Arts & Letters Daily links to this Virginia Postrel article about Friedrich (and I’d thought I’d supply two links here, hence this interruption – I preferred all that to just putting “von”) Hayek.
Quote:
Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly “irrational” customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today’s rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today’s fragmented and specialized markets, today’s emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today’s multicultural challenges.
Hayek’s 1952 book, “The Sensory Order,” often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. “Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names ‘connectionism’ and ‘parallel distributed processing.’ Remarkably, Hayek is never cited.”
I can still remember how a paperback series called “Fontana Modern Masters” did not contain a Hayek volume in it, because the lefty academic in charge of the enterprise simply forbade it. Robert Conquest dissecting Lenin was acceptable. Lenin might be a bit bad, but he was at least important, you see. Anyone writing about Hayek, however critically, was beyond the pale. He was not part of the agenda. He didn’t count. It would seem that, thanks to the championship of people like Steven Pinker, he is seriously starting to. Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.
Hayek first came to my attention after reading an article by Dr. Sowell (your entry from yesterday) in Forbes several years ago. The subject was Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, which I purchased and sent to several friends.
I greatly admire Dr Sowell, and Hayek, too.
And if you like the legal aspects of Freedom/Liberty:
Try “Freedom and the Law” -Bruno Leoni
Highly recommened, readable, and not horribly long either, for a wonder.
Discusses different european legal traditions (i.e. the english and everybody else) and much else.
Mr Micklethwait writes:
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists
You might be better there, Brian, with twenty years ago! 🙂
Even our uber-enemy Stephen J. Gould recognised the link between Adam Smith and Charlie Darwin, admitting that biological evolutionary theory grew from Smith’s economic ideas, rather than the other way about.
Try:
http://eonix.8m.com/etc/gould.htm
Which does of course beg the question why was a man as insightful and intelligent as Gould could remain a socialist?
Though I do remember some piece from Gould talking about the perfection of the development of some insect mandible part, almost perfect for its task down to the last molecule, but how human society couldn’t allow such ever-responding and ever-changing balanced and spontaneous Hayekian Austrian perfection to arise, because too many poor liccle human economic endeavours would have to undergo creative destructive, under capitalism, and go the same way as insects which evolve the wrong parts go extinct.
Some nonsense or other about how the human brain had evolved to the point where it could go beyond evolution. Yeah, Stephen, like straight into the Gulag.
Technocrat planners. Don’t ya love ’em! 🙂
Brian
Yes, a lovely man Hayek. How about asking the editor to post my review of “Friedrich Hayek, a Biography” by Alan Ebenstein?
Hope you are better now.
Findlay
I’ll see if I can persuade him.
When Neal Koblitz and Serge Lang criticized Samuel Huntington’s preposterous use of mathematics, they didn’t mention that Hayek had made the same point in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason.
In twenty years I predict science will have determined that people use drugs chronically for chronic pain and that the idea of addiction is nonesense.
Pinker doesn’t quite get that one.
Evidently the idea that a trait that has wide social disapproval is adaptive to the individual’s circumstance is not fitting with his philosophy.
Oh, wait.
Well never mind.