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Justice, Liberty, and the Rule of Law In Hayek's Constitution of Liberty - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Winter 1982, vol. 5, No. 4 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Justice, Liberty, and the Rule of Law In Hayek's Constitution of Liberty

These claims regarding the relations between justice, liberty, and the rule of law encompass the most controversial and the most often attacked portion of Hayek's social philosophy. Common to all criticisms of it is the objection that Hayek expects too much of the rule of law itself, which is only one of the virtues a legal order may display, and a rather abstract notion at that. Among classical liberals and libertarians, this objection has acquired a more specific character. It has been argued76 that upholding the rule of law cannot by itself protect liberty or secure justice, for these values will be promoted only if the individual rights are respected. Hayek's theory is at the very least radically incomplete, according to these critics, inasmuch as his conception of the rule of law will have the classical liberal implications he expects of it, only if it incorporates a conception of individual rights, which he seems explicitly to disavow. All these liberals and libertarians fasten upon Hayek's use of a Kantian test of universalizability to argue that such a test is almost without substance, in that highly oppressive and discriminatory laws will survive it, so long as their framers are ingenious enough to avoid mentioning particular groups or named individuals in them. The upshot of this criticism is that, in virtue of the absence in his theory of any strong conception of moral rights, Hayek is constrained to demand more of the largely formal test of universalizability than it can possibly deliver, and so to conflate the ideal of the rule of law with other political goods and virtues.

Criticisms of Hayek's Universalizable ‘Rule of Law’

This fundamental criticism of Hayek, stated powerfully by Hamowy77 and Raz78 and endorsed in eariler writings of my own,79 now seems to me to express an impoverished and mistaken view of the nature and role of Kantian universalizability in Hayek's philosophical jurisprudence. It embodies the error that, in Hayek or indeed in Kant, universalizability is a wholly formal test.

In his “Principles of a Liberal Social Order,” (A-115, in B-13) Hayek tells us: “The test of the justice of a rule is usually (since Kant) described as that if its ‘universalizability,’ i.e. of the possibility of willing that rules should be applied to all instances that correspond to the conditions stated in it (the ‘categorical imperative’).”80 As an historical gloss, Hayek observes that:

It is sometimes suggested that Kant developed his theory of the Rechtstaat by applying to public affairs his conception of the categorical imperative. It was probably the other way round, and Kant developed his theory of the categorical imperative by applying to morals the concept of the rule of law which he found ready made (in the writings of Hume).81

Hayek's own argument, that applying Kantian universalizability to the maxims that make up the legal order yields liberal principles of justice which confer maximum equal freedom upon all, has been found wanting by nearly all his critics and interpreters. Thus Raz quotes Hayek as follows:

“The conception of freedom under the law that is the chief concern of this book rests on the contention that when we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man's will and are therefore free. It is because the judge who applies them has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that laws and not men rule... As a true law should not name any particulars, so it should especially not single out any specific persons or group of persons.”

Raz comments on this passage: “Then, aware of the absurdity to which this passage leads, he modifies his line, still trying to present the rule of law as the supreme guarantee of freedom...”82

Similarly, discussing Hayek's criteria that laws should not mention proper names and that the distinctions which the law makes be supported both within and without the group which is the subject of legislation, Hamowy comments:

That no proper name be mentioned in a law does not protect against particular persons or groups being either harassed by laws which discriminate against them or granted privileges denied the rest of the population. A prohibition of this sort on the form laws may take is a specious guarantee of legal equality, since it is always possible to contrive a set of descriptive terms which will apply exclusively to a person or group without recourse to proper names...83

How are these standard objections to be rebutted?

Meeting Objections to the Universalizability Test

We must first of all note that, even in Kant and in Kantian writers other than Hayek, such as R.M. Hare and John Rawls, the test of universalizability does far more than rule out reference to particular persons or special groups. The test of universalizability does indeed, in the first instance, impose a demand of consistency as between similar cases, and in that sense imposes a merely formal requirement of non-discrimination. This is the first stage or element of universalization, the irrelevance of numerical differences. But the next stage of universalization is that of asking whether one can assent to the maxim being assessed coming to govern the conduct of other towards oneself: this is the demand of impartiality between agents, the demand that one put oneself in the other man's place. And this element or implication of universalizability leads on to a third, that we be impartial as between the preferences of others, regardless of our own tastes or ideals of life—a requirement of moral neutrality. I do not need to ask here exactly how these elements of universalizability are related to one another, to ask (most obviously) if the second is entailed by the first in any logically inexorable way, or similarly the third by the second. It is enough to note that there is a powerful Kantian tradition according to which strong implications do link the three phases of universalization, and that this is a tradition to which Hayek himself has always subscribed.84

Applying the full test of universalizability to the maxims that go towards making a legal order, we find that, not only are references to particulars ruled out, but the maxims must be impartial in respect of the interests of all concerned, and they must be neutral in respect of their tastes or ideals of life. If it be once allowed that the test of universalizability may be fleshed out in this fashion, it will be seen as a more full-blooded standard of criticism than is ordinarily allowed, and Hayek's heavy reliance on it will seem less misplaced. For, when construed in this fashion, the universalizability test will rule out (for example) most if not all policies of economic intervention as prejudicial to the interests of some and will fell all policies of legal moralism. Two large classes of liberal policy, supposedly allowable under an Hayekian rule of law, thus turn out to be prohibited by it.

Hayek himself is explicit that the test of universalizability means more than the sheerly formal absence of reference to particulars. As he puts it:

The test of the justice of a rule is usually (since Kant) described as that of its ‘universalizability,’ i.e. of the possibility of willing that the rules should be applied to all instances that correspond to the conditions stated in it (the ‘categorical imperative’). What this amounts to is that in applying it to any concrete circumstances it will not conflict with any other accepted rules. The test is thus in the last resort one of the compatibility or non-contradictoriness of the whole system of rules, not merely in a logical sense but in the sense that the system of actions which the rules permit will not lead to conflict.85

The maxims tested by the principle of universalizability, then, must be integrated into a system of nonconflictable or (in Leibniz’ terminology) compossible rules, before any of them can be said to have survived the test.

Again, the compatibility between the several rules is not one that holds in any possible world, but rather that which obtains in the world in which we live. It is here that Hayek draws heavily on Hume's account of the fundamental laws of justice, which he thinks to be, not merely compatible with, but in a large measure the inspiration for Kant's political philosophy.86 As I have already observed, the practical content of the basic rules of justice is given in Hume by anthropological claims, by claims of general fact about the human circumstance. It is by interpreting the demands of universalizability in the framework of the permanent necessities of human social life that we derive Hume's three laws of natural justice.

Kantian Universalizability & Liberal Justice

Note again that, in Hume, as in Hayek, the laws of justice are commended as being the indispensable condition for the promotion of general welfare, i.e. their ultimate justification is utilitarian. But in order to achieve this result, neither Hayek nor Hume need offer any argument in favor of our adopting a Principle of Utility. Rather, very much in the spirit of R.M. Hare's Kantian reconstruction of utilitarian ethics,87 Hayek's claim is that an impartial concern for the general welfare is itself one of the demands of universalizability. A utilitarian concern for general welfare is yielded by the Kantian method itself and is not superadded to it afterwards. Hayek's thesis, like Hume's, is that a clear view of the circumstances of human life shows justice to be the primary condition needed to promote general welfare. But, like Hare and Kant, he thinks concern for both justice and the general welfare to be dictated by universalizability itself.

Hayek's argument, then, is that the maxims of liberal justice are yielded by applying the Kantian universalizability test to the principles of the legal order. As he puts it:

It will be noticed that only purpose-independent (‘formal’) rules pass this (Kantian) test because, as rules which have originally been developed in small purpose-connected groups (‘organizations’) are progressively extended to larger and larger groups and finally universalized to apply to the relations between any members of an Open Society who have no concrete purposes in common and merely submit to the same abstract rules, they will in the process have to shed all reference to particular purposes.88

Again, in listing the essential points of his conception of justice Hayek asserts:

...a) that justice can be meaningfully attributed only to human actions and not to any state of affairs as such without reference to the question whether it has been, or could have been, deliberately brought about by somebody; b) that the rules of justice have essentially the nature of prohibitions, or, in other words, that injustice is really the primary concept and the aim of rules of just conduct is to prevent unjust action; c) that the injustice to be prevented is the infringement of the protected domain of one's fellow men, a domain which is to be ascertained by means of these rules of justice; and d) that these rules of just conduct which are in themselves negative can be developed by consistently applying to whatever such rules a society has inherited the equally negative test of universal applicability—a test which, in the last resort, is nothing less than the self-consistency of the actions which these rules allow if applied to the circumstances of the real world.89

There seem to be several elements, then, in Hayek's contention that applying the Kantian test to the legal framework yields a liberal order. First, though he does not explicitly distinguish the three stages or phases of universalization I mentioned earlier, he is clear that the universalizability test is not only formal, and that it comprehends the requirement that the scheme of activities it permits in the real world would be conflict-free. Second, at any rate in a society whose members have few if any common purposes, law must have a largely formal character, stipulating terms under which men may pursue their self-chosen activities rather than enjoining any specific activities on them; in the term Hayek adopts from Oakeshott,90 the form of legal rule appropriate to such an abstract or open society is “nomocratic” rather than “teleocratic,” purpose-neutral rather than purpose-dependent. Third, in a society whose members lack common purposes or common concrete knowledge, only abstract rules conferring a protected domain on each can qualify as rules facilitating a conflictfree pattern of activities. This means that the conditions of our abstract or open society will themselves compel adoption of a rule conferring just claims to liberty and private property—which Hayek rightly sees and indissolubly linked—once these conditions are treated as the appropriate background for the Kantian test.

One crucially important implication of this last point, noted in all of Hayek's political writings over the last twenty years but spelled out most systematically in the second volume of his recent trilogy, Law, Legislation and Liberty, is that the rules of justice which survive the Kantian test can prescribe justice only in the procedures and never in end-states. As Hayek puts it, explicating Hume: “There can be no rules for rewarding merit, or no rules of distributive justice, because there are no circumstances which may not affect merit, while rules always single out some circumstances as the only relevant ones.”91

This pattern of argument is an important and striking one, worth examining in detail on its merits, and not capable of being dismissed as prima facie unworkable. One important point may be worth canvassing, however. Hayek argues that once the legal framework has been reformed in Kantian fashion, it must of necessity be one that maximizes liberty. Hamowy goes so far as to assert that Hayek defines liberty as conformity with the rule of law.92 Now, whereas not every aspect of Hayek's treatment of freedom and coercion is clear or defensible,93 it seems a misinterpretation to say that he ever defines freedom as consisting solely in conformity with the rule of law. Rather, he takes such conformity to be a necessary condition of a free order. His thesis is that applying the Kantian test to the legal order will of itself yield a maxim according equal freedom to all men.94 So it is not that the rule of law contains freedom as part of its definition, but rather that a freedom-maximizing rule is unavoidably yielded by it. In other terms, we may say that, whereas moral rights do not come into Hayek's theory as primordial moral facts, the right to a protected domain is yielded by his conception as a theorem of it.

If Hayek is right that his method shows the unacceptability of contemporary patterned conceptions of justice, for example, and if, as I think, he has shown that only procedural justice can be squared with the liberal maxim demanding equal freedom of action, then we can begin to see the measure of his achievement. Certainly, his Kantian derivation of equal freedom deserves close and sympathetic scrutiny, and it cannot be assumed without argument that Hayek's system cannot protect individual rights or claims to justice simply because such rights do not enter the system at a fundamental level. For the most original and striking claim of Hayek's legal and political philosophy, which in this respect may be regarded as a synthesis of the theories of justice of Hume and Kant, is that applying the rational test of universalizability to the conditions of our world must of necessity yield a system of rules in which a protected domain of individual liberty is secured.

[76.] See Ronald Hamowy, “Law and the Liberal Society: F. A. Hayek's Constitution of Liberty,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 2, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 287-297; J. Raz, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue,” in Liberty and the Rule of Law, ed. R. L. Cunningham, Texas A & M University Press, 1979, pp. 3-21; and John N. Gray, “F. A. Hayek on Liberty and Tradition,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 119-137.

[77.] See footnote 76 above.

[78.] See footnote 76 above.

[79.] See my “F. A. Hayek on Liberty and Tradition,” cited in footnote 76 above.

[80.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 168, ff.

[81.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, pp. 116-117.

[82.] Raz, “The Rule of Law,” µin Cunningham, ed.Õ, p. 19.

[83.] Hamowy, “Law and the Liberal Society,” pp. 291-292.

[84.] I draw heavily here on the account of universalization given in J. L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, London: Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 83-102.

[85.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 168.

[86.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, pp. 116-117: “What Kant had to say about this µjusticeÕ seems to derive directly from Hume.”

[87.] See R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

[88.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 168.

[89.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 166.

[90.] See Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 163.

[91.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 116. Hayek's argument for a procedural conception of justice—an argument which, unlike Nozick's, does not depend on one's prior acceptance of Lockean rights theory—is one of the fundamentally important theses of his later philosophy, all the more important because his claim is that the procedural view of justice follows from the Kantian principle and is uniquely consonant with the requirements of the free market process.

[92.] Hamowy, “Law and the Liberal Society.”

[93.] Hamowy is surely right that Hayek's account of coercion is faulty. On this see Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981, Chapter 28, “F. A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion.”

[94.] See J. L. Mackie, Ethics, p. 88: “This...thesis is well formulated by Hobbes: ‘that a man...be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.’ Hobbes equates this with the Golden Rule of the New Testament....”