By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
That science has a cultural dimension, both in its creation and in its use is a fact under-acknowledged. Modern science is distinctly European and could have arisen only within a distinctive intellectual tradition, centuries in the making. As to its cultural impact, many of the names we associate with the history of science were not oblivious to the social implications of the philosophy that ruled the day.
F.A. Hayek saw this clearly when he wrote The Road to Serfdom. Known primarily as an economist, he was also a philosopher of science. Like Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Otto Neurath, he was interested in how those methods which had proven so successful in the natural sciences might be utilized in the sciences of man.
For centuries Western Europe had commonly acknowledged that there is a natural order to which one is accountable, that there is an immutable law to which civil authority must bow. But then British empiricism or positivism took hold in the universities, and by limiting knowledge to description and prediction, it ruled out key metaphysical concepts such as “nature” and “purpose in nature,” thus preventing an appeal to a time-transcending moral order. Absent a teleological conception of nature, a skeptic may rightly ask, “How can one move from a description of what is to what ought to be?”
Justice itself, once understood as one of Plato’s cardinal virtues, had to be redefined. Similarly, freedom no longer means what from a classical point of view it was thought to mean. Traditionally it meant that a man could not be compelled to do anything contrary to reason and conscience.
Limited to the empirically discernible, freedom came to mean that a man could not be compelled to do anything except by law enacted in accordance with some prescribed procedure with sufficient force behind it to compel obedience. From the positivist’s standpoint, what were once called “rights” became merely concessions granted by the state or society.
Hayek recognized that if rights are the product of law, they are not properly rights at all; they are mere concessions to claims that the individual makes and the state recognizes. As such, they can be withdrawn if the state deems such withdrawal in the interest of the general welfare. Viewed from the perspective of positivism, the rights of man are no longer to be regarded as “natural rights”; they are mere “legal rights.”
Hayek was convinced when he wrote The Road to Serfdom that positivism tended to divide political theorists into left and right wings. Writing while the outcome of World War II was still uncertain, he called attention to the fact that the socialist policies endorsed by the “progressive intellectuals” of the day are the same as those of the 1920s and 1930s that gave Europe National Socialism. The Road to Serfdom may be fruitfully read as a historical review of the social and economic policies that prevailed in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century, but that was not Hayek’s primary purpose in writing the book.
It was issued as a prophetic warning, yet as Hayek modestly writes, “one does not have to be a prophet to be aware of impending disaster. When one hears for the second time opinions expressed and measures advocated which one has met twenty years ago, they assume a new meaning as symptoms of a definite trend: They suggest the probability that future developments will take a similar turn.”
He continues, “It is necessary now to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate we are in danger of repeating. This danger is not immediate, it is true, and conditions in England and the United States are still so remote from those we have witnessed in Germany as to make it difficult to believe we are moving in the same direction.” Still, he fears that the socialist policies endorsed by our progressive intellectuals will inevitably take their toll.
Hayek was not alone in his analysis of the past or in recognizing the danger that the emerging socialist parties posed for the future of Europe. Ludwig von Mises had made a similar point in a 1920 a treatise entitled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”
“In the absence of a capitalist market, production costs and commodity values cannot be determined. A government planning agency can neither measure costs nor determine prices. Prices reflect not inherent but changing human preferences; they provide producers and distributors necessary information for planning production and distribution….It is precisely in dealings that market prices are formed, taken as the basis of calculations for all kinds of goods and labor. Where there is no free market, there is no economic calculation.”
Both von Mises and Hayek insist that it is impossible to have any information, strictly speaking, without a pricing mechanism. Such information can only come from a free market. The centralized planner assumes a kind of geometric, a priori deductive knowledge. A free market allows empirical truth to come to light. A good example of a free market is the real estate market. The government cannot tell a person what he should be paying for an apartment, a house, or a drug, but socialism thinks it can do so.
Karl Popper has called The Road to Serfdom “one of the most important political books I have ever read.”
“Hayek has seen very much sharper than I have,” he wrote to a friend, “that socialism leads directly to totalitarianism.”
Popper in his autobiography discloses that he would have remained a socialist had he not begun to see that.
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