A Socialist's Reading of Hayek

Jesse Larner of Dissent Magazine gives her thoughts on Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, describing his arguments about institutional interference in economics as "merely obvious" and faulting him for not addressing the "more libertarian" forms of socialism like those of Rosa Luxembourg and Pierre-Joseph "Property is theft!" Proudhon. I admit that that's a rather hostile description of the article and A Secondhand Conjecture did find nice things to say about Larner's review, but the tone of his analysis is just plain rude. I might write that way about Marx or Bakunin in a blog post to let off steam, but in a professional venue, how about some professionalism?

As far as his actual arguments go, Larner's championing of forms of spontaneous collectivism like the kibbutzim doesn't make much sense to me since these businesses are often dependent upon state support and, in the present day, have gradually taken on the character of non-collective businesses or failed entirely. Larner states that Hayek's failure to consider these alternative socialist possibilities indicates how narrow his definition of socialism was. This seems to be untrue on its face. Hayek began The Road to Serfdom with a statement of his intent to analyze a particular form of socialism, saying that many who identify as socialists do so with an entirely different conception of socialism from the one which he meant to discuss. You can't fault a man's argument for being limited when he begins by marking out limits.

Larner does end up making a couple of interesting statements. One:

Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom). He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek’s view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society. Hayek’s political philosophy recognizes only negative rights. Positive fulfillment beyond the most basic needs is a matter of individual striving.

The first sentence doesn't really make sense as an argument (most people would agree that individualism is compatible with membership in a society) unless you regularly read socialist theory, after which it all strangely starts to make sense, or unless you understand that Larner thinks membership in a society entails adherence to an ideal of social justice. And social justice means what? Um, here it seems to mean collective responsibility for the redress of individual grievances. Individual grievances like what? Uh, a lack of positive fulfilment that is somehow related to a person's economic condition. Okay, I give up; if he's not talking about the same kind of collectivist socialism that Hayek's critiques in The Road to Serfdom, then I'm just not following.

Two:

Hayek’s solution is to deny the legitimacy of any movement to impose restraint on competition. The paradox is that forming spontaneous associations for the collective good of insiders seems to be a universal human activity. When individuals are free to make choices, this is invariably what they choose to do.

Yes, that is what they choose to do and it can lead to such wonderful social and business organizations as clans and cartels. If there are "insiders" who benefit from restraints on competition, then there are also "outsiders" who suffer from those restraints. Humans want to build these privileged associations and other humans want to tear them down. Free markets balance this building and tearing down while maximizing the benefits of these processes for all participants by allowing them to move freely between the inside and the outside of economic associations.

The article ends with a rather unncessary dig---"The ineptitude of Hayek’s title suggests the shallowness with which he has considered patterns of collective life in human societies"---and the depiction of Hayek fans as prophet-worshippers, concluding: "The rest of us, I hope, have learned to be wary of prophets." Wary, yes, but we should also be aware that all men are prophets in their way and the least we can give them is a respectful hearing.