affairs resulting from long and infinitely ramified chains of trade is not only difficulties of communication begin with the definition and naming of factually misleading but also almost always contains a concealed desire the very objects we wish to analyse. The chief terminological barrier to to model this extended order on the intimate fellowship for which our understanding, outranking in importance the other terms we have just emotions long. Bertrand de Jouvenel has well described this instinctive discussed, is the expression `society' itself - and not only inasmuch as it nostalgia for the small group - `the milieu in which man is first found, has, since Marx, been used to blur distinctions between governments which retains for him an infinite attraction: but any attempt to graft the and other ìnstitutions'. As a word used to describe a variety of systems same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny'

of interconnections of human activities, `society' falsely suggests that all (1957:136).

such systems are of the same kind. It is also one of the oldest terms of The crucial difference overlooked in this confusion is that the small this kind, as for example in the Latin societas, from socius, the personally group can be led in its activities by agreed aims or the will of its known fellow or companion; and it has been used to describe both an members, while the extended order that is also àsociety' is formed into actually existing state of affairs and a relation between individuals. As a concordant structure by its members' observance of similar rules of usually employed, it presupposes or implies a common pursuit of shared conduct in the pursuit of different individual purposes. The result of purposes that usually can be achieved only by conscious collaboration.

such diverse efforts under similar rules will indeed show a few As we have seen, it is one of the necessary conditions of the extension characteristics resembling those of an individual organism possessing a of human cooperation beyond the limits of individual awareness that brain or mind, or what such an organism deliberately arranges, but it is the range of such pursuits be increasingly governed not by shared misleading to treat such àsociety' animistically, or to personify it by purposes but by abstract rules of conduct whose observance brings it ascribing to it a will, an intention, or a design. Hence it is disturbing to about that we more and more serve the needs of people whom we do not find a serious contemporary scholar confessing that to any utilitarian know and find our own needs similarly satisfied by unknown persons.

` society' must appear not às a plurality of persons ... [but] as a sort of Thus the more the range of human cooperation extends, the less does single great person' (Chapman, 1964:153).

motivation within it correspond to the mental picture people have of what should happen in àsociety', and the morèsocial' comes to be not the key word in a statement of the facts but the core of an appeal to an 11 2

113

THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

practice

with regard tòsocial'. Apparently it would have been The Weasel Word `Social'

i mpractical for him to follow his policy here, and he simply had to The noun `society', misleading as it is, is relatively innocuous compared abandon it. These examples led me for a while to note down all with the adjectivèsocial', which has probably become the most occurrences of `social' that I encountered, thus producing the following confusing expression in our entire moral and political vocabulary. This instructive list of over one hundred and sixty nouns qualified by the has happened only during the past hundred years, during which time its adjectivèsocial':

modern usages, and its power and influence, have expanded rapidly from Bismarckian Germany to cover the whole world. The confusion accounting

action

adjustment

that it spreads, within the very area wherein it is most used, is partly administration

affairs

agreement

due to its describing not only phenomena produced by various modes of age

animal

appeal

cooperation among men, such as in àsociety', but also the kinds of awareness

behaviour

being

actions that promote and serve such orders. From this latter usage it body

causation

character

has increasingly been turned into an exhortation, a sort of guide-word circle

climber

compact

for rationalist morals intended to displace traditional morals, and now composition

comprehension

concern

increasingly supplants the word `good' as a designation of what is conception

conflict

conscience

morally right. As a result of this `distinctly dichotomous' character, as consciousness

consideration

construction

Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms appropriately puts it, factual and contract

control

credit

normative meanings of the word `social' constantly alternate, and what cripples

critic (-que)

crusader

at first seems a description imperceptibly turns into a prescription.

decision

demand

democracy

description

development

dimension

On this particular matter, German usage influenced the American language discrimation

disease

disposition

more than English; for by the eighteen-eighties a group of German scholars distance

duty

economy

known as the historical or ethical school of economic research had end

entity

environment

increasingly substituted the term `social policy' for the term `political epistemology

ethics

etiquette

economy' to designate the study of human interaction. One of the few not to event

evil

fact

be swept away by this new fashion, Leopold von Wiese, later remarked that factors

fascism

force

only those who were young in thèsocial age' - in the decades immediately framework

function

gathering

before the Great War - can appreciate how strong at that time was the geography

goal

good

inclination to regard thèsocial' sphere as a surrogate for religion. One of the graces

group

harmony

most dramatic manifestations of this was the appearance of the so-called health

history

ideal

social pastors. But `to be "social" ', Wiese insists, ìs not the same as being i mplication

inadequacy

independence

good or righteous or "righteous in the eyes of God" ' (1917). To some of inferiority

institution

insurance

Wiese's students we owe instructive historical studies on the spreading of the intercourse

justice

knowledge

term `social' (see my references in 1976:180).

laws

leader

life

market economy

medicine

migration

The extraordinary variety of uses to which the word `social' has since mind

morality

morals

been put in English is brought home vividly when in the Fontana needs

obligation

opportunity

Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977), cited earlier in another context, is order

organism

orientation

found, appropriately preceded by `Soap Opera', a series of no less than outcast

ownership

partner

thirty-five combinations of `social' with some noun or other, from passion

peace

pension

`Social Action' tòSocial Wholes'. In a similar effort, R. Williams's Key person

philosophy

pleasure

Words (1976), the author, although generally referring the reader, with point of view

policy

position

the conventional 'q.v.', to corresponding entries, departed from this power

priority

privilege

114

115

THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge problem

process

product

one's ideological premises.

progress

property

psychology

rank

realism

realm

On current American usage of the expression see the late Mario Pei's Weasel Rechtsstaat

recognition

reform

Words: The Art of Saying What You Don't Mean (1978), which credits Theodore relations

remedy

research

Roosevelt with having coined the term in 1 918, thus suggesting that seventy response

responsibility

revolution

years ago American statesmen were remarkably well educated. Yet the right

role

rule of law

reader will not find in that book the prize weasel word `social'.

satisfaction

science

security

service

signals

significance

Though abuse of the word `social' is international, it has taken Soziolekt (group speech)

solidarity

spirit

perhaps its

most extreme forms in

West

Germany where the

structure

stability

standing

constitution of 1949 employed the expression sozialer Rechtsstaat (social status

struggle

student

rule of law) and whence the conception of `social market economy' has studies

survey

system

spread - in a sense which its populariser Ludwig Erhard certainly never talent

teleology

tenets

intended. (He once assured me in conversation that to him the market tension

theory

thinkers

economy did not have to be made social but was so already as a result of thought

traits

usefulness

its origin.) But while the rule of law and the market are, at the start, utility

value

views

fairly clear concepts, the attributèsocial' empties them of any clear virtue

want

waste

meaning. From these uses of the word `social', German scholars have wealth

will

work

come to the conclusion that their government is constitutionally subject worker

world

to the Sozialstaatsprinzip, which means little less than that the rule of law has been suspended. Likewise, such German scholars see a conflict Many of the combinations given here are even more widely used in a between Rechtsstaat and Sozialstaat and entrench the soziale Rechtsstaat i n negative,

critical

form: thus `social adjustment' becomes `social

their constitution - one, I may perhaps say, that was written by Fabian maladjustment', and the same for `social disorder', `social injustice', muddle-heads inspired by the nineteenth-century inventor of `National

`social insecurity', `social instability', and so on.

Socialism', Friedrich Naumann (H. Maier, 1972:8).

It is difficult to conclude from this list alone whether the word `social'

Similarly, the term `democracy' used to have a fairly clear meaning; yet has acquired so many different meanings as to become useless as a tool

`social democracy' not only served as the name for the radical Austro--

of communication. However this may be, its practical effect is quite Marxism of the inter-war period but now has been chosen in Britain as a clear and at least threefold. First, it tends pervertedly to insinuate a label for a political party committed to a sort of Fabian socialism. Yet the notion that we have seen from previous chapters to be misconceived -

traditional term for what is now called thèsocial state' was `benevolent namely, that what has been brought about by the impersonal and despotism', and the very real problem of achieving such despotism spontaneous processes of the extended order is actually the result of democratically, i.e., while preserving individual freedom, is simply wished deliberate human creation. Second, following from this, it appeals to away by the concoction `social democracy'.

men to redesign what they never could have designed at all. And third, it also has acquired the power to empty the nouns it qualifies of their

'Social justice' and `Social Rights'

meaning.

In this last effect, it has in fact become the most harmful instance of Much the worst use of `social', one that wholly destroys the meaning of what, after Shakespeare's Ì can suck melancholy out of a song, as a any word it qualifies, is in the almost universally used phrasèsocial weasel suck eggs' ( As You Like It, 11,5), some Americans call àweasel justice'. Though I have dealt with this particular matter already at word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving some length, particularly in the second volume on The Mirage of Social a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which Justice in my Law, Legislation and Liberty, I must at least briefly state the they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel point again here, since it plays such an important part in arguments for word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, and against socialism. The phrasèsocial justice' is, as a distinguished 116

117

THE FATAL CONCEIT

OUR POISONED LANGUAGE

man more courageous than I bluntly expressed it long ago, simply à through the market, the size of an individual's contribution to the semantic fraud from the same stable as People's Democracy' (Curran, overall

product, nor can it otherwise be determined how much 1958:8). The alarming extent to which the term seems already to have remuneration must be tendered to someone to enable him to choose the perverted the thinking of the younger generation is shown by a recent activity which will add most to the flow of goods and services offered at Oxford doctor's thesis on Social justice ( Miller, 1976), in which the large. Of course if the latter should be considered morally good, then traditional conception of justice is referred to by the extraordinary the market turns out to produce a supremely moral result.

remark that `there appears to be a category of private justice'.

Mankind is split into two hostile groups by promises that have no I have seen it suggested that `social' applies to everything that realisable content. The sources of this conflict cannot be dissipated by reduces or removes differences of income. But why call such action compromise, for every concession to factual error merely creates morèsocial'? Perhaps because it is a method of securing majorities, that is, unrealisable expectations. Yet, an anti-capitalist ethic continues to votes in addition to those one expects to get for other reasons? This does develop on the basis of 'errors by people who condemn the wealth-seem to be so, but it also means of course that every exhortation to us to

-generating institutions to which they themselves owe their existence.

bèsocial' is an appeal for a further step towards thèsocial justice' of Pretending to be lovers of freedom, they condemn several property, socialism. Thus use of the term `social' becomes virtually equivalent to contract,

competition,

advertising,

profit,

and even money itself.

the call for `distributive justice'. This is, however, irreconcilable with a Imagining that their reason can tell them how to arrange human efforts competitive market order, and with growth or even maintenance of to serve their innate wishes better, they themselves pose a grave threat population and of wealth. Thus people have come, through such errors, to civilisation.

to call `social' what is the main obstacle to the very maintenance of

`society'. `Social' should really be called 'anti-social'.

It is probably true that men would be happier about their economic conditions if they felt that the relative positions of individuals were just.

Yet the whole idea behind distributive justice - that each individual ought to receive what he morally deserves - is meaningless in the extended order of human cooperation (or the catallaxy), because the available product (its size, and even its existence) depends on what is in one sense a morally indifferent way of allocating its parts. For reasons already explored, moral desert cannot be determined objectively, and in any case the adaptation of the larger whole to facts yet to be discovered requires that we accept that `success is based on results, not on motivation' (Alchian, 1950:213). Any extended system of cooperation must adapt itself constantly to changes in its natural environment ( which include the life, health and strength of its members); the demand that only changes with just effect should occur is ridiculous. It is nearly as ridiculous as the belief that deliberate organisation of response to such changes can be just. Mankind could neither have reached nor could now maintain its present numbers without an i nequality that is neither determined by, nor reconcilable with, any deliberate moral judgements. Effort of course will improve individual chances, but it alone cannot secure results. The envy of those who have tried just as hard, although fully understandable, works against the common interest. Thus, if the common interest is really our interest, we must not give in to this very human instinctual trait, but instead allow the market process to determine the reward. Nobody can ascertain, save 11 8

119

EIGHT

THE EXTENDED ORDER AND POPULATION GROWTH

hungry existence' as a hunter (1795:139). (The native American tribes THE EXTENDED ORDER AND

that continued to engage primarily in hunting were displaced also from POPULATION GROWTH

another direction: by tribes that had learnt to practise agriculture.) Although the displacement of one group by another, and of one set of practices by another, has often been bloody, it does not need always to be so. No doubt the course of events differed from place to place, and we can hardly go into the details here, but one can imagine many different sequences of events. In some places invaded, as it were, by the extended order, those following new practices, who could extract more The most decisive of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the from the given land, would often be able to offer other occupants, in number of its inhabitants.

return for access to their land (without the occupants having to do any Adam Smith

work at all, and without the ìnvaders' having to use force), nearly as much as, and sometimes even more than, these occupants had obtained by hard toil. On the other hand, the very density of their own The Malthusian Scare: The Fear of Overpopulation settlements

would have enabled more advanced people to resist

I have been attempting to explain how the extended order of human attempts to evict them from extensive territories that they had used, and cooperation has evolved despite opposition from our instincts, despite needed, during periods when they themselves had practised more fear of all the uncertainties inherent in spontaneous processes, despite primitive methods of land use. Many of these processes may then have widespread economic ignorance, and despite the distillation of all these happened entirely peacefully, although the greater military strength of in movements that seek to use allegedly rational means to achieve commercially organised people will often have accelerated the process.

genuinely atavistic ends. I have also maintained that the extended order Even if the extension of the market and the growth of population would collapse, and that much of our population would suffer and die, if could be achieved entirely by peaceful means, well-informed and such movements ever did truly succeed in displacing the market. Like it thoughtful people are, nevertheless, increasingly reluctant today to or not, the current world population already exists. Destroying its continue to accept the association between population growth and the material foundation in order to attain the èthical' or instinctually rise of civilisation. Quite the contrary, as they contemplate our present gratifying improvements advocated by socialists would be tantamount population density and, more especially, the acceleration in the rate of to condoning the death of billions and the impoverishment of the rest.

population increase during the past three hundred years, they have (See also my 1954/1967:208; and 1983:25-29.)

become highly alarmed, and construe the prospect of increasing growth The close connection between population size and the presence of, of population as a disaster of nightmare quality. Even a sensible and benefits of, certain evolved practices, institutions, and forms of philosopher like A. G. N. Flew (1967:60) praised Julian Huxley for human interaction is hardly a new discovery. That às it is the power of recognising early, `before this was even as widely admitted as it now is, exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of that human fertility represents the number one threat to the present and this division must always be limited by the extent of this power, or, in future welfare of the human race'.

other words, by the extent of the market' was one of Adam Smith's I have been contending that socialism constitutes a threat to the profoundest insights (1776/1976:31); cf. also the twòFragments on the present and future welfare of the human race, in the sense that neither Division of Labour' in Lectures on jurisprudence (1978:582-586). That socialism nor any other known substitute for the market order could those following competitive market practices would, as they grew in sustain the current population of the world. But reactions like the one numbers, displace others who followed different customs, was also seen just quoted, as often as not made by people who do not themselves early. Following John Locke's similar claim in the Second Treatise advocate socialism, suggest that a market order that produces, and is (1690/1887), the American historian James Sullivan remarked, as early produced by, such a large population also poses a serious threat to the as 1795, how the native Americans had been displaced by European welfare of mankind. Obviously this conflict must now be addressed.

colonists, and that now five hundred thinking beings could prosper in The modern idea that population growth threatens worldwide the same area where previously only a single savage could `drag out a pauperisation is simply a mistake. It is largely a consequence of 12 0

121

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE EXTENDED ORDER AND POPULATION GROWTH

oversimplifying the Malthusian theory of population; Thomas Malthus's they have become so different: new possibilities of specialisation -

theory made a reasonable first approach to the problem in his own time, depending not so much on any increase in individual intelligence but on but modern conditions make it irrelevant. Malthus's assumption that growing differentiation of individuals - provide the basis for a more human labour could be regarded as a more or less homogeneous factor successful use of the earth's resources. This in turn requires an of production (i.e., wage labour was all of the same kind, employed in extension of the network of indirect reciprocal services which the agriculture, with the same tools and the same opportunities) was not far signalling mechanism of the market secures. As the market reveals ever from the truth in the economic order that then existed (a theoretical new opportunities of specialisation, the two-factor model, with its two-factor economy). For Malthus, who was also one of the first Malthusian conclusions, becomes increasingly inapplicable.

discoverers of the law of decreasing returns, this must have indicated The widely prevailing fear that the growth of population that attends that every increase in the number of labourers would lead to a reduction and fosters all this is apt to lead to general impoverishment and disaster of what is now called marginal productivity, and therefore of worker is thus largely due to the misunderstanding of a statistical calculation.

income, particularly once the best land had been occupied by plots of This is not to deny that an increase of population may lead to a optimum size. (On the relation between Malthus's two theorems see reduction of average incomes. But this possibility is also misinterpreted McCleary, 1953:111.)

- the misinterpretation here being due to conflating the average income This ceases to be true, however, under the changed conditions we of a number of existing people in different income classes with the have been discussing, wherein labour is not homogeneous but is average income of a later, larger number of people. The proletariat are diversified and specialised. With the intensification of exchange, and an additional population that, without new opportunities of employment, i mproving techniques of communication and transportation, an increase would never have grown up. The fall in average income occurs simply of numbers and density of occupation makes division of labour because great population growth generally involves a greater increase of advantageous, leads to radical diversification, differentiation and the poorer, rather than the richer, strata of a population. But it is specialisation, makes it possible to develop new factors of production, incorrect to conclude that anybody needs to have become poorer in the and heightens productivity (see chapters two and three above, and also process. No single member of an existing community need to have below). Different skills, natural or acquired, become distinct scarce become poorer (though some well-to-do people are likely, in the process, factors, often manifoldly complementary; this makes it worthwhile to to be displaced by some of the newcomers and to descend to a lower workers to acquire new skills which will then fetch different market level).

Indeed, everyone who was already there might have grown prices. Voluntary specialisation is guided by differences in expected somewhat richer; and yet average incomes may have decreased if large rewards. Thus labour may yield increasing rather than decreasing numbers of poor people have been added to those formerly present. It is returns.

A denser population can also employ techniques and trivially true that a reduction of the average is compatible with all technology that would have been useless in more thinly occupied income groups having increased in numbers, but with higher ones regions; and if such technologies have already been developed elsewhere increasing in numbers less than the lower ones. That is, if the base of they may well be imported and adopted rapidly (provided the required the income pyramid grows more than its height, the average income of capital can be obtained). Even the bare fact of living peacefully in the increased total will be smaller.

constant contact with larger numbers makes it possible to utilise But it would be more accurate to conclude from this that the process available resources more fully.

of growth benefits the larger number of the poor more than the smaller When, in such a way, labour ceases to be a homogeneous factor of number of the rich. Capitalism created the possibility of employment. It production, Malthus's conclusions cease to apply. Rather, an increase of created the conditions wherein people who have not been endowed by population may now, because of further differentiation, make still further their parents with the tools and land needed to maintain themselves and increases of population possible, and for indefinite periods population their offspring could be so equipped by others, to their mutual benefit.

increase may be both self-accelerating and a pre-requisite for any For the process enabled people to live poorly, and to have children, who advance in both material and (because of the individuation made otherwise, without the opportunity for productive work, could hardly possible) spiritual civilisation.

even have grown to maturity and multiplied: it brought into being and It is, then, not simply more men, but more different men, which kept millions alive who otherwise would not have lived at all and who, if brings an increase in productivity. Men have become powerful because they had lived for a time, could not have afforded to procreate. In this 1 2 2

123

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE EXTENDED ORDER AND POPULATION GROWTH

way the poor benefited more from the process. Karl Marx was thus artificial support of this growth from outside, there is little cause for right to claim that `capitalism' created the proletariat: it gave and gives them concern. Morally, we have as little right to prevent the growth of life.

population in other parts of the world as we have a duty to assist it. On Thus the whole idea that the rich wrested away from the poor what, the other hand, a moral conflict may indeed arise if materially advanced without such acts of violence would, or at least might, belong to them, is countries continue to assist and indeed even subsidise the growth of absurd.

populations in regions, such as perhaps the Sahel zone in Central The size of the stock of capital of a people, together with its Africa, where there appears to exist little prospect that its present accumulated traditions and practices for extracting and communicating population, let alone an increased one, will in the foreseeable future be information,

determine

whether that people can maintain large

able to maintain itself by its own efforts. With any attempt to maintain numbers. People will be employed, and materials and tools produced to populations beyond the volume at which accumulated capital could still serve future needs of unknown persons, only if those who can invest be currently reproduced, the number that could be maintained would capital to bridge the interval between present outlay and future return diminish. Unless we interfere, only such populations will increase will gain an increment from doing this which is at least as great as what further as can feed themselves. The advanced countries, by assisting they could have obtained from other uses of that capital.

populations such as that in the Sahel to increase, are arousing Thus without the rich - without those who accumulated capital -

expectations,

creating

conditions involving obligations, and thus

those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, assuming a grave responsibility on which they are very likely sooner or scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought later to default. Man is not omnipotent; and recognising the limits of his would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise. The powers may enable him to approach closer to realising his wishes than creation of capital altered such conditions more than anything else. As following natural impulses to remedy remote suffering about which he the capitalist became able to employ other people for his own purposes, can, unfortunately, do little if anything.

his ability to feed them served both him and them. This ability In any case, there is no danger whatever that, in any foreseeable i ncreased further as some individuals were able to employ others not future with which we can be concerned, the population of the world as a just directly to satisfy their own needs but to trade goods and services whole will outgrow its raw material resources, and every reason to with countless others. Thus property, contract, trade, and the use of assume that inherent forces will stop such a process long before that capital did not simply benefit a minority.

could happen. (See the studies of Julian L. Simon (1977, 1981a & b), Envy and ignorance lead people to regard possessing more than one Esther Boserup (1981), Douglas North (1973, 1981) and Peter Bauer needs for current consumption as a matter for censure rather than (1981), as well as my own 1954:15 and 1967:208.)

merit. Yet the idea that such capital must be accumulated àt the For there are, in the temperate zones of all continents except Europe, expense of others' is a throwback to economic views that, however wide regions which can not merely bear an increase in population, but obvious they may seem to some, are actually groundless, and make an whose inhabitants can hope to approach the standards of general accurate understanding of economic development impossible.

wealth, comfort, and civilisation that thèWestern' world has already reached only by increasing the density of their occupation of their land The Regional Character of the Problem

and the intensity of exploitation of its resources. In these regions the population must multiply if its members are to achieve the standards for Another source of misunderstanding is the tendency to think of which they strive. It is in their own interest to increase their numbers, population growth in purely global terms. The population problem and it would be presumptuous, and hardly defensible morally, to advise must be seen as regional, with different aspects in different areas. The them, let alone to coerce them, to hold down their numbers. While real problem is whether the numbers of inhabitants of particular regions serious problems may arise if we attempt indiscriminately to preserve tend, for whatever reason, to outgrow the resources of their own areas all human lives everywhere, others cannot legitimately object to an (including the resources they can use to trade).

increase in numbers on the part of a group that is able to maintain its As long as an increase in population has been made possible by the own numbers by its own efforts. Inhabitants of countries already growing productivity of the populations in the regions concerned, or by wealthy hardly have any right to call for an ènd to growth' (as did the more effective utilisation of their resources, and not by deliberate Club of Rome or the later production Global 2000), or to obstruct the 1 2 4

1 25

THE FATAL CONCEIT

THE EXTENDED ORDER AND POPULATION GROWTH

countries in question, which rightly resent any such policies.

part of humankind can now maintain itself just because its members are Some notions that attend such recommended policies for restricting so flexible, just because there are so many different individuals whose population - for example, that advanced peoples should turn parts of different gifts enable them to differentiate themselves from one another the territories inhabited by still undeveloped people into a sort of nature even further by absorbing a boundless variety of combinations of park - are indeed outrageous. The idyllic image of happy primitives differing streams of traditions.

who enjoy their rural poverty and will gladly forego the development The diversity for which increasing density provided new opportun-that alone can give many of them access to what they have come to ities was essentially that of labour and skills, of information and regard as the benefits of civilisation is based on fantasy. Such benefits knowledge, of property and incomes. The process is neither simple nor do, as we have seen, demand certain instinctual and other sacrifices.

causal nor predictable, for at each step increasing population density But less advanced people must decide for themselves, individually, merely creates unrealised possibilities which may or may not be whether material comfort and advanced culture is worth the sacrifices discovered and realised rapidly. Only where some earlier population involved. They should, of course, not be forced to modernise; nor should had already passed through this stage and its example could be they be prevented, through a policy of isolation, from seeking the i mitated, could the process be very rapid. Learning proceeds through a opportunities of modernisation.

multiplicity of channels and presupposes a great variety of individual With the sole exception of instances where the increase of the positions and connections among groups and individuals through which numbers of the poor has led governments to redistribute incomes in possibilities of collaboration emerge.

their favour, there is no instance in history wherein an increase of Once people learn to take advantage of new opportunities offered by population reduced the standards of life of those in that population who increased density of population (not only because of the specialisation had already achieved various levels. As Simon has convincingly argued, brought about by division of labour, knowledge and property, but alsò There are not now, and there never have been, any empirical data by some individual accumulation of new forms of capital), this becomes showing that population growth or size or density have a negative effect the basis of yet further increases. Thanks to multiplication, differention the standard of living' (1981a:18, and see also his major works on ation, communication and interaction over increasing distances, and this subject, 1977 and 1981b).

transmission through time, mankind has become a distinct entity preserving certain structural features that can produce effects beneficial to a further increase of numbers.

Diversity and Differentiation

So far as we know, the extended order is probably the most complex Differentiation is the key to understanding population growth, and we structure in the universe - a structure in which biological organisms should pause to expand on this crucial point. The unique achievement that are already highly complex have acquired the capacity to learn, to of man, leading to many of his other distinct characteristics, is his assimilate, parts of suprapersonal traditions enabling them to adapt differentiation and diversity. Apart from a few other species in which themselves from moment to moment into an ever-changing structure selection' artificially imposed by

man has produced comparable

possessing an order of a still higher level of complexity. Step by step, diversity, man's diversification is unparalleled. This occurred because, momentary impediments to further population increase are penetrated, in the course of natural selection, humans developed a highly efficient increases in population provide a foundation for further ones, and so on, organ for learning from their fellows. This has made the increase of leading to a progressive and cumulative process that does not end man's numbers, over much of his history, not, as in other instances, self--

before all the fertile or richly endowed parts of the earth are similarly limiting, but rather self-stimulating. Human population grew in a sort of densely occupied.

chain reaction in which greater density of occupation of territory tended to produce new opportunities for specialisation and thus led to an increase The Centre and the Periphery

of individual productivity and in turn to a further increase of numbers.

There also developed among such large numbers of people not only a And it may indeed end there: I do not think that the much-dreaded variety of innate attributes but also an enormous variety of streams of population explosion - leading tòstanding room only' - is going to cultural traditions among which their great intelligence enabled them to occur. The whole story of population growth may now be approaching select - particularly during their prolonged adolescence. The greater its end, or at least approaching a very new level. For the highest 1 2 6

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population

growth has never taken place in developed market

The increase of population taking place in these cities stems from the economies but always on the peripheries of developed economies, fact that people living on peripheries of market economies, while among those poor who had no fertile land and equipment that would already

profiting from their participation in them (through, for have enabled them to maintain themselves, but to whom `capitalists'

example, access to more advanced medicine, to better information of all offered new opportunities for survival.

sorts, and to advanced economic institutions and practices), have These peripheries are, however, disappearing. Moreover, there are nonetheless not adapted fully to the traditions, morality, and customs of hardly any countries left to enter the periphery: the explosive process of these economies. For example, they still may practice customs of population expansion has, during the last generation or so, very nearly procreation stemming from circumstances outside the market economy reached the last corners of the earth.

where, for instance, the first response of poor people to a slight increase Consequently there is strong reason to doubt the accuracy of of wealth had been to produce a number of descendants at least extrapolating the trend of the last several centuries - of an indefinitely sufficient to provide for them in their old age. These old customs are increasing acceleration of population growth - into the indefinite future.

now gradually, and in some places even quickly, disappearing, and We may hope and expect that once the remaining reservoir of people these peripheral groups, particularly those closest to the core, are who are now entering the extended order is exhausted, the growth of absorbing traditions that allow them better to regulate their propagation.

their numbers, which distresses people so much, will gradually recede.

After all, the growing commercial centers become magnets in part just After all, no fairly wealthy group shows any such tendency. We do not because they provide models of how to achieve through imitation what know enough to say when the turning point will be reached, but we can many people desire.

fairly assume that it will be very long indeed before we approach the These shanty towns, which are interesting in themselves, also horrors which the fancy of the ineluctable indefinite increase of mankind illustrate several other themes developed earlier. For example, the conjures up.

population of the countryside around these cities has not been depleted I suspect that the problem is already diminishing: that the population at the expense of the shanty towns; usually it too has profited from the growth rate is now approaching, or has already reached, its maximum, growth of the cities. The cities offered sustenance to millions who and will not increase much further but will decline. One cannot of otherwise would have died or never been born had they (or their course say for certain, but it appears that - even if this has not already parents) not migrated to them. Those who did migrate to the cities (or occurred - some time in the last decade of this century population to their peripheries) were led there neither by the benevolence of the growth will reach a maximum and that, afterwards, it will decline city folk in offering jobs and equipment nor by the benevolent advice of unless there is deliberate intervention to stimulate it.

their better-off country `neighbours', but rather by following rumours Already in the mid 1960's, the annual rate of growth of the about other unknown poor folk (perhaps in some remote mountain developing regions peaked at around 2.4 percent, and began to decline valley) who were saved by being drawn into the growing towns by news to the present level of around 2.1 percent. And the population growth of paid work available there. Ambition, even greed, for a better life, not rate in more developed regions was already on the decline by this same beneficence, preserved these lives: yet it did better than beneficence ti me. In the mid 'sixties, then, population seems to have reached, and could have done. The people from the countryside learned from market then retreated from, an all-time high annual growth rate (United signals - although they could hardly have understood the matter in Nations, 1980, and J. E. Cohen, 1984:50-51). As Cohen writes: such abstract terms - that income not currently consumed by rich men

` humankind has begun to practice or to experience the restraint that in the cities was being used to provide others with tools or livelihood in governs all its fellow species.'

payment for work, enabling people to survive who had not inherited The processes at work may become more comprehensible if we take a arable land and the tools to cultivate it.

closer look at the populations at the peripheries of the developing Of course it may be hard for some to accept that those living in these economies. The best examples are perhaps to be found in those fast-shanty towns deliberately chose them over the countryside (about growing cities of the developing world - Mexico City, Cairo, Calcutta, which people have such romantic feelings) as places of sustenance. Yet, Sao Paulo or Jakarta, Caracas, Lagos, Bombay - where the population as with the Irish and English peasants Engels found in the Manchester has doubled or more over a short span and where old city centers tend slums of his own time, that is what happened.

to be surrounded by shanty towns or 'bidonvilles'.

The squalor of these peripheral areas is primarily due to the very 1 2 8

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economic marginality that dictated residence there rather than in the formerly able to maintain themselves are entirely fictional.

Most

countryside. Also not to be ignored are the adversècyclical' effects of individuals who now make up the proletariat could not have existed third-world governments' attempts to manage their economies, and of before others provided them with means to subsist. Although these folk the ability of these governments to remove employment opportunities may feel exploited, and politicians may arouse and play on these feelings from peripheral groups as concessions to established labour interests or to gain power, most of the Western proletariat, and most of the millions of misguided social reformers.

the developing world, owe their existence to opportunities that advanced Finally - and here one may sometimes witness the selection process at countries have created for them. All this is not confined to Western something like first hand, and in its most naked form - the effects of countries or the developing world. Communist countries such as Russia commercial morals do not fall most harshly and visibly on those who would be starving today if their populations were not kept alive by the have already learnt to practise them in a relatively more advanced Western world - although the leaders of these countries would be hard put form, but rather on newcomers who have not yet learnt how to cope to admit publicly that we can support the current population of the world, with them. Those who live on the peripheries do not yet fully observe including that of the communist countries, only if we maintain successfully the new practices (and thus are almost always perceived as 'undesir-and improve the basis of private property which makes our extended order able' and often thought even to border on the criminal). They are also possible.

experiencing personally the first impact that some practices of more Capitalism also introduced a new form of obtaining income from advanced civilisation exert on people who still feel and think according production that liberates people in making them, and often their progeny to the morality of the tribe and village. However painful for them this as well, independent of family groups or tribes. This is so even if process may be, they too, or they especially, benefit from the division of capitalism is sometimes prevented from providing all it might for those labour formed by the practices of the business classes; and many of who wish to take advantage of it by monopolies of organised groups of them gradually change their ways, only then improving the quality of workers, ùnions', which create an artificial scarcity of their kind of their lives. At least a minimal change of conduct on their part will be a work by preventing those willing to do such work for a lower wage from condition for their being permitted to enter the larger established group doing so.

and gradually to gain an increasing share in its total product.

The general advantage of replacing concrete particular purposes by For the numbers kept alive by differing systems of rules decide which abstract rules manifests itself clearly in cases like these. Nobody system will dominate. These systems of rules will not necessarily be anticipated what was going to happen. Neither a conscious desire to those that the masses (of which the shanty-town dwellers are only a make the human species grow as fast as possible nor concern for dramatic example) themselves have already fully adopted, but those particular known lives produced that result. It was not always even followed by a nucleus around whose periphery increasing numbers those who first initiated new practices (saving, private property, and gather to participate in gains from the growing total product. Those such like) whose physical offspring thus gained better chances of who do at least partially adopt, and benefit from, the practices of the surviving. For these practices do not preserve particular lives but rather extended order often do so without being aware of the sacrifices such increase the chances

(or prospects or probabilities) of more rapid

changes will also eventually involve. Nor is it only primitive country propagation of the group. Such results were no more desired than folk who have had to learn hard lessons: military conquerors who lorded foreseen. Some of these practices may indeed have involved a decrease over a subject population and even destroyed its elite often later had to in esteem for some individual lives, a preparedness to sacrifice by learn, sometimes to their regret, that to enjoy local benefits required infanticide, to abandon the old and sick, or to kill the dangerous, in adopting local practices.

order to improve the prospects of maintaining and multiplying the rest.

We can hardly claim that to increase mankind is good in some absolute sense. We submit only that this effect, increase of particular populations Capitalism Gave Life to the Proletariat

following particular rules, led to the selection of those practices whose We may in our remaining sections perhaps draw together some of our dominance has become the cause of further multiplication. (Nor, as we saw main arguments and note some of their implications.

in chapter one, is it suggested that developed morals that restrain and If we ask what men most owe to the moral practices of those who are suppress certain innate feelings should wholly displace these feelings.

called capitalists the answer is: their very lives. Socialist accounts which Our inborn instincts are still important in our relations to our ascribe the existence of the proletariat to an exploitation of groups i mmediate neighbours, and in certain other situations as well.) 1 2n

1 2 1

THE FATAL CONCEIT

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Yet if the market economy did indeed prevail over other types of be affected, whereas the death of all females under forty-five would order because it enabled those groups that adopted its basic rules the destroy all possibility of preserving the strain.

better to multiply, then the calculation in market values is a calculation in terms But if for this reason all unknown lives must count equally in the of lives: i ndividuals guided by this calculation did what most helped to extended order - and in our own ideals we have closely approached this increase their numbers, although this could hardly have been their aim so far as government action is concerned - this aim has never intention.

governed behaviour in the small group or in our innate responses. Thus one is led to raise the question of the morality or goodness of the The Calculus of Costs Is a Calculus of Lives

principle.

Yet, as with every other organism, the main `purpose' to which man's Though the concept of àcalculus of lives' cannot be taken literally, it is physical make-up as well as his traditions are adapted is to produce more than a metaphor. There may be no simple quantitative other human beings. In this he has succeeded amazingly, and his relationships governing the preservation of human lives by economic conscious striving will have its most lasting effect only so far as, with or action, but the importance of the ultimate effects of market conduct can without his knowledge, it contributes to this result. There is no real hardly be overrated. Yet several qualifications have to be added. For point in asking whether those of his actions which do so contribute are the most part, only unknown lives will count as so many units when it is really `good', particularly if thus it is intended to inquire whether we like a question of sacrificing a few lives in order to serve a larger number the results. For, as we have seen, we have never been able to choose our elsewhere.

morals. Though there is a tendency to interpret goodness in a utilitarian Even if we do not like to face the fact, we constantly have to make way, to claim that `good' is what brings about desired results, this claim such decisions. Unknown individual lives, in public or private decisions, is neither true nor useful. Even if we restrict ourselves to common are not absolute values, and the builder of motor roads or of hospitals or usage, we find that the word `good' generally refers to what tradition electric equipment will never carry precautions against lethal accidents tells us we ought to do without knowing why - which is not to deny that to the maximum, because by avoiding costs this would cause elsewhere, justifications are always being invented for particular traditions. We can overall risks to human lives can be much reduced. When the army however perfectly well ask which among the many and conflicting rules surgeon after a battle engages in `triage' - when he lets one die who that tradition treats as good tend, under particular conditions, to might be saved, because in the time he would have to devote to saving preserve and multiply those groups that follow them.

him he could save three other lives (see Hardin, 1980:59, who defines

`triage' as `the procedure which saves the maximum of lives') - he is acting on a calculus of lives. This is another instance of how the Life Has No Purpose But Itself

alternative between saving more or fewer lives shapes our views, even if Life exists only so long as it provides for its own continuance. Whatever only as vague feelings about what ought to be done. The requirement of men live for, today most live only because of the market order. We have preserving the maximum number of lives is not that all individual lives become civilised by the increase of our numbers just as civilisation be regarded as equally important. It may be more important to save the made that increase possible: we can be few and savage, or many and life of the doctor, in our example above, than to save the lives of any civilised. If reduced to its population of ten thousand years ago, particular one of his patients: otherwise none might survive. Some lives mankind could not preserve civilisation. Indeed, even if knowledge are evidently more important in that they create or preserve other lives.

already gained were preserved in libraries, men could make little use of The good hunter or defender of the community, the fertile mother and it without numbers sufficient to fill the jobs demanded for extensive perhaps even the wise old man may be more important than most specialisation and division of labour. All knowledge available in books babies and most of the aged. On the preservation of the life of a good would not save ten thousand people spared somewhere after an atomic chief large numbers of other lives may depend. And the highly holocaust from having to return to a life of hunters and gatherers, productive may be more valuable to the community than other adult although it would probably shorten the total amount of time that individuals. It is not the present number of lives that evolution will tend to humankind would have to remain in such a condition.

maximise but the prospective stream of future lives. If in a group all men of When people began to build better than they knew because they fertile age, or all such women, and the required numbers to defend and began to subordinate concrete common goals to abstract rules that feed them, were preserved, the prospects of future growth would hardly enabled them to participate in a process of orderly collaboration that 1 32

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

NINE

nobody could survey or arrange, and which no one could have predicted, they created situations unintended and often undesired. We RELIGION AND THE GUARDIANS

may not like the fact that our rules were shaped mainly by their OF TRADITION

suitability for increasing our numbers, but we have little choice in the matter now (if we ever did), for we must deal with a situation that has already been brought into being. So many people already exist; and only a market economy can keep the bulk of them alive. Because of the rapid transfer of information, men everywhere now know what high standards of living are possible. Most of those who live in some more thinly settled places can hope to reach such standards only by Religion, even in its crudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality multiplying and settling their regions more densely - so increasing even long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy.

further the numbers that can be kept alive by a market economy.

Adam Smith

Since we can preserve and secure even our present numbers only by adhering to the same general kinds of principles, it is our duty - unless And others called it want of sense

we truly wish to condemn millions to starvation - to resist the claims of Always to rail at what they loved.

creeds that tend to destroy the basic principles of these morals, such as Bernard Mandeville

the institution of several property.

In any case, our desires and wishes are largely irrelevant. Whether Natural Selection from Among the Guardians of Tradition we desire further increases of production and population or not, we must

- merely to maintain existing numbers and wealth, and to protect them In closing this work, I would like to make a few informal remarks - they as best we can against calamity - strive after what, under favourable are intended as no more than that - about the connection between the conditions, will continue to lead, at least for some time, and in many argument of this book and the role of religious belief. These remarks places, to further increases.

may be unpalatable to some intellectuals because they suggest that, in their own long-standing conflict with religion, they were partly mistaken While I have not intended to evaluate the issue whether, if we had

- and very much lacking in appreciation.

the choice, we would want to choose civilisation, examining issues of This book has shown mankind as torn between two states of being.

population raises two relevant points. First, the spectre of a population On one hand are the kinds of attitudes and emotions appropriate to explosion that would make most lives miserable appears, as we have behaviour in the small groups wherein mankind lived for more than a seen, to be unfounded. Once this danger is removed, if one considers the hundred thousand years, wherein known fellows learnt to serve one realities of `bourgeois' life - but not utopian demands for a life free of all another, and to pursue common aims. Curiously, these archaic, more conflict, pain, lack of fulfilment, and, indeed, morality - one might think primitive attitudes and emotions are now supported by much of the pleasures and stimulations of civilisation not a bad bargain for those rationalism, and by the empiricism, hedonism, and socialism associated who do not yet enjoy them. But the question of whether we are better with it. On the other hand there is the more recent development in off civilised than not is probably unanswerable in any final way through cultural evolution wherein we no longer chiefly serve known fellows or such speculation. The second point is that the only thing close to an pursue common ends, but where institutions, moral systems, and objective assessment of the issue is to see what people do when they are traditions have evolved that have produced and now keep alive many given the choice - as we are not. The readiness with which ordinary ti mes more people than existed before the dawn of civilisation, people people of the Third

World - as opposed to Western-educated

who are engaged, largely peacefully though competitively, in pursuing intellectuals - appear to embrace the opportunities offered them by the thousands of different ends of their own choosing in collaboration with extended order, even if it means inhabiting for a time shanty towns at thousands of persons whom they will never know.

the

periphery,

complements evidence regarding the reactions of

How can such a thing have happened? How could traditions which European peasants to the introduction of urban capitalism, indicating people do not like or understand, whose effects they usually do not that people will usually choose civilisation if they have the choice.

appreciate and can neither see nor foresee, and which they are still 13 4

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ardently combating, continue to have been passed on from generation to resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true -

generation?

or verifiable or testable - in the same sense as are scientific statements, Part of the answer is of course the one with which we began, the and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation. I evolution of moral orders through group selection: groups that behave sometimes think that it might be appropriate to call at least some of in these ways simply survive and increase. But this cannot be the whole them, at least as a gesture of appreciation, `symbolic truths', since they story. If not from an understanding of their beneficial effect in creating did help their adherents tòbe fruitful and multiply and replenish the an as-yet unimaginable extended order of cooperation, whence did such earth and subdue it' ( Genesis 1:28). Even those among us, like myself, rules of conduct originate? More important, how were they preserved who are not prepared to accept the anthropomorphic conception of a against the strong opposition of instinct and, more recently, from the personal divinity ought to admit that the premature loss of what we assaults of reason? Here we come to religion.

regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a powerful Custom and tradition, both non-rational adaptations to the environ-support in the long development of the extended order that we now ment, are more likely to guide group selection when supported by totem enjoy, and that even now the loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, and taboo, or magical or religious beliefs - beliefs that themselves grew creates great difficulties.

from the tendency to interpret any order men encountered in an In any case, the religious view that morals were determined by animistic manner. At first the main function of such restraints on processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not individual action may have been to serve as signs of recognition among exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by members of the group. Later the belief in spirits that punished exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to transgressors led such restraints to be preserved. `The spirits are in achieve more than he could ever foresee. If we bear these things in general conceived as guardians of tradition.... Our ancestors live now mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are as spirits in the other world.... They become angry and make things said to have become somewhat sceptical of the validity of some of their bad if we do not obey custom' (Malinowski, 1936:25).

teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that But this is not yet sufficient for any real selection to occur, for such a loss of faith would lead to a decline of morals. No doubt they were beliefs and the rites and ceremonies associated with them must also right; and even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, work on another level. Common practices must have a chance to and the tradition that has provided not only our civilisation but our produce their beneficial effects on a group on a progressive scale before very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual selection by evolution can become effective. Meanwhile, how are they claims.

transmitted from generation to generation? Unlike genetic properties, The undoubted historical connection between religion and the values cultural properties are not transmitted automatically. Transmission and that have shaped and furthered our civilisation, such as the family and non-transmission from generation to generation are as much positive or several property, does not of course mean that there is any intrinsic negative contributions to a stock of traditions as are any contributions connection between religion as such and such values. Among the by individuals. Many generations will therefore probably be required to founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed ensure that any particular such traditions are indeed continued, and property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those that they do indeed eventually spread. Mythical beliefs of some sort which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, may be needed to bring this about, especially where rules of conduct which is both anti-property and anti-family (and also anti-religion), is conflicting with instinct are concerned. A merely utilitarian or even not promising. For it is, I believe, itself a religion which had its time, functionalist explanation of the different rites or ceremonies will be and which is now declining rapidly. In communist and socialist insufficient, and even implausible.

countries we are watching how the natural selection of religious beliefs We owe it partly to' mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, disposes of the maladapted.

particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable The decline of communism of which I speak is, of course, occurring mainly those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to where it has actually been implemented - and has therefore been allowed to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, disappoint utopian hopes. It lives on, however, in the hearts of those who we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilisation that have not experienced its real effects: in Western intellectuals and among the 1 3 6

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any question about what particular ruling clique may have coddled it poor on the periphery of the extended order, i.e., in the Third World.

during some particular period.

Among the former, there appears to be some growing sense that rationalism of the type criticised here is a false god; but the need for a god of some sort Some questions of language may also arise in describing and evaluating persists, and is met partly by such means as returning to a curious version of such developments. Ordinary language is inadequate to make the Hegelian dialectic which allows the illusion of rationality to coexist with a necessary distinctions sufficiently precise, especially where the concept system of belief closed to criticism by unquestioned commitment to a of knowledge is concerned. For instance, is knowledge involved when à humanist totality' (which, in fact, is itself supremely rationalistic in just the person has the habit of behaving in a manner that, without his knowing constructivist sense I have criticised). As Herbert Marcuse put it, `Real it, increases the likelihood that not only he and his family but also many freedom for individual existence (and not merely in the liberalist sense) is others unknown to him will survive - particularly if he has preserved possible only in a specifically structured polls, àrationally' organized this habit for altogether different and indeed quite inaccurate grounds?

society' (quoted in Jay, 1973:119. To see what this `rationality' means, see Obviously what guided him successfully is not what is generally meant ibid., 49, 57 60, 64, 81, 125, et passim). In the latter, `liberation theology'

)

by rational knowledge. Nor is it helpful to describe such acquired may fuse with nationalism to produce a powerful new religion with disastrous practices as èmotive' since they clearly are not always guided by what consequences for people already in dire economic straits (see O'Brien, 1 986).

may legitimately be called emotions either, even though certain factors, such as fear of disapproval or punishment (whether human or divine), may often support or preserve particular habits. In many if not most How would religion have sustained beneficial customs? Customs cases, those who won through were those who stuck tòblind habit' or whose beneficial effects were unperceivable by those practising them learnt through religious teaching such things as that `honesty is the best were likely to be preserved long enough to increase their selective policy', thereby beating cleverer fellows who had `reasoned' otherwise.

advantage only when supported by some other strong beliefs; and some As strategies for survival, counterparts of both rigidity and flexibility powerful supernatural or magic faiths were readily available to perform have played important roles in biological evolution; and morals that this role. As an order of human interaction became more extended, and took the form of rigid rules may sometimes have been more effective still more threatening to instinctual claims, it might for a time become than more flexible rules whose adherents attempted to steer their quite dependent on the continuing influence of some such religious practice, and alter their course, according to particular facts and beliefs - false reasons influencing men to do what was required to foreseeable consequences - and thus by something that it would be maintain the structure enabling them to nourish their enlarging easier to call knowledge.

numbers (see Appendix G).

But just as the very creation of the extended order was never So far as I personally am concerned I had better state that I feel as little intended, similarly there is no reason to suppose that the support entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I derived from religion usually was deliberately cultivated, or that there must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean.

was often anything `conspiratorial' about all this. It is naive -

I

certainly

reject

every anthropomorphic, personal, or animistic

particularly in light of our argument that we cannot observe the effects of interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people our morals - to imagine some wise elite coolly calculating the effects of succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mind-various morals, selecting among them, and conspiring to persuade the like acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant masses by Platonic `noble lies' to swallow an òpium of the people' and overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. I cannot attach thus to obey what advanced the interests of their rulers. No doubt meaning to words that in the structure of my own thinking, or in my choice among particular. versions of basic religious beliefs was often picture of the world, have no place that would give them meaning. It decided by expedient decisions of secular rulers. Moreover, religious would thus be dishonest of me were I to use such words as if they support was, from time to time, deliberately, sometimes even cynically, expressed any belief that I hold.

enlisted by secular rulers; but frequently these would have concerned I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here, but momentary disputes that hardly counted for much over long evolution-ultimately decided to do so because support by a professed agnostic ary periods - periods wherein the question whether the favoured rule may help religious people more unhesitatingly to pursue those contributed to the increase of the community was more decisive than 139

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THE FATAL CONCEIT

conclusions that we do share. Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or APPENDICES

values that keeps their community alive. The source of order that religion ascribes to a human-like divinity - the map or guide that will show a part successfully how to move within the whole - we now learn to see to be not outside the physical world but one of its characteristics, one far too complex for any of its parts possibly to form an ìmage' or

` picture' of it. Thus religious prohibitions against idolatry, against the making of such images, are well taken. Yet perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in `society' in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions?

On that question may rest the survival of our civilisation.

14 0

APPENDIX À NATURAL' VERSUS ÀRTIFICIAL'

Current scientific and philosophical usage is so deeply influenced by the Aristotelian tradition, which knows nothing of evolution, that existing dichotomies and contrasts not only usually fail to capture correctly the processes underlying the problems and conflicts discussed in chapter one, but actually hinder understanding of those problems and conflicts themselves. In this section I shall review some of these difficulties in classification, in the hope that some familiarity with the obstacles to understanding may in fact further understanding.

We may as well begin with the word `natural', the source of much controversy and many misunderstandings. The original meaning of the Latin root of `natural', as well as the Greek root of its equivalent

` physical', derive from verbs describing kinds of growth (nascor and phyo respectively; see Kerferd, 1981:111-150), so that it would be legitimate to describe as `natural' anything that has grown spontaneously and not been deliberately designed by a mind. In this sense our traditional, spontaneously evolved

morals are perfectly natural rather than

artificial, and it would seem fitting to call such traditional rules `natural law'.

But usage does not readily permit the understanding of natural law that I have just sketched. Rather, it tends to confine the word `natural'

to innate propensities or instincts that (as we saw in chapter one) often conflict with evolved rules of conduct. If such innate responses alone are described as `natural', and if - to make matters worse - only what is necessary to preserve an existing state of affairs, particularly the order of the small group or immediate community, is described as `good', we have to designate as both ùnnatural' and `bad' even the first steps taken towards observing rules and thereby adapting to changing conditions - that is, the first steps towards civilisation.

Now if `natural' must be used to mean innate or instinctual, and àrtificial' to mean the product of design, the results of cultural evolution (such as traditional rules) are clearly neither one nor the other

- and thus are not only `between instinct and reason', but also of course between `natural' (i.e., instinctual) and àrtificial' (i.e., the product of reasonable design). The exclusive dichotomy of `natural' and àrtificial', 1 43

THE FATAL CONCEIT

APPENDIX A

as well as the similar and related one of `passion' and `reason' - which, capable of forming orders of a lower degree, yet are themselves not the being exclusive, does not permit any area between these terms - has products of orders of a higher level. This teaches us to recognise our thus contributed greatly to the neglect and misunderstanding of the li mited power of explaining or designing an order belonging to a lower crucial exosomatic process of cultural evolution which produced the stage of the hierarchy of orders, as well as our inability to explain or traditions that determined the growth of civilisation. In effect, these design one of a higher order.

dichotomies define this area, and these processes, out of existence.

Having stated the general problem that interferes with clear usage of Yet if we go beyond these crude dichotomies, we see that the true these traditional terms, we may as well indicate briefly, taking David opposite to passion is not reason but traditional morals. The evolution Hume as an example, how even the thought of one of the most of a tradition of rules of conduct - standing between the processes of the i mportant thinkers in our tradition has been plagued by misunder-evolution of instinct and those of reason - is a distinct process which it standings arising from such false dichotomies. Hume is a particularly is quite mistaken to regard as a product of reason. Such traditional rules good example since he unfortunately chose for the moral traditions that have indeed grown naturally in the course of evolution.

I would really prefer to call natural the term àrtificial' (probably Growth is not an exclusive property of biological organisms. From the borrowing from the common-law writers' expression àrtificial reason').

proverbial snowball to the deposits of wind or the formation of crystals Ironically, this led to his being regarded as the founder of utilitarianism,

- or waterborne sand, the rising of mountains and the formation of despite his having stressed that `though the rules of justice be artificial complex molecules - nature is full of examples of increase of size or they are not arbitrary', and that therefore it is even not ìmproper to call structure. When we consider the emergence of structures of inter-them laws of nature' (1739/1886:11,258). He endeavoured to safeguard relations among organisms, we find that it is also perfectly correct, himself against constructivistic misinterpretations by explaining that he etymologically and logically, to use the word `growth' to describe them; ònly suppose[d] those reflections to be formed at once, which in fact and this is how I mean the word: namely, to designate a process arise insensibly and by degrees' (1739/1886:11,274). (Hume made use occurring in a self-maintaining structure.

here of the device which Scottish moral philosophers called `conjectural Thus to continue to contrast cultural with natural evolution leads history' (Stewart, 1829:VII, 90, and Medick, 1973:134-176) - a device back into the trap mentioned - the exclusive dichotomy between later often called `rational reconstruction' - in a manner that may àrtificial'

development guided by conscious design, and what is mislead and which his younger contemporary Adam Ferguson learnt assumed to bènatural' because it exhibits unchanging instinctual systematically to avoid). As these passages suggest, Hume came close to characteristics. Such interpretations of `natural' easily force one in the an evolutionary interpretation, even perceiving that `no form can persist direction of constructivist rationalism. Though constructivist interpre-unless it possesses those powers and organs necessary for its tations are no doubt superior to organismic èxplanations' (now subsistence: some new order or economy must be tried and so on, generally rejected as empty) that merely substitute one unexplained without intermission; till at last some order which can support and process for another, we should recognise that there are two distinct maintain itself, is fallen upon'; and that man cannot `pretend to an kinds of evolutionary process - both of which are perfectly natural exemption from the lot of all living animals [because the] perpetual war processes. Cultural evolution, although a distinct process, remains in among all living creatures' must go on (1779/1886:11, 429, 436). As has i mportant respects more similar to genetic or biological evolution than been well said, he practically recognised that `there is a third category to developments guided by reason or foreknowledge of the effects of between natural and artificial which shares certain characteristics with decisions.

both' (Haakonssen, 1981:24).

The similarity of the order of human interaction to that of biological Yet the temptation to try to explain the function of self-organising organisms has of course often been noticed. But so long as we were structures by showing how such a structure might have been formed by unable to explain how the. orderly structures of nature were formed, as a creating mind is great; and it is thus understandable that some of long as we lacked an account of evolutionary selection, the analogies Hume's followers interpreted his term àrtificial' in this way, building perceived were of limited help. With evolutionary selection, however, on it a utilitarian theory of ethics according to which man consciously we are now supplied with a key to a general understanding of the chooses his morals for their recognised utility. This may seem a curious formation of order in life, mind and interpersonal relations.

view to ascribe to someone who had stressed that `the rules of morality Incidentally, some of those orders, like that of the mind, may be are not the conclusions of reason' (1739/1886:11, 235), but it was a 1 4 4

1 45

THE FATAL CONCEIT

APPENDIX A

misinterpretation that came naturally to a Cartesian rationalist such as much affected the development of research that a report of the 1980

C. V. Helvetius, from whom Jeremy Bentham admittedly derived his meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher and Arzte could say that own constructions (see Everett, 1931:110).

`for modern science of nature a world of things and phenomena has become a world of structures and orders'.

Though in Hume, and also in the works of Bernard Mandeville, we can Such recent advances in natural science have shown how right the watch the gradual emergence of the twin concepts of the formations of American scholar Simon N. Patten was when, nearly ninety years ago, spontaneous orders and of selective evolution (see Hayek, 1967/78:250, he wrote that `just as Adam Smith was the last of the moralists and the 1963/67:106-121 and 1967/78a:249-266), it was Adam Smith and first of the economists, so Darwin was the last of the economists and the Adam Ferguson who first made systematic use of this approach. Smith's first of the biologists' (1899, XXIII). Smith proves to have been even work marks the breakthrough of an evolutionary approach which has more than that: the paradigm he provided has since become a tool of progressively displaced the stationary Aristotelian view. The nineteenth-great power in many branches of scientific effort.

- century enthusiast who claimed that the Wealth of Nations was in Nothing better illustrates the humanistic derivation of the concept of i mportance second only to the Bible has often been ridiculed; but he evolution than that biology had to borrow its vocabulary from the may not have exaggerated so much. Even Aristotle's disciple Thomas humanities. The term `genetic' that has now become perhaps the key Aquinas could not conceal from himself that multae utilitates impedirentur technical term for the theory of biological evolution was apparently first si omnia peccata districte prohiberentur - that much that is useful would be used in its German form (genetisch) (Schulze, 1913:1, 242), in the writings prevented if all sins were strictly prohibited (Summa Theologica, II, ii, q.

of J. G. Herder (1767), Friedrich Schiller (1793) and C. M. Wieland 78 i).

(1800), long before Thomas Carlyle introduced it into English. It was While Smith has been recognised by several writers as the originator used particularly in linguistics after Sir William Jones had in 1787

of cybernetics (Emmet, 1958:90, Hardin, 1961:54), recent examinations discovered the common descent of the Indo-European languages; of Charles Darwin's notebooks (Vorzimmer, 1977; Gruber, 1974) and by the time that this had been elaborated in 1816 by Franz Bopp, suggest that his reading of Adam Smith in the crucial year 1838 led the conception of cultural evolution had become a commonplace. We Darwin to his decisive breakthrough.

find the term used again in 1836 by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1977:111, Thus from the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century 389 and 418), who in the same work also argued that ìf one conceived stem the chief impulses towards a theory of evolution, the variety of of the formation of language, as is most natural, as successive

, it

disciplines now known as cybernetics, general systems theory, syner-becomes necessary to ascribe to it, as to all origin in nature, a system of getics, autopoiesis, etc., as well as the understanding of the superior self-evolution' (with thanks to Professor R. Keller, Dusseldorf, for this ordering power of the market system, and of the evolution also of reference). Was it an accident that Humboldt was also a great advocate language, morals, and law (Ullman-Margalit, 1978, and Keller, 1982).

of individual freedom? And after the publication of Charles Darwin's Adam Smith nevertheless remains the butt of jokes, even among work we find lawyers and linguists (aware of their kinship already in economists, many of whom have not yet discovered that the analysis of ancient Rome (Stein, 1966: chapter 3)), protest that they had been self-ordering processes must be the chief task of any science of thè Darwinians before Darwin' (Hayek, 1973:153). It was not until after market order. Another great economist, Carl Menger, a little more than William Bateson's Problems of Genetics (1913) that `genetics' rapidly a hundred years after Adam Smith, clearly perceived that `this genetic became the distinctive name for biological evolution. Here we shall element is inseparable from the conception of theoretical science'

adhere to its modern use, established by Bateson, for biological ( Menger, 1883/1933:11,183, and cf, his earlier use of the term `genetic'

inheritance through `genes', to distinguish it from cultural inheritance in Menger, 1871/1934:1,250). It was largely through such endeavors to through learning - which does not mean that the distinction can always understand the formation of human interaction through evolution and be carried through precisely. The two forms of inheritance frequently spontaneous formation of order that these approaches have become the interact, particularly by genetic inheritance determining what can or main tools for dealing with such complex phenomena for the cannot be inherited by learning (i.e., culturally).

explanation of which `mechanical laws' of one-directional causation are no longer adequate (see Appendix B).

In recent years the spreading of this evolutionary approach has so 14 6

1 47

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX B

even longer in England through the decisive influence of Alfred THE COMPLEXITY OF PROBLEMS OF

Marshall and his school) persist to the present.

HUMAN INTERACTION

John Stuart Mill perhaps played the most important role in this connection. He had early put himself under socialist influence, and through this bias acquired a great appeal tòprogressive' intellectuals, establishing a reputation as the leading liberal and thèSaint of Rationalism'. Yet he probably led more intellectuals into socialism than any other single person: fabianism was in its beginnings essentially formed by a group of his followers.

Although physical scientists sometimes appear unwilling to recognise Mill had barred his way to comprehending the guide function of the greater complexity of the problems of human interaction, the fact prices by his doctrinaire assurance that `there is nothing in the laws of itself was seen more than a hundred years ago by no less a figure than value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up'

James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1877 wrote that the term `physical (1848/1965, Works: III, 456), an assurance that made him believe that science' is often applied ìn a more or less restricted manner to thosè considerations of value had to do with [the distribution of wealth]

branches of science in which the phenomena considered are of the alone' and not with its production (1848/1965, Works, III: 455). Mill simplest and most abstract kind, excluding the consideration of the was blinded to the function of prices by his assumption that only a more complex phenomena such as those observed in living things'. And process of mechanical causation by some few observable preceding more recently a Nobel laureate in physics, Louis W. Alvarez, stressed events constituted a legitimate explanation in terms of the standards of that àctually physics is the simplest of all the sciences.... But in the natural science. Due to the influence that Mill's assumption had exerted case of an infinitely more complicated system, such as the population of for so long, thèmarginal revolution' of twenty-five years later, when it a developing country like India, no one can yet decide how best to did arrive, had an explosive effect.

change the existing conditions' (Alvarez, 1968).

Mechanical methods and models of simple causal explanation are It deserves mentioning here, however, that only six years after Mill's increasingly inapplicable as we advance to such complex phenomena.

textbook was published, H. H. Gossen, a thinker who is almost wholly In particular, the crucial phenomena determining the formation of overlooked, had anticipated marginal utility theory in already clearly many highly complex structures of human interaction, i.e., economic recognising the dependence of extended production on guidance by prices values or prices, cannot be interpreted by simple causal or 'nomothetic'

and emphasising that ònly with the establishment of private property can theories, but require explanation in terms of the joint effects of a larger the yardstick be found for the determination of the optimal quantity of each number of distinct elements than we can ever hope individually to commodity to be produced under given circumstances.... The greatest observe or manipulate.

possible protection of private property is definitely the greatest necessity for It was only thèmarginal revolution' of the 1870s that produced a the continuation of human society' (1854/1983:254-5).

satisfactory explanation of the market processes that Adam Smith had long before described with his metaphor of the ìnvisible hand', an Despite the great harm done by his work, we must probably forgive account which, despite its still metaphorical and incomplete character, Mill much for his infatuation with the lady who later became his wife -

was the first scientific description of such self-ordering processes. James upon whose death, in his opinion, `this country lost the greatest mind it and John Stuart Mill, by contrast, were unable to conceive of the contained' and who, according to his testimony, ìn the nobleness of her determination of market values in any manner other than causal public object ... never stopped short of perfect distributive justice as determination by a few preceding events, and this inability barred the final aim, implying therefore a state of society entirely communist in them, as it does many modern 'physicalists', from understanding self-practice and spirit' (1965, Works: XV, 601; and see Hayek, 1951).

steering market processes. An understanding of the truths underlying Whatever the influence of Mill may be, Marxian economics is still marginal utility theory was further delayed by James Mill's guiding today attempting to explain highly complex orders of interaction in influence on David Ricardo, as well as by Karl Marx's own work.

terms of single causal effects like mechanical phenomena rather than as Attempts to achieve mono-causal explanations in such areas (prolonged prototypes of those self-ordering processes which give us access to the 14 8

1 49

THE FATAL CONCEIT

APPENDIX C

explanation of highly complex phenomena. It deserves mention however that, as Joachim Reig has pointed out (in his Introduction to the TIME AND THE EMERGENCE AND

Spanish translation of E. von Bohm-Bawerk's essay on Marx's theory of REPLICATION OF STRUCTURES

exploitation (1976)), it would seem that after learning of the works of Jevons and Menger, Karl Marx himself completely abandoned further work on capital. If so, his followers were evidently not so wise as he.

The fact that certain structures can form and multiply because other similar structures that already exist can transmit their properties to others (subject to occasional variations), and that abstract orders can thus undergo a process of evolution in the course of which they pass from one material embodiment into others that will arise only because the pattern already exists, has given our world a new dimension: time's arrow (Blum, 1951). In the course of time new features arise which did not exist before: self-perpetuating and evolving structures which, though represented at any one moment only by particular material embodi-ments, become distinct entities that in various manifestations persist through time.

The possibility of forming structures by a process of replication gives those elements that have the capacity for doing so better chances of multiplying. Those elements will be preferably selected for multiplication that are capable of forming into more complex structures, and the increase of their members will lead to the formation of still more such structures. Such a model, once it has appeared, becomes as definite a constituent of the order of the world as any material object. In the structures of interaction, the patterns of activities of groups are determined by practices transmitted by individuals of one generation to those of the next; and these orders preserve their general character only by constant change (adaptation).

1 5 0

151

APPENDIX D

APPENDIX D

individuals can exist only as products of their wills, but the mere wish of ALIENATION, DROPOUTS, AND THE

a claimant can hardly create a duty for others. Only expectations CLAIMS OF PARASITES

produced by long practice can create duties for the members of the community in which they prevail, which is one reason why prudence must be exercised in the creation of expectations, lest one incur a duty that one cannot fulfill.

3.

Socialism has taught many people that they possess claims irrespective of performance, irrespective of participation. In the light of In this section I should like to record a few reflections about the matters the morals that produced the extended order of civilisation, socialists in named in the title of this section.

fact incite people to break the law.

Those who claim to have been àlienated' from what most of them 1.

As we have seen, conflict between an individual's emotions and apparently never learnt, and who prefer to live as parasitic dropouts, what is expected of him in an extended order is virtually inevitable: draining the products of a process to which they refuse to contribute, innate responses tend to break through the network of learnt rules that are true followers of Rousseau's appeal for a return to nature, maintain civilisation. But only Rousseau provided literary and intel-representing as the chief evil those institutions that made possible the l ectual credentials for reactions that cultivated people once dismissed formation of an order of human coordination.

as simply uncouth. Regarding the natural (read ìnstinctual') as good or I do not question any individual's right voluntarily to withdraw from desirable is, in his work, an expression of nostalgia for the simple, the civilisation. But what èntitlements' do such persons have? Are we to primitive, or even the barbarian, based on the conviction that one ought subsidise their hermitages? There cannot be any entitlement to be to satisfy his or her desires, rather than to obey shackles allegedly exempted from the rules on which civilisation rests. We may be able to invented and imposed by selfish interests.

assist the weak and disabled, the very young and old, but only if the In a milder form, disappointment at the failure of our traditional sane and adult submit to the impersonal discipline which gives us morality to produce greater pleasure has recently found expression in means to do so.

nostalgia for the small that is beautiful, or in complaints about The It would be quite wrong to regard such errors as originating with the joyless Economy (Schumacher, 1973, Scitovsky, 1976, as well as much of young. They reflect what they are taught, the pronouncements of their the literature of àlienation').

parents - and of departments of psychology and sociology of education and the characteristic intellectuals

whom they produce - pale

2.

Mere existence cannot confer a right or moral claim on anyone reproductions of Rousseau and Marx, Freud and Keynes, transmitted against any other. Persons or groups may incur duties to particular through intellects whose desires have outrun their understanding.

individuals; but as part of the system of common rules that assist humankind to grow and multiply not even all existing lives have a moral claim to preservation. A practice that seems so harsh to us wherein some Eskimo tribes leave senile members to die at the beginning of their seasonal migration may well be necessary for them to bring their offspring to the next season. And it is at least an open question whether it is a moral duty to prolong the lives of suffering incurables as long as modern medicine can. Such questions arise even before we ask to whom such claims can be validly addressed.

Rights derive from systems of relations of which the claimant has become a part through helping to maintain them. If he ceases to do so, or has never done so (or nobody has done so for him) there exists no ground on which such claims could be founded. Relations between 1 5 2

153

APPENDIX E

APPENDIX F

PLAY, THE SCHOOL OF RULES

REMARKS ON THE ECONOMICS AND

ANTHROPOLOGY OF POPULATION

The practices that led to the formation of the spontaneous order have The matters discussed in chapter eight have concerned economics from much in common with rules observed in playing a game. To attempt to its origins. The science of economics may well be said to have begun in trace the origin of competition in play would lead us too far astray, but 1 681, when Sir William Petty (a slightly older colleague of Sir Isaac we can learn much from the masterly and revealing analysis of the role Newton, and among the founders of the Royal Society) became of play in the evolution of culture by the historian Johan Huizinga, fascinated by the causes of the rapid growth of London. To everybody's whose work has been insufficiently appreciated by students of human surprise he found that it had grown bigger than Paris and Rome order (1949: esp. 5, 11, 24, 47, 51, 59, and 100, and see Knight, together, and in an essay on The Growth, Increase and Multiplication of 1923/1936:46, 50, 60-66; and Hayek, 1976:71 and n. 10).

Mankind he explained how greater density of population made a greater Huizinga writes that ìn myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of division of labour possible:

civilised life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil Each manufacture will be divided in as many parts as possible. In the of play' (1949:5); play `creates order, is order' (1950:10) It proceeds

making of a watch, if one man shall make the wheels, another the spring, within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed another shall engrave the dial plate, then the watch will be better and rules and in an orderly manner' (1949:15 and 51).

cheaper than if the same work were put on any one man.

A game is indeed a clear instance of a process wherein obedience to And we also see that in towns and in the streets of great towns, where all common rules by elements pursuing different and even conflicting the inhabitants are almost of one trade, the commodity peculiar to those purposes results in overall order. Modern game theory has, moreover, places is made better and cheaper than elsewhere. Moreover, when all sorts shown that while some games lead to the gains of one side being evenly of manufacture are made in one place, there every ship that goes forth can balanced by the gains of the other, other games may produce overall net suddenly have its loading of so many particulars and species as the port gain. The growth of the extended structure of interaction was made whereunto she is bound can take off (1681/1899:II, 453 and 473).

possible by the individual's entry into the latter sorts of game, ones leading to overall increase of productivity.

Petty also recognised that 'fewness of people, is real poverty; and a Nation wherein are Eight Millions of people are more than twice as rich as the same scope of land wherein are but four; For the Governors which are the great charge, may serve near as well for the greater as the lesser number' (1681/1899:11, 454-55, and 1927:11, 48). Unfortunately, the special essay he wrote on `The Multiplication of Mankind' appears to be lost (1681/1899:1, 454-55 and 1927:1, 43), but it is evident that the general conception was transmitted from him through Bernard Mandeville (1715/1924:1, 356) to Adam Smith, who noticed, as remarked in chapter eight, that division of labour is limited by the extent of the market, and that population increase is crucial to the prosperity of a country.

If economists have from an early date been preoccupied with such 154

1 55

THE FATAL CONCEIT

APPENDIX G

questions,

anthropologists in recent times have given insufficient attention to the evolution of morals (which of course can scarcely ever SUPERSTITION AND THE PRESERVATION

be òbserved'); and not only the crudities of social Darwinism but also socialist prejudices

have discouraged the pursuit of evolutionary

OF TRADITION

approaches. Nevertheless we find an eminent socialist anthropologist, in a study of Ùrban Revolution', definèrevolution' as `the culmination of the progressive change in the economic structure and social organisation of communities that caused, or was accompanied by, a dramatic increase of the population affected' (Childe, 1950:3). Important insights are also found in the writings of M. J. Herskovits, who states: This volume was nearly ready for the printers when a friendly comment by Dr. D. A. Rees on a lecture I had given drew my attention to a The relation of population size to environment and technology on the one remarkable little study by Sir James Frazer (1909) - Psyche's Task -

hand, and to per capita production on the other, offers the greatest challenge bearing the subtitle given above. In it, as Frazer explained, he in investigating the combinations which make for an economic surplus endeavoured tòsort out the seeds of good from the seeds of evil'. It among a given people....

deals with my central subject in a manner in many respects similar, but, On the whole it seems that the problem of survival is most pressing in the coming as it does from a distinguished anthropologist, it is able to give, smallest societies. Conversely, it is among the larger groups, where the particularly on the early development of property and the family, so specialisation appears which is essential in providing more goods than are much more empirical evidence that I wish I could reprint the whole of sufficient to support all people, that the enjoyment of social leisure is made its 84 pages as an illustrative appendix to this volume. Among those of possible (1960:398).

his conclusions which are pertinent to this volume, he explains how superstition, by strengthening respect for marriage, contributed to What is often represented by biologists (e.g., Carr-Saunders, 1922, stricter observance of rules of sexual morality among both married and Wynne-Edwards, 1962, Thorpe, 1976) as primarily a mechanism for unmarried. In his chapter on private property (17), Frazer points out li miting population might equally well be described as a mechanism for that `the effect of tabooing a thing [was] to endow it with a supernatural increasing, or better for adapting, numbers to a long-run equilibrium to or magical energy that rendered it practically unapproachable by any the supporting power of the territory, taking as much advantage of new but the owner. Thus taboo became a powerful instrument for possibilities to maintain larger numbers as of any damage which a strengthening the ties, perhaps our socialist friends would say riveting temporary excess might cause. Nature is as inventive in the one respect the chains, of private property'. And later (19), he quotes a much as in the other, and the human brain was probably the most successful earlier author who reports that in New Zealand àform of tapu was a structure enabling one species to outgrow all others in power and great preserver of property', and an even earlier report (20) about the extent.

Marquand Islands wherèwithout doubt the first mission of taboo was to establish property the basis of all society'.

Frazer also concluded (82) that `superstition rendered a great service to humanity. It supplied multitudes with a motive, a wrong motive it is true, for right action; and surely it is better for the world that men should be right from wrong motives than that they would do wrong with the best intentions. What concerns society is conduct, not opinion: if only our actions are just and good, it matters not a straw to others whether our opinions are mistaken'.

1 5 6

157

EDITOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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W. W., III (1964), `Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality', in Mario Bunge, ed.: The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy ( New York: The Free Press).

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W. W., III (1982), `Rationality, Criticism and Logic', Philosophia, 1982, pp. 121-221.

Bartley, W. W., III (1985/87), `Knowledge Is Not a Product Fully Known to Its Producer', in Kurt R. Leube and Albert Zlabinger, eds., The Political Economy of Freedom ( Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1 985); and in revised and expanded form as Àlienated Alienated: The Economics of Knowledge versus the Psychology and Sociology of Knowledge', in Radnitzky and Bartley (1987).

Bateson,

William (1913),

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Savigny, F. C. (1814/31),

Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung and

Campbell, ed., Sexual

Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971

Rechtswissenschaft

( Heidelberg:

Mohr and Zimmer, 1814), trans.

( Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.).

Abraham Hayward, as Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Skinner, B. F. (1955-56), `Freedom and the Control of Man', American jurisprudence ( London: Littlewood & Co., 1831).

Scholar 25, pp. 47-65.

Savigny, F. C. (1840), System des heutigen Romischen Rechts ( Berlin: Veit, Smith, Adam (1759), Theory of Moral Sentiments ( London: A. Millar).

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Smith, Adam (1759/1911), Theory of Moral Sentiments ( London: G. Bell Schelsky, H. (1975), Die Arbeit tun die Anderen ( Opladen: Westdeutscher and Sons).

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Smith, Adam (1776/1976), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Schiller, J. C. F. (1793),

Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, in Wealth of Nations ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Sdmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Tubingen: J. G. Cotta, 1812-15), Vol.

Smith, Adam (1978), Lectures on jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D.

8; republished as Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe Raphael, P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

von Briefen, Kurt Hoffmann, ed. (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, Sombart, Werner (1902), Der moderne Kapitalismus ( Leipzig: Duncker & 1934).

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Schoeck, Helmut (1973), `Die Sprache des Trojanischen Pferd', in Die Stein, Peter (1966), Regulae Iuris ( Edinburgh: University Press).

Lust am schlechten Gewissen ( Freiburg: Herder).

Stewart, Dugald (1828/1854-60), Works, ed. W. Hamilton (Edinburgh: Schoeck, Helmut (1966/69), Envy ( London: Secker & Warburg).

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Schrodinger, Erwin (1944), What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Strabo,

The

Geography of Strabo,

trans. Horace L. Jones (London:

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Schulze, H. (1913), Deutsches Fremdworterbuch.

Sullivan, James (1795), The Altar of Baal thrown down; or, the French Nation Schumacher, E. F. (1973), Small Is Beautiful ( New York: Harper & defended against the pulpit slander of David Osgood ( Philadelphia: Aurora Row).

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Schumpeter, J. (1954), History of Economic Analysis ( New York: Oxford Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959), The Phenomenon of Man, ( New York: University Press).

Harper).

Scitovsky, Tibor (1976),

The joyless Economy: an Inquiry into Human

Thorpe,

W. H. (1963),

Learning and Instinct in Animals

( London:

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Press).

Thorpe, W. H. (1966/76), Science, Man, and Morals (Ithaca: Cornell 17 0

1 7

BIBLIOGRAPHY

University Press); republished (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, NAME INDEX

1976).

Thorpe, W. H. (1969), Der Mensch in der Evolution, with an introduction by Konrad Lorenz (Munchen: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung).

Translation of Science, Man and Morals (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).

Thorpe, W. H. (1978), Purpose in a World of Chance ( Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Trotter, Wilfred (1916), Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War ( London: Campbell, W. Glenn, xii

T. F. Unwin, Ltd.).

Acton, Lord, 52

Alchian, Armen, 36, 118, 159

Carlyle, Thomas, 91, 147, 161

Tylor, Edward B. (1871), Primitive Culture ( London: J. Murray).

Alland, A. Jr., 16, 159

Carr-Saunders, A.M., 16, 156, 161

Ullmann-Margalit, Edna (1977),

The Emergence of Norms

( Oxford:

Alvarez, Louis W., 148, 159

Cato the Elder, 103

Clarendon Press).

Aquinas, (Saint) 'Thomas, 47-8, 146

Chagnon, Napoleon A., 16, 161

Aristotle, 11, 32, 45-8, 52, 90, 104,

Chapman, J.W., 113, 161

Ullmann-Margalit,

Edna (1978), Ìnvisible

Hand Explanations',

109-10, 146

Cheung, Steven Ng Sheong, 36

Synthese 39, 1978.

Childe, V. Gordon, 22, 39, 156, 161

United Nations (1980), `Concise Report of the World Population Babbage, Charles, 87, 159

Chisholm, G.B., 58, 67

Situation in 1979: Conditions, Trends, Prospects and Policies', Baechler, Jean, 33, 45, 159

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 11, 32, 103

United

Bailey, Samuel, 15, 159

Clark, Grahame, 161

Nations Population Studies 72.

Barker, Ernest, 159

Clark, R.W., 59, 161

Vico, G. (1854), Opere, 2nd ed., ed. G. Ferrari (Milan).

Barrett, Paul H., 24

Clifford, W.K., 108

Vorzimmer, Peter J. (1977), Charles Darwin: the Years of Controversy; The Barry, Brian, 50, 54, 159

Coase, R.H., 36, 161

Origin of Species and Its Critics, 1859-1882

Cohen, J.E., 128, 161

( Philadelphia: Temple

Bartley, W.W. III, 10, 61, 68, 91, 159

Bateson, William, 147, 159

Cohen, Morris R., 56, 59, 110, 161

University Press).

Bauer, Lord (Peter Bauer), 125, 160

Cohn, Norman, 162

Wells, H. G. (1984),

Experience in Autobiography

(London: Faber &

Baumgardt, D., 160

Columbus, Christopher, 18

Faber).

Becker, G.S., 36

Comte, August, 26, 52, 68, 108, 162

Westermarck, E. A. (1906-08),

Bell, Daniel, 160

Confucius, 106, 109, 162

The Origin and Development of the Moral

Bentham, Jeremy, 52, 63, 65, 107, 146,

Cubitt, Charlotte, 5, 158

Ideas ( London: MacMillan and Co.).

1 60

Curran, Charles, 118, 162

Wieland, C. M. (1800), Aristipp and einige seiner Zeitgenossen ( Leipzig: Bernal, J.D., 60

B. G. J. Goschen).

Bernstam, Mikhail, 158

Dairaines, Serge, 33, 162

Darwin, Charles, 23-4, 26, 70, 107-8,

Wiese, Leopold von (1917),

Bloch, Ernst, 107, 160

Der Liberalismus in Vergangenheit and Zukunft

Blum, H.F., 151, 160

1 46-7

( Berlin: S. Fischer).

Blundell, John, xii

Demandt, Alexander, 110, 162

Williams,

George C., ed. (1966),

Adaptation

and

Natural

Selection

Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 98, 150

Demsetz, Harold, 36

(Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Bonner, John Tyler, 17, 25, 160

Descartes, Rene, 48, 52

Bopp, Franz, 147, 160

Durham, William, 162

Williams, George C. (1971), Group Selection ( Chicago: Aldine-Atherton).

Born, Max, 60-1, 160

Williams, George C. (1975), Sex and Evolution ( Princeton: Princeton Boserup, Esther, 125, 160

Eccles, Sir John, 16, 162

University Press).

Boswell, James, 32

Eddington, Sir Arthur, 60

Williams, Raymond (1976), Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Braudel, Ferdinand, 100, 103, 108, 111,

Edmonds, J.M., 162

160

Einaudi, Luigi, 44, 162

( London: Fontana).

Brien, Timothy, 158

Einstein, Albert, 58-60, 62, 67, 104, 162

Wynne-Edwards, V. C' (1962), Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Bullock, Allan, 160

Emmett, Dorothy M., 146, 162

Behaviour ( Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd).

Burke, Edmund, 29, 35, 53, 160

Erhard, Ludwig, 117

Butler, Samuel, 38, 161

Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 108, 162

Everett, C.W., 146, 162

Camara, (Archbishop) Heldcn, 104

Campbell, B.G., 16, 161

Farb, Peter, 16, 162

Campbell, Donald T., 8, 18, 161

Ferguson, Adam, 3, 35, 145-6, 162

17 2

173

NAME INDEX

NAME INDEX

Naumann, Friedrich, 117

Schumacher, E.F., 152, 170

Ferri, Enrico, 51, 162

Jevons, William Stanley, 97-8, 150

Finley, Sir Moses I., 29, 162

Johnson, Samuel, 32

Needham, Joseph, 33, 44, 57, 167-8

Schumpeter, Joseph A., 110, 170

Newton, Sir Isaac, 155

Scitovsky, Tibor, 152, 170

Flew, A.G.N., 27, 121, 162

Jones, E.L., 165

Ford, Henry, 93

Jones, Sir William, 23-4, 147

North, Douglas C., 125, 168

Scott, R., 112, 166

Segerstedt, Torgny, 51, 170

Forster, E.M., 58, 67

Jouvenal, Bertrand de, 113, 165-6

Foucault, Michel, 64

O'Brien, C.C., 138, 168

Seneca, 103

Opton, Gene, 158

Seton-Watson, H., 54, 170

Franklin, Norman, xii

Kant, Immanuel, 73, 166

Frazer, Sir James G., 157, 162

Keller, Rudolf E., 146-7, 166

Orwell, George, 55-6, 168

Shafarevich, Igor Rostislavovich, 171

Ostwald, Wilhelm, 60

Shakespeare, William, 116

Friedman, Jeffrey, 158

Kerferd, G.B., 143, 166

Freud, Sigmund, xi, 18, 153, 163

Keynes, John Maynard, xi, 57-8, 62, 67

Simon, Julian L., 125-6, 158, 171

76, 153, 166

Patten, Simon N., 147, 168

Simpson, G.G., 16, 171

Gissurarson, Hannes, 158

Kirsch, G., 52, 166

Pei, Mario, 117, 168

Skinner, B.F., 171

Pejovich, Steve, 36

Smith, Adam, 14, 24, 35, 86-7, 108, 120,

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 106

Knight, Frank H., 154, 166

Gossen, H.H., 87, 149, 163

Kristol, Irving, 160

Petty, Sir William, 155, 168

135,146-8,155,171

Piaget, Jean, 47, 107, 168

Soddy, F., 60

Green, S., 39

Grinder, Walter, xii

Leakey, R.E., 39, 166

Pierson, N.G., 87, 168

Solvay, E., 60

Piggott, Stuart, 40, 168

Sombart, Werner, 111, 171

Groseclose, Timothy, 158

Liddell, H.G., 112, 166

Gruber, Howard E., 24, 146, 163

Liggio, Leonard P., xii

Pirenne, Jacques, 33, 39, 168

Stallybrass, Oliver, 160, 162

Locke, John, 33-4, 49, 120, 166

Plant, Sir Arnold, 36

Stein, Peter, 147, 171

Haakonssen, Knud, 145, 163

Plato, 52, 90, 109

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 58

Polanyi, Karl, 44, 168

Stewart, Dugald, 24, 145, 171

Habermas, Jiirgen, 64

Mach, Ernst, 89

Hale, Sir Matthew, 34

Machlup, Fritz, 37, 166

Popper, Sir Karl R., xi, 10, 16, 25-6, 49,

Strabo, 30, 171

61, 67-9, 91, 168-9

Sullivan, James, 120, 171

Hardin, Garret James, 15, 132, 146, 163

Maier, H., 117, 166

Harris of High Cross, Lord (Ralph

Maine, Henry Sumner, 29-30, 35, 166

Pribram, K., 169

Prigogine, Ilya, 169

Harris), xii

Malinowski, B., 136, 166

Teilhard de Chardin, P., 171

Hawkes, David, 109

Malthus, Thomas, 122

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 64

Thorpe, W.H., 156, 171-2

Hayek, F.A. von, x-xii, 8, 10, 15, 21, 26,

Mandeville, Bernard, 12-13, 69, 86, 89,

Thucydides, 46

45, 53, 55, 58, 63, 72-3, 79, 87-8, 94,

1 35, 146, 155, 166

Quinton, Lord (Anthony Quinton), 61,

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 52

169

98, 104, 110-11, 114, 117, 120, 125,

Marcuse, Herbert, 138

Trotter, Wilfred, 17, 48, 172

146-7,149,154,158,163-4

Marshall, Alfred, 58, 98, 149

Tylor, Edward B., 50, 172

Radnitzky, Gerard, 10, 158, 169

Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 108-9

Marx, Karl, 26, 50, 52, 91, 93, 108-9,

Rawls, John, 74, 169

Heilbroner, Robert, 22, 164

111-12,124,148,150,153

Ullman-Margalit, Edna, 146, 172

Rees, D.A., 157

Helvetius, C.V., 146

Maxwell, James Clerk, 148

Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 24, 69,

Mayr, Ernst, 45, 166

Reig, Joachim, 150

Renfrew, Colin, 39, 169

Vico, Giambattista, 69-70, 172

1 47,164

McCleary, G.F., 122, 166

Ricardo, David, 100, 148

Voltaire, F.M.A. de, 63, 65

Herskovits, M.J., 39, 156, 164-5

McNeill, William H., 90, 166

Roberts, P.C., 87, 169

Vorzimmer, Peter J., 146, 172

Hessen, Robert, 158

Medick, Hans, 145, 166

Rock, Kenneth, 158

Hirschmann, Albert 0., 165

Menger, Anton, 92

Roosevelt, Theodore, 117

Waley, Arthur, 109

Hobbes, Thomas, 12

Menger, Carl, 11, 29, 70, 92, 95, 97-8,

Rostovtzeff, M., 44, 169

Walras, Leon, 97

Hobhouse, L.T., 110, 165

146, 150, 167

Wells, H.G., 55-6, 67, 172

Hoffer, Eric, 90

Millikan, R.A., 60

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 49-52, 64, 77,

Wenar, Leif, 158

Holdsworth, W.S., 165

Mill, James, 148

85,152-3,170

Wesson, Robert G., 158

Howard, J.H., 15, 165

Mill, John Stuart, 52, 58, 65, 80, 92-3,

Russell, Lord (Bertrand Russell), 27, 59,

62-3,65,67,85,104,170

Westermarck, E.A., 50, 172

Huizinga, Johan, 154, 165

98,148-9,167

Whately, (Archbishop) Richard, 111-12

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 24, 80, 147,

Miller, David, 118, 167

Rutland, Peter, 87, 170

Ryle, Gilbert, 78, 170

Wicksteed, Philip Henry, 98

165

Mises, Ludwig von, 6, 87, 100, 112, 167

Wieland, C.M., 147, 172

Hume, David, 3, 8, 13, 34-5, 47, 50,

Monod, Jacques, 56, 58, 61, 67, 167

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, 50, 52

Wiese, Leopold von, 114, 172

66-7,69,73,76,86,145-6,165

Montaigne, Michel de, 11

Savigny, F.C. von, 35, 70, 170

Wieser, Friedrich von, 98

Huxley, Julian, 25, 121, 165

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de

Schelsky, H., 110, 170

Williams, George C., 172

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 165

Secondat de, 34, 38, 167

Williams, Raymond, 114, 172

Moore, G.E., 58, 167

Schiller, Friedrich von, 32, 147, 170

Wood, John B., xii

Irons, William, 16, 161

Morris, Walter S., xii

Schoeck, Helmut, 35, 110, 170

Woolf, Virginia, 58

Moynihan, Kristin, 158

Schrodinger, Erwin, 170

Schulze, H., 147, 170

Wynn-Edwards, V.C., 156, 172

Jay, Martin, 138, 165

Myrdal, Gunnar, 50, 167

175

17 4

SUBJECT INDEX

four requirements of, 48, 63-6;

exploitation, not inevitable in trade, 93

SUBJECT INDEX

interpretation of law and morals, 52;

extended order of human cooperation,

li mits on experimentation, 53; and

xi, 6; contribution of religion to, 138;

notion that rational human mind

evolves over long periods of time, 16,

entered evolving human body, 22;

1 9; includes sub-orders following

recurring themes in, 60-1; as socialist

different rules, 18; mechanistic

methodology, 8; spread by media, 55;

i nterpretation of, 66; and money, 103;

chapters 4 and 5

most complex known structure, 127;

cooperation, and small groups, 19

and moral practices, 6, 12; requires

cultural evolution, in adaptation to

restraint of instinct, 13, 35-6; results

unforeseeable events, 25; distinct

not from design but spontaneously, 6;

role of early trade in development of,

alienation, sources of, 64, Appendix D

practices, 9; use of dispersed

from, and faster than, biological

38-43; and several property, 33; uses

altruism, as source of unhappiness, 64;

knowledge in, 9; use of term, 111

evolution, 25, 144; idea of, 23;

includes inheritance of acquired

dispersed knowledge for diverse ends,

can hinder formation of extended

catallactics, 62, 98, 112

15

order, 81; in small groups, 18-19

central authority, rule by, 6; compared

characteristics, 25, 147; language

obscures understanding of, 144; not

animism, abandoned in transcendent

to operation of decentralized market,

` fatal conceit', that abilities and skills

self-ordering process, 73; in

86-7; inability to produce fullest use

subject to inevitable laws of

stem chiefly from reason, 21; that

connotation of words, 107; in

of information, 77, 86-7; inability to

development, 26

evolutionary products can always be

interpretation of complex structures,

producèsocial justice' and economic

cybernetics, 146

i

82; persistence in studies of human

i mprovement, 85; and several

mproved by human ingenuity, 83;

harks back to the rule of natural

affairs, 108; in religion, 56

property, 50

design, human, limits of, 6, 7, 75-6; and

purpose, W.K. Clifford on, 108

i nstincts rather than learnt restraints,

anthropomorphism, see animism

civil liberties, 29

49; that humankind can shape the

àrtificial' (as opposed tònatural'),

civilisation, benefits and costs, xi; and

differentiation, advantages of, 79; in

confusion caused by Hume's use of,

cultural evolution, 17; and extended

exchange systems, 95; and population

world according to wish, 27, 75

fear of the unfamiliar, and trade, 94

145; as product of design, 143;

order, 6; foundations in antiquity, 29;

growth, 122, 126-7, 155

division of labour, see specialisation

freedom, and Hume's `fundamental laws

Appendix A

historical conflicts, 18; limited role of

of nature', 34; impossible without

Austrian school of economics, 97-8; see

strong government in advance of,

economics, 14; and anthropology,

some restraints and delimitation of

also marginal utility

32-3; not made by conscious design,

22; resulted from unwanted gradual

155-6; Aristotelian, 44-6; Austrian

individual rights, 63; includes implicit

acceptance of some traditions, 62;

beneficial ends, foreknowledge of, as

changes in morality, 20; restrains

school of, 97; failure of single causal

Rousseau's mistaken view of, 49-50;

absurd requirement for action in

i nstinctual behavior, 12; and several

explanations in, 148-50;

threatened by strong government, 32;

extended order, 80-1

property, 29, 34

misunderstanding of by contemporary

t wo senses of, 35

benevolent despotism, 117

Civilisation and its Discontents (Sigmund

scientists, 60; and morality in Keynes,

Benthamite tradition, 52, 146

Freud), xi, 18

57-8; not about physical phenomena,

` general will', of Rousseau, 49

biological evolution, differences from

collective product, magnitude of, 7

98, 148; possible influence on Darwin,

genetic, in the sense of biological

cultural evolution, 25; does not

collective utility, not discoverable, 98

24; self-organising processes in, 94,

inheritance, 147

entirely predate cultural evolution,

collectivism, and primitive man, 12; and

1 48; and socialism, 85-6; and

genetic development, 24

22; how change occurs in, 15; not

wider trade relations, 42

structure of human action, 76

government, exaggerated role in history

subject to inevitable laws, 26; and

commerce, in ancient world, 29; Spartan

empiricism, 61

books, 44; and growth of early

studies of cultural development, 24

attitude toward, 32; in spread of

èthic of knowledge', in Monod, 56

civilisation, 32-3; Hume's view

Bloomsbury Group, 57

civilisation, 34

evolution, cannot be just, 74; concurrent

restricting, 34; monopoly of money

Boswell's

evolution of mind and civilisation, 22;

Life ( Dr. Samuel Johnson), 32

competition, of currencies, not allowed

cultural, analogous to but not

by, 103-4; and stagnation of China,

calculus of lives, 132

by government monopoly, 103; in

45

capacity for learning, in humans, 18, 21,

evolution, 26; and observance of rules,

identical with, biological, 16-17; does

not enable prediction of future, 26;

79

19; as procedure of discovery in

i ncome, distribution of, 6; and justice, 7

capital, Marx's work on, 150; to support

adapting to unknown circumstances,

how understanding of antedates

i ndividuals, best judge use of own

population, 124-5

19; required to prevent abuse of

Darwinian theory, 24; Julian Huxley

on, 25; of knowledge, 9-10, 75, 80; of

resources, 31, 87-8; do not

capitalism, 6; and belief that owners

property, 35

understand rules of conduct they

manipulate system, 78, 82; and

conservatism, not Hayek's position

morality and moral traditions, 9-10;

follow, 14; live within two orders of

civilisation, 9; created proletariat,

except in limited moral issues, 53

Joseph Needhain on, 57; not limited

rules, 18; may be destroyed by ill-

1 24; creates employment, 123;

constructivist rationalism, 22; in

to organisms, 27, 80; of reason, 22; of

expansion of, 33; fails to satisfy tenets

attempt to control development, 22;

rules, 20; spontaneous order in, 22;

considered notions of what is

reasonable, 27; productive efforts of in

of constructivist rationalism, 66; and

biases archaeology and sociology,

variety in, 80

exchange systems, 95

market order benefit unknown others,

freedom, 62-3; resistance to its

50-1; embodies false theory of reason,

17 6

177

SUBJECT INDEX

SUBJECT INDEX

81; resent constraints on instinctual

liberation, as threat to liberty, 64-5

morality, does not, and no possible

private property, see several property

behavior, 13

liberty, and meaning of words,

moral code will, satisfy rationalist

production for use, Einstein on, 59; 104

individual property, and early tools, 30;

Confucius on, 106

criteria for justification, 68-9;

profit, as signal of fruitful activity, 46,

land as, 31; not recognised by

evolved, sustains extended order, 70;

92, 104; misunderstood by

Spartans, 32

macro-economics, 98, 100

Greek tradition spread by Romans,

intellectuals, 104

individualism, and myth of solitary

Malthusian theory of population, 122

31; and `liberal' philosophy, 52;

proletariat, 11, 123, 130-1

savage, 12

marginal utility, 79; theory of, 97;

preferred use of term, 12; rationalist

property rights, chapter 2; as still

inflation, and Keynes's general theory,

revolutionary effect of, 148-9; chapter

philosophers suppose pursuit of

developing notion, 36-7

58

6, passim

happiness is reason for selection of,

prosperity, Adam Smith on, 120

information access to, 6; as advantage in

market economy, 1 1 I

64; rejection by Chisholm as

trading, 89; density of population

market order, x; allows increase in

irrational and unscientific, 58; revolt

rational reconstruction, 69, 145

contributes to diversity of, 127; in

numbers and relative wealth, 70, 120,

against, in Bloomsbury Group, 57-8;

rationalism, 61, 135; see constructivist

expanding order, 84; individual use of

132; benefits others without explicit

and right to property, Hume on, 34,

rationalism

in trading, 43, 77; and markets, 7;

intent, 81; consequences that would

1 45; role of evolution in formation of,

reason, chapters 1, 4, 5, passim; ill-

rapid transfer of, 134; superiority of

ensue on destruction of, xi, 27-8, 120;

21; unwanted gradual changes in, 20

considered notions of may change

spontaneous formations in dispersing,

contribution of eighteenth-century

facts, 27; not means by which learnt

88; superstitious views toward, 101

Scottish moral philosophers in

natural', 143; limitation of use to what

rules displace innate responses, 23;

instinct, appeal of socialism to, 7; basis

understanding of, 146; Keynes on, 57;

is innate or instinctual, 143, 152;

proper use of, 8; result of evolutionary

for cooperation of early groups, 11; as

late development of, 16; poorly

Appendix A

selection, not source of ability to

best guide to cooperation among men

understood, 19; provides for others

natural science, 146-7

acquire skills, 21; used by Descartes

( Rousseau's view), 49; conflicts with

beyond life expectancies of those

naturalistic fallacy, 27

to justify gratification of instinct, 50;

"earnt rules, 19; continuing effect of,

acting, 84; uses dispersed knowledge,

noble savage, myth of, in collectivism,

value of, compared to tradition, 53-4

1 7; contributes to rules of micro-

77

18; in Rousseau, 49; not free or

religion, anthropomorphism in, 56; in

cosmos, 18; insufficient basis for

markets, competitive, 7; in creating

powerful, 50, 65

development of moral traditions, 9,

extended order, 70; leads to hatred of

order, 19; distribute resources without

135; source of challenge to property,

constraint necessary to civilisation,

predictable net results, 71; in

order, allows generation of new powers,

51; chapter 9

13; older than custom and tradition,

gathering information, 15; in view of

79; cannot be explained or predicted,

resources, direction of, 6; dispersal of,

23; values visible, physical effort over

Austrian school, 97

79; evolutionary selection and, 144;

and use of knowledge about, 7, 77;

` mysterious' trade, 91

mind, 21-3; acquired by absorbing

presupposes no orderer or deliberate

early attempts to capture, 44;

i ntelligence, not the inventor of morals,

traditions, 22-3; as product of

arrangement, 24, 76-7, 107-8

economy in use of, 15, 123

1 37

cultural evolution, 21

organisations, in spontaneous macro-

rules of conduct, as alternative to

i nteraction, complexity of 148-50

monetary institutions, feared and

order, 37

common ends, 63; could not be

ìnvisible hand', of Adam Smith, 14, 148

resented, 102-3; government

designed in advance, 72; end-

monopolies make competitive

peripheral areas, and population

independent, 31; evolve without

justice, 33-4; John Locke on, 34;

experimentation impossible, 103;

growth, 128-9

knowledge of effects, 72; following

conflicting notions of, 75, 118; chapter

result from spontaneous order, 103;

physical effort, and merit, 91; Carlyle

different from knowing effects of, 78;

2; passim

chapter 6, passim

on, 91; waning value of, 92

and rules of play, 154

money, fascination with, 101;

piecemeal improvement, 69

knowledge, in competition, 91;

ambivalence toward, 102; loathing of,

play, in cultural evolution, Appendix E

scientific method, in Max Born, 60

development of, 75; and moral rules,

103; chapter 6, passim

population growth, 4, chapter 8,

scientism, see constructivist rationalism

139

moral practices, traditional, 6, 10;

Appendix F, passim

self organisation, in economics and

cannot be justified rationally, 68; of

positivism, 52, 61

biological sciences, 9; see spontaneous order

labour, in Malthus, 122

capitalists create proletariat, 130-1;

Pre-Socratic philosophers, and

several property, 12; advantages in

Lamarckism, 25

and civil liberties, 29; created neither

knowledge of self-forming orders, 45

information dispersal, 86; allows

language, debasement of, 9, and chapter

by instinct nor by reason, 10; dislike

prices, and adaptation to the unknown,

widely dispersed benefits to non-

7; and evolution, 147; use in

of, 6; effect on economy and political

76; and distribution, 93; evolution of,

owners as well as owners, 77-8; as

classification, 15, 106-7

life, 8; evolutionary selection and, 6,

42, 44; guide diverse market

basis of growth, 33; and civilisation,

law, and abstract rules governing

52; lack of understanding of, 6; make

participants, 99-100, 104; reflect

29; condemned in name of freedom.

disposal of property, 30; as guarantee

possible the growth of reason, 21; not

value of means, 96; role in forming

119; development of concept of, 30;

of freedom, 35; language and, 147;

based on simple gratification, 8; pain

extended economy, 86-7

increasingly suspect after Rousseau,

Savigny on, 35

of adopting, 6; as part of reason,

principle of comparative costs, 100

50; investigation of avoided in recent

liberalism, American sense, 52, 65, 110;

Locke on, 49; spread of 6;

private ownership, in ancient Egypt, 33;

anthropology, 50; and liberty, 30;

i n Hobhouse, 110; Òld Whig' view,

unprovability of, 6; ùnreasonable'

as basis of justice, 34; Frazer on taboo

precondition for trade, 31; supported

52

and ùnscientific', 66

and, 157; in Graeco-Roman world, 29

in surviving religions, 137; unknown

17 8

179

SUBJECT INDEX

to savage, 35; chapter 2

associated with dramatic increases in

`social', used to connotègood', 114-16

population, 39, 43; disdain of, 89-94;

social Darwinism, 23; its faults wrongly

mistaken conclusions about Athenian

used to reject evolutionary approach

regulation of, 44; oldest contact

to human affairs, 27, 156

among remote groups, 39; and

social engineering, 32, 51

production, 101; specialisation in, 38;

social justice, chapter 7, passim; and role spread order, yet also disrupted early

of reason, 8, 117

tribes, 39-40; Thucydides on, 46

socialism, 6; aims to redesign moral

tradition, as adaptation to the unknown,

traditions, law and language, on

76; based not on intuition,

` rational' lines, 6, 7, 67, 107, 153;

unconscious, or reason, 23, 43;

analysis of economic order, 6; appeal

confusion of with personal will, 140;

to intellectuals, 53-4; based on

conveys rules not consciously made,

Aristotelian and animistic views, 47,

12, 14, 16, 135; lies between instinct

108; effect on standard of living, 9,

and reason, 21, 23; older than reason,

121; factual errors of, 6, 9; Mill's

21; role of superstition in preserving,

i nfluence on its acceptance, 149; need

157; superior to reason, 75; supported

to refute, 6; proposed debate on, x;

by religious belief, 136; transmitted

supported by alleged morality of

by religion, 136

science, 61; use of term, 11 I

traditions underlying market order,

`society', chapter 7, passim

effect on knowledge and wealth, 7; fail

solidarity, characteristic of small group,

to meet constructivist requirements,

80, introduction

65-7, 71; socialist rejection of, 7

specialisation, allows increase of

transcendent order, 72

population, 40, 122; increases power

triage, 132

of group, 80; and use of information,

1 01

utilitarianism, 61; as misinterpretation

spontaneous order, in creating extended

of Hume, 145

order, 6, 83-4; emergence of concept,

146; and money and credit, 102;

value, complexity and, 148; conditions

organisations and, 37; and

affecting, 94-5; disdain for àrtificial'

requirement of predictable benefit, 73

character of, 97; hierarchy of, 96-7;

spontaneity, depends on general rules,

i ncrease of and human purposes, 95;

73

Mill's error regarding, 93, 149; and

superstition, in preserving tradition, 157

tangible products, 92; in trade,

` symbolic truths', in religion, 137

affected by relative scarcity, 92

`ti me's arrow', 151

xenos, the guest-friend, 42

trade, allows density of occupation, 41;

archaeological evidence of, 38;

wealth, increase of, 6, 93, 99

18 0

Edited by W.W. Bartley III

In this new work Friedrich A. Hayek presents a fundamental examination and critique of the central ideas of socialism. He argues that socialism has, from its origins, been mistaken on scientific and factual, and even on logical, grounds -

and that its repeated failures, in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas that this century has witnessed, were the direct outcome of these scientific errors.

. . as passionate and disputatious as anything he has written. As well as adding up to a powerful manifesto against socialism, it is a fully accessible account of many of the main strands of Mr Hayek's thinking. Politicians ... no longer have any excuse for ignoring what he has actually said. . . . One of the outstanding political philosophers of this century has written a concise summation of his work: Hayek for everyman. It deserves to be read.'

- The Economist

À fresh and astringent argument against the intellectual pretensions of socialism which should prove arresting and thought-provoking even to those for whom it is not finally persuasive. Expertly edited by W.W. Bartley III, the general overseer of Hayek's Collected Works, The Fatal Conceit should command the attention not only of Hayek scholars, but of political theorists, intellectual historians and philosophers.'

-John Gray

` My first reaction on reading The Fatal Conceit, as published, is to express admiration for the intellectual and physical vitality of an author who, in his upper 80's, had transformed a somewhat rambling set of sketches ... into a coherent, well-constructed argument, from which anyone can learn ... The central ideas represent the cumulation of Hayek's thinking over a long and productive life of the mind.'

-James M. Buchanan

` Friedrich Hayek's influence has been tremendous.'

- Milton Friedman

'I regard Hayek's work as a new opening of the most fundamental debate in the field of political philosophy.'

- Sir Karl Popper

Òne of the great political thinkers of our time.'

- Roger Scruton

`The third quarter of this century has been described as "the age of Keynes" .. .

In terms of the economic problems now facing us, the current period might more accurately be termed "the age of Hayek".'

- The Times

Economics/Politics/Philosophy

ISBN 0-415-04187-2

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