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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Raymond Aron on Hayek and political reason « Previous | |Next »
October 17, 2007

In this review of Raymond Aron's Defense of Political Reason: Essays in First Things Brian C. Anderson highlights Aron's critique of Hayek. This critique is found in Aron's review essay of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty entitled "The Liberal Definition of Liberty."

Aron says that Hayek's classic work, which was part of his revival of classical liberalism, had set forth two foundational principles for a free society: the existence of a realm of noncoercion and the universality and generality of law. To these two principles Hayek wedded classical liberal political economy- the free market and the "catallaxy" of economic exchange. While impressed with the rigor of Hayek's thought and imbued with the same love of liberty, Aron maintained that Hayek had, like most liberal thinkers, neglected the political.

Anderson says that Aron argued that this his neglect manifested itself in four distinct ways.

First, a free society depends on an inescapable dimension of coercion, particularly in its "federative power." As Aron puts it, "the direction of foreign relations remains the task of men and not of laws." In the partially Hobbesian world of international relations, statesmanship is inescapable. Foreign policy cannot be engaged in without the sovereign liberty of the statesman, but such sovereign liberty is unavoidably coercive-it can send people to their deaths, it can withhold information from the populace, it can transgress the day-to-day laws of the community.

Secondly, liberty as universality and generality of law cannot be a substitute for moral and political judgment. Laws may be universal and yet still discriminate, as Mahoney notes: "Rule of law is at best an ideal but it loses its undoubted dignity when it takes on a formulaic character, when it is presented as a replacement for politics and prudence."
Thirdly, Hayek never discusses the necessity of solid mores for the maintenance of civic life. Aron, like the neoconservatives, stresses the need for civic education; Hayek, like most libertarian and contemporary liberal thinkers, takes for granted the continuance of premodern traditions of virtue that provide the moral capital of liberal civilization but are in danger of being squandered when liberty decays to license.
Finally, Aron is prudent about the welfare state. Like Hayek, he feels that beyond a certain point the welfare state becomes suffocating and poses a threat to liberty. But unlike Hayek, Aron believes a limited welfare state is compatible with liberty and could even preserve it. In any modern democracy, Aron argues, there is a welfare function for government, entailed by the very logic of industrial society. This prudential critique of the welfare state is taken up by neoconservatives, who seek to limit, not to eliminate, the welfare system. As Mahoney points out, "Aron's is the rarest of liberalisms-a politic and political liberalism."
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:19 PM |