The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Ellen Frankel Paul, Laissez Faire In Nineteenth-century Britain: Fact Or Myth?
• I: Legal Philosophy
• The Minos: What Is Law?
• Obedience to Law
• Moral and Legal Justification
• Early First Amendment Theory
• The First Amendment & Freedom of Expression
• The First Amendment and Religion
• The First Amendment Vs. the Cpi
• The Economics of Strict Liability
• The Rule of Law In American Politics
• II: Political Analysis
• Society, State, and Right In Proudhon
• Human Rights and Political Change
• Carter's Human Rights Policy
• Locke's Tolerance: Prudence Or Right?
• Political Intolerance
• Hayek: Reason, Relativism, and Liberty
• Hayek On Coercion and Freedom
• “advanced Liberalism” As Managed Capitalism
• Common Good & Public Interest
• Uncrowding the “commons”
• Milgram: Obedience, Authority, & Legitimacy
• Syndicalism & “the Servile State”
• The Parisian League
• Conservatism In Spain
• Soviet Intellectual Orthodoxy
• The Clergy & the American Revolution
• Russian & American Defenses of Servitude
• Croce's Hegemony: How to Win Minds
• III: War and the State
• Just War and Rights
• Just Wars Vs. No Wars
• Walzer & Just War
• Wartime Propaganda Tactics
• Iran, Oil, and the Cold War
• The State and Oil Policy
• San Francisco & the Military Complex
• Protectionist Assaults On Developing Countries
• Government Military Behavior
• IV: Political Economy and Theory
• Three Kinds of “capitalism”
• Adam Smith: Economic Utilitarian
• Roepke: Laissez Faire and Social Order
• Government-induced Boom & Bust
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Methodology
• Professor Friedman's Instrumentalism
• Milton Friedman's Critics
• Entrepreneurship and Justice
• Externalities & Government Intervention

Hayek: Reason, Relativism, and Liberty

Eugene F. Miller

• University of Georgia

“The Cognitive Basis of Hayek's Political Thought.” In Robert L. Cunningham, ed. Liberty and The Rule of Law (Texas & London: Texas A & M University Press, 1979):242–267.

The central theme underlying F. A. Hayek's mature writings is the importance for politics and science of our correctly understanding the limits of human reason.

Along with two theories of liberty that emerged in the eighteenth century—the British and the French—came two theories of reason: British “empiricism” and French rationalism. Hayek judges French rationalism to be incompatible with the proper limits for social planning, but he does not enable us to make a rational choice among conflicting traditions of liberty. Even though he strives to avoid historical relativism, his exclusive reliance on modern empiricism may undercut his opposition to relativism and thereby weaken the very principle of liberty he hopes to defend.

Hayek opposes rationalism by minimizing the role that reason plays in human affairs, while affirming that much of the order which we find in society can be understood as the spontaneous and unforeseen result of individual actions rather than the result of deliberate, centralized design. He thus outdistances even Hume or Kant in questioning reason's power to know the nature of things. Reason itself, Hayek thinks, may change and evolve, largely without conscious direction.

Hayek believes that the mind's classification of things is never based on the discovery of “natural kinds” or classes. For Hayek there are no sense data that are simply “given,” prior to interpretation or theory. This means that we can never conclusively test any scientific theory. Hayek has shifted from his earlier conviction that the human mind is invariable among historical epochs to his present stress on the variability of the mind and its cognitive structure. However, in putting such stringent limitations on human reason, Hayek has joined “the moderns” as opposed to classical writers like Aristotle and Plato. He thereby eliminates the possibility that we can make rational choices among traditions on the basis of what is true or good by nature. In doing so, Miller claims, Hayek undercuts his own traditional defense of liberty.