The Persuasive Life

Donald N. McCloskey from the August/September 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

"This is, incidentally," he remarked, "a reason why my views have become unpopular." People want predictions--of the coming Great Depression of 1990 (I bought Ravi Batra's book the other day for $5.99) or the coming greenhouse catastrophe of 2010--not denials that prediction and control are possible. Friedman and many other economists this century have fallen under the modernist spell, articulated, for example, by Wesley Clair Mitchell in 1924: "In economics as in other sciences we desire knowledge mainly as an instrument of control. Control means the alluring possibility of shaping the evolution of economic life to fit the developing purposes of the race."

More than any economist, Hayek was out of step with such erotic fascism of prediction and control. In another way that left him out of step, Hayek disagreed with his predecessor as doyen of the Austrian School, Ludwig von Mises. Hayek gradually realized that he had more in common with the Scottish enlightenment than with the French, and that Jeremy Bentham was the French element in British thought. "I believe I can now...explain why...[the] masterly critique by Mises of socialism has not really been effective. Because Mises remained in the end himself a rationalist-utilitarian, and with a rationalist-utilitarianism, the rejection of socialism is irreconcilable....If we remain strictly rationalists, utilitarians, that implies we can arrange everything according to our pleasure....In one place he says we can't do it, another place he argues, being rational people, we must try to do it."

It's what's wrong with much of modern economic thought, this utilitarian rationalism--in Stigler's political economy as against Friedman's, or in Richard Posner's law and economy as against Ronald Coase's. The philosophers and literary people call it the "aporia [contradiction, indecision] of the Enlightenment project," which is to say the contradiction, most plain in France, between freedom and rationality. Hayek was two centuries behind the times, a resident of Edinburgh rather than Paris, an exponent of bourgeois virtue rather than of a new aristocracy of experts. By the end of the 20th century, though, he is old-fashioned enough to be postmodern. You read it here: Hayek has more in common with Jacques Derrida than with Bentham and Comte and Russell.