Hayek’s Counter-Revolution
F.A. Hayek The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason The Free Press, Illinois, 1952
“[Hayek] asserts to address the problem of scientism in the social sciences, asserting that researchers and reporters attempt to apply the methods and claims of objective certainty from hard science.” [Wikipedia]
This book ends:
It may well be true that we as scholars tend to overestimate the influence which we can exercise on contemporary affairs. But I doubt whether it is possible to overestimate the influence which ideas have in the long run. And there can be no question that it is our special duty to recognize the currents of thought which still operate in public opinion, to examine their significance, and, if necessary, to refute them. It was an attempt to fulfill at least the first part of this duty which I have tried to outline in this paper.
Part Three: Comte and Hegel
Hayek still seems influential today, so it seems reasonable to apply his approach to his own work. His Road to Serfdom has been, and arguably still is, of obvious current influence, regarding ‘big government’, whether of ‘left’ or ‘right’ as a danger to ‘the common good’, and advocating a ‘conservative’ (small ‘c’) view of small democratic governments minimally interfering in otherwise ‘free markets’, as discuseed in his ‘Use of Knowledge in Society‘.
‘The Counter-Revolution’ has three parts:
- Scientism and the Study of Society
- The Counter-Revolution of Science
- Comte and Hegel
Of these Hayek says:
These two major sections of the volume were first published in
Preface
parts in Economica for 1942-1944 and for 1941 respectively. The
third study, written more recently as a lecture appeared first in
Measure for June 1951 but was prepared from notes collected at the
same time as those for the first two essays. …
I take this book as providing the intellectual ‘meat’ behind his more influential accounts.
Part One: ‘Scientism’ …
I The Influence of the Natural Sciences
It need scarcely be emphasized that nothing we shall have to say is aimed against the methods of Science in their proper sphere or is intended to throw the slightest doubt on their value. But to preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of “scientism” or the “scientistic” prejudice.
pg 15
II The Problem and Methods of the Natural Sciences
[Sciences] main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a syste- matic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. In the course of this process not only the provisional classification which the commonly used concepts provided, but also the first distinctions between the different perceptions which our senses convey to us, had to give way to a completely new and different way in which we learned to order or classify the events of the external world.
pg 18
That the ordinary concepts of the kind of things that surround us do not provide an adequate classification which enables us to state general rules about their behavior in different circumstances, and that in order to do so we have to replace them by a different classifi- cation of events is familiar. It may, however, still sound surprising that what is true of these provisional abstractions should also be true of the very sense qualities which most of us are inclined to regard as the ultimate reality. But although it is less familiar that science breaks up and replaces the system of classification which our sense qualities represent, yet this is precisely what Science does. It begins with the realization that things which appear to us the same do not always behave in the same manner, and that things which appear different to us sometimes prove in all other respects to behave in the same way; and it proceeds from this experience to substitute for the classification of events which our senses provide a new one which groups together not what appears alike but what proves to behave in the same manner in similar circumstances.
pg 19
This process of re-classifying “objects” which our senses have already classified in one way, of substituting for the “secondary” qualities in which our senses arrange external stimuli a new classification based on consciously established relations between classes of events is, perhaps, the most characteristic aspect of the procedure of the natural sciences. The whole history of modern Science proves to be a process of progressive emancipation from our innate classification of the external stimuli till in the end they completely disappear so that “physical science has now reached a stage of development that renders it impossible to express observable occurrences in language appropriate to what is perceived by our senses. The only appropriate language is that of mathematics,” 18 i.e., the discipline developed to describe complexes of relationships between elements which have no attributes except these relations. While at first the new elements into which the physical world was “analyzed” were still endowed with “qualities,” i.e., conceived as in principle visible or touchable, neither electrons nor waves, neither the atomic structure nor electromagnetic fields can be adequately represented by mechanical models.
pg 20
Here footnote 18 says: “Most of the problems of this latter group will, however, raise problems of the kind characteristic of the social sciences proper when we attempt to explain them.” This still seems true today. That is, many of our problems are due to an inappropriate ‘scientistic’ approach to problems.
III The Subjective Character of the Data of the Social Sciences
BEFORE WE PROCEED to consider the effect of scientism on the study of society it will be expedient briefly to survey the peculiar object and the methods of the social studies. They deal, not with the relations between things, but with the relations between men and things or the relations between man and man. They are concerned with man’s actions, and their aim is to explain the unintended or undesigned results of the actions of many men.
pg 25 (My -DJM’s – emphasis)
Not all the disciplines of knowledge which are concerned with the life of men in groups, however, raise problems which differ in any important respect from those of the natural sciences. The spread of contagious diseases is evidently a problem closely connected with the life of man in society and yet its study has none of the special characteristics of the social sciences in the narrower sense of the term. Similarly the study of heredity, or the study of nutrition, or the investigation of changes in the number or age composition of populations, do not differ significantly from similar studies of animals. 18 And (he same applies to certain branches of anthropology, or ethnology, in so far as they are concerned with physical attributes of men. There are, in other words, natural sciences of man which do not necessarily raise problems with which we cannot cope with the methods of the natural sciences. Wherever we are concerned with unconscious reflexes or processes in the human body there is no obstacle to treating and investigating them “mechanically” as caused by objectively observable external events. …
Hayek offers no reasons for his view about the particular subjects (such as infectious diseases) he refers to above. So for the remarks I have emphasised beg two questions:
- How do we know when ‘the methods of the natural sciences’ are inappropriate, and thus their application may be ‘scientistic’?
- Even if there is good reason to believe that, for example, the course of an epidemic has largely been determined by ‘unconscious or reflex processes’, might we not have done better by being more ‘technocratic’ or otherwise ‘following’ the science?
The passage quoted above continues:
… They [the ‘mechanical activities] take place without the knowledge of the man concerned and without his having power to modify them; and the conditions under which they are produced can be established by external observation without recourse to the assumption that the person observed classifies the external stimuli in any way differently from that in which they can be defined in purely physical terms.
pgs 25/6
This too begs questions:
- Could ‘the man concerned’ come to ‘know’ the activities concerned, perhaps through science?
- Could ‘the man’ acquire the power to modify them?
- Would this contribute to the personal or social development of ‘the man’, increasing ‘his’ freedom?
- Might this not be a ‘good thing’.
Hayek goes on:
The social sciences in the narrower sense, i.e., those which used to be described as the moral sciences, are concerned with man’s conscious or reflected action, actions where a person can be said to choose between various courses open to him, and here the situation is essentially different. … We know, in … that in his conscious decisions man classifies external stimuli in a way which we know solely from our own subjective experience of this kind of classification. We take it for granted that other men treat various things as alike or unlike just as we do, although no objective test, no knowledge of the relations of these things to other parts of the external world justifies this. Our procedure is based on the experience that other people as a rule (though not always e.g., not if they are colorblind or mad) classify their sense impressions as we do.
pg 26
Here Hayek seems to suppose that the begged questions above are ‘as a rule’ answered in the negative, and even to think that anyone who is more adaptable may reasonably regarded as disabled or mad, or at least as some kind of social misfit. But much of Hayek’s argumentation remains valid (perhaps usefully so) even if we discount this espoused view. Hayek goes on:
But we not only know this. It would be impossible to explain or understand human action without making use of this knowledge. People do behave in the same manner towards things, not because these things are identical in a physical sense, but because they have learnt to classify them as belonging to the same group, because they can put them to the same use or expect from them what to the people concerned is an equivalent effect.
p 26
In this, Hayek seems to me highly illogical. It may be that such ‘knowledge’ would be necessary to justify some widely held views about what is ‘pragmatic’ for societies, and in particular to justify popular concepts of ‘rationality’, such as those widely attributed to Plato. But … .
If in investigating our contemporary society the “laws of nature” which we have to use as a datum because they affect people’s actions are approximately the same as those which figure in the works of the natural scientists, this is for our purposes an accident which must not deceive us about the different character of these laws in the two fields. What is relevant in the study of society is not whether these laws of nature are true in any objective sense, but solely whether they are believed and acted upon by the people. …
pg 30
This begs some more questions:
Who are ‘the people’? Is it some undifferentiated lumpen, or does it include all those who are a part of ‘society’, and if so are the disabled, ‘mad’ and otherwise atypical people a part of ‘the’ people (as distinct from a more inclusive ‘peoples’)?
Such questions seem particularly pertinent to economics, of which Hayek says:
We cannot here enter into a similar discussion of the more complex phenomena with which economic theory is concerned and where in recent years progress has been particularly closely connected with the advance of subjectivism. We can only point to the new problems which these developments make appear more and more central, such as the problem of the compatibility of intentions and expectations of different people, of the division of knowledge between them, and the process by which the relevant knowledge is acquired and expectations formed. 28 We are not here concerned, however, with the specific problems of economics, but with the common character of all disciplines which deal with the results of conscious human action. The points which we want to stress are that in all such attempts we must start from what men think and mean to do: from the fact that the individuals which compose society are guided in their actions by a classification of things or events according to a system of sense qualities and of concepts which has a common structure and which we know because we, too, are men; and that the concrete knowledge which different individuals possess will differ in important respects. Not only man’s action towards external objects but also all the relations between men and all the social institutions can be understood only in terms of what men think about them. Society as we know it is, as it were, built up from the concepts and ideas held by the people; and social phenomena can be recognized by us and have meaning to us only as they are reflected in the minds of men.
pgs 35/6
Thus Hayek seems to suppose that ‘we’ are only concerned to describe societies as they currently are, and not with their potential for change. This chapter ends:
… It is only by the systematic and patient following up of the implications of many people holding certain views that we can understand, and often even only learn to see, the unintended and often uncomprehended results of the separate and yet interrelated actions of men in society. That in this effort to reconstruct these different patterns of social relations we must relate the individual’s action not to the objective qualities of the persons and things towards which he acts, but that our data must be man and the physical world as they appear to the men whose actions we try to explain, follows from the fact that only what people know or believe can enter as a motive into their conscious action.
pg 35
IV The Individualistic and “Compositive” method of the Social Sciences
AT THIS POINT it becomes necessary briefly to interrupt the main argument in order to safeguard ourselves against a misconception which might arise from what has just been said. The stress which we have laid on the fact that in the social sciences our data or “facts” are themselves ideas or concepts must, of course, not be understood to mean that all the concepts with which we have to deal in the social sciences are of this character. There would be no room for any scientific work if this were so; and the social sciences no less than the natural sciences aim at revising the popular concepts which men have formed about the objects of their study, and at replacing them by more appropriate ones. The special difficulties of the social sciences, and much confusion about their character, derive precisely from the fact that in them ideas appear in two capacities, as it were, as part of their object and as ideas about that object. While in the natural sciences the contrast between the object of our study and our explanation of it coincides with the distinction between ideas and objective facts, in the social sciences it is necessary to draw a distinction between those ideas which are constitutive of the phenomena we want to explain and the ideas which either we ourselves or the very people whose actions we have to explain may have formed about these phenomena and which are not the cause of, but theories about, the social structures.
pg 36, my emphasis
… Trying to avoid using as data the concepts held by individuals where they are clearly recognizable and explicitly introduced as what they are, people brought up in scientistic views frequently and naively accept the speculative concepts of popular usage as definite facts of the kind they are familiar with.
pg 38
… While the method of the natural sciences is in this sense, analytic, the method of the social sciences is better described as compositive 33 or synthetic. It is the so-called wholes, the groups of elements which are structurally connected, which we learn to single out from the totality of observed phenomena only as a result to our systematic fitting together of the elements with familiar properties, and which we build up or reconstruct from the known properties of the elements.
pg 39
Footnote 33 adds that:
[Since] the elements are directly known to us in the social sciences, we can start here with the compositive procedure.
My difficulty here is that that, not being one of ‘us’, the ‘elements’ are not known ‘directly’ to me, and I know of no way of getting to ‘know’ them in the same sense as Hayek seems to imagine that he does. But in any case, Hayek simply seems to have been concerned with the elements as they currently are in his social world, which seems quite different to me in mine, let alone the society in which I may find myself next week.
Hayek continues:
… If social phenomena showed no order except in so far as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only in so far as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation. But although people dominated by the scientistic prejudice are often inclined to deny the existence of any such order (and thereby the existence of an object for theoretical sciences of society), few if any would be prepared to do so consistently: that at least language shows a definite order which is not the result of any conscious design can scarcely be questioned.
pg 39/40
… While we can explain the principle on which certain phenomena are produced and can from this knowledge exclude the possibility of certain results, e.g. of certain events occurring together, our knowledge will in a sense be only negative, i.e. it will merely enable us to preclude certain results but not enable us to narrow the range of possibilities sufficiently so that only one remains.
pg 40
V The Objectivism of the Scientistic Approach
A behaviorist or physicalist, to be consistent, ought not to begin by observing the reactions of people to what our senses tell us are similar objects; he ought to confine himself to studying the reactions to stimuli which are identical in a strictly physical sense. [But] No behaviorist, however, seriously contemplates doing so. They all take it naively for granted that what appears alike to us will also appear alike to other people. Though they have no business to do so, they make constant use of the classification of external stimuli by our senses and our mind as alike or unlike, a classification which we know only from our personal experience of it and which is not based on any objective tests showing that these facts also behave similarly in relation to each other. This applies as much to what we commonly regard as simple sense qualities, such as color, the pitch of sound, smell, etc., as to our perception of configurations (Gestalteri) by which we classify physically very different things as specimens of a particular “shape,” e.g., as a circle or a certain tune. To the behaviorist or physicalist the fact that we recognize these things as similar is no problem.
pg 45
… That different objects mean the same thing to different people, or that different people mean the same thing by different acts, remain important facts though physical science may show that these objects or acts possess no other common properties.
pg 46
… Of what kind the facts are with which we have to deal in any discipline is not determined by all the properties possessed by the concrete objects to which the discipline applies, but only by those
properties by which we classify them for the purposes of the discipline in question.
… [This] knowledge on which we constantly act, which must necessarily precede, and is pre-supposed by, any communication with other men, is not conscious knowledge
It is a common but dangerous error to believe that things which our senses or our mind treat as members of the same class must have something else in common beyond being registered in the same manner by our mind.
pg 47
The blind transfer of the striving for quantitative measurements 46 to a field in which the specific conditions are not present which give it its basic importance in the natural sciences, is the result of an entirely unfounded prejudice. It is probably responsible for the worst aberrations and absurdities produced by scientism in the social sciences. It not only leads frequently to the selection for study of the most irrelevant aspects of the phenomena because they happen to be measurable, but also to “measurements” and assignments of numerical values which are absolutely meaningless. What a distinguished philosopher recently wrote about psychology is at least equally true of the social sciences, namely that it is only too easy “to rush off to measure something without considering what it is we are measuring, or what measurement means. In this respect some recent measurements are of the same logical type as Plato’s determination that a just ruler is 729 times as happy as an unjust one.”
pg 51
Of ‘productive capacity’ Hayek notes:
There is no such thing as the productive capacity of society in the abstract apart from particular forms of organization. The only fact which we can regard as given is that there are particular people who have certain concrete knowledge about the way in which particular things can be used for particular purposes. This knowledge never exists as an integrated whole or in one mind, and the only knowledge that can in any sense be said to exist are these separate and often inconsistent and even conflicting views of different people.
pg 52
He continues:
Of very similar nature are the frequent statements about the “objective” needs of the people, where “objective” is merely a name for somebody’s views about what the people ought to want. We shall have to consider further manifestations of this “objectivism” towards the end of this part when we turn from the consideration of scientism proper to the effects of the characteristic outlook of the engineer, whose conceptions of “efficiency” have been one of the most powerful forces through which this attitude has affected current views on social problems.
pg 52
VI The Collectivism of the Scientistic Approach
CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH the “objectivism” of the scientistic approach is its methodological collectivism, its tendency to treat “wholes” like “society” or the “economy,” “capitalism” (as a given historical “phase”) or a particular “industry” or “class” or “country” as definitely given objects about which we can discover laws by observing their behavior as wholes.
pg 53
The error involved in this collectivist approach is that it mistakes for facts what are no more than provisional theories, models constructed by the popular mind to explain the connection between some of the individual phenomena which we observe. [Those] who by the scientistic prejudice are led to approach social phenomena in this manner are induced, by their very anxiety to avoid all merely subjective elements and to confine themselves to “objective facts,” to commit the mistake they are most anxious to avoid, namely that of treating as facts what are no more than vague popular theories. They thus become, when they least suspect it, the victims of the fallacy of “conceptual realism” (made familiar by A. N. Whitehead as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”).
pg 54
The naive realism which uncritically assumes that where there are commonly used concepts there must also be definite “given” things which they describe is so deeply embedded in current thought about social phenomena that it requires a deliberate effort of will to free oneselves from it.
[The]wholes about which we speak exist only if, and to the extent to which, the theory is correct which we have formed about the connection of the parts which they imply, and which we can explicitly state only in the form of a model built from those relationships.
pgs 55/6
… Rightly or wrongly we tend to assume that the other minds which we encounter can differ from ours only by being inferior, so that everything which they perceive or know can also be perceived or be known to us. The only way in which we can form an approximate idea of what our position would be if we had to deal with an organism as complicated as ours but organized on a different principle, so that we should not be able to reproduce its working on the analogy of our own mind, is to conceive that we had to study the behavior of people with a knowledge vastly superior to our own. … It would not be from observing them in action that we should acquire their knowledge, but it would be through being taught their knowledge that we should learn to understand their actions.
pg 60
… In order that any collection of individuals should form a true statistical collective it is even necessary that the attributes of the individuals whose frequency distribution we study should not be systematically connected or, at least, that in our selection of the individuals which form the “collective” we are not guided by any knowledge of such a connection. The “collectives” of statistics, on which we study the regularities produced by the “law of large numbers,” are thus emphatically not wholes in the sense in which we describe social structures as wholes. …
pg 61
VII The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach
The application of these considerations to the phenomena of human history leads to very important consequences. It means nothing less than that a historical process or period is never a single definite object of thought but becomes such only by the question we ask about it; and that, according to the question we ask, what we are accustomed to regard as a single historical event can become any number of different objects of thought.
pg 70
Consistently pursued historicism necessarily leads to the view that the human mind is itself variable and that not only are most or all manifestations of the human mind unintelligible to us apart from their historical setting, but that from our knowledge of how the whole situations succeed each other we can learn to recognize the laws according to which the human mind changes, and that it is the knowledge of these laws which alone puts us in a position to understand any particular manifestation of the human mind. Historicism, because of its refusal to recognize a compositive theory of universal applicability unable to see how different configurations of the same elements may produce altogether different complexes, and unable, for the same reason, to comprehend how the wholes can ever be anything but what the human mind consciously designed, was bound to seek the cause of the changes in the social structures in changes of the human mind itself changes which it claims to understand and explain from changes in the directly apprehended wholes. From the extreme assertion of some sociologists that logic itself is variable, and the belief in the “pre-logical” character of the thinking of primitive people, to the more sophisticated contentions of the modern “sociology of knowledge,” this approach has become one of the most characteristic features of modern sociology. It has raised the old question of the “constancy of the human mind” in a more radical form than has ever been done before.
pg 76
The whole idea of the variability of the human mind is a direct result of the erroneous belief that mind is an object which we observe as we observe physical facts. The sole difference between mind and physical objects, however, which entitles us to speak of mind at all, is precisely that wherever we speak of mind we interpret what we observe in terms of categories which we know only because they are the categories in which our own mind operates. There is nothing paradoxical in the claim that all mind must run in terms of certain universal categories of thought, because where we speak of mind this means that we can successfully interpret what we observe by arranging it in these categories. And anything which can be comprehended through our understanding of other minds, anything which we recognize as specifically human, must be comprehensible in terms of these categories. (sic)
pg 78
When we speak of man we refer to one whose actions we can understand. (!)
pg 79
VIII “Purposive” Social Formations
IN THE CONCLUDING portions of this essay we have to consider certain practical attitudes which spring from the theoretical views already discussed. Their most characteristic common feature is a direct result of the inability, caused by the lack of a compositive theory of social phenomena, to grasp how the independent action of many men can produce coherent wholes, persistent structures of relationships which serve important human purposes without having been designed for that end. This produces a “pragmatic” 70 interpretation of social institutions which treats all social structures which serve human purposes as the result of deliberate design and which denies the possibility of an orderly or purposeful arrangement in anything which is not thus constructed.
pg 80
This view receives strong support from the fear of employing any anthropomorphic conceptions which is so characteristic of the scientistic attitude. … They are thus driven back to a view which is essentially the same as that which, till the eighteenth century, made man think of language or the family as having been “invented,” or the state as having been created by an explicit social contract, and in opposition to which the compositive theories of social structures were developed.
If we survey the different fields in which we are constantly tempted to describe phenomena as “purposive” though they are not directed by a conscious mind, it becomes rapidly clear that the “end” or “purpose” they are said to serve is always the preservation of a “whole,” of a persistent structure of relationships, whose existence we have come to take for granted before we understood the nature of the mechanism which holds the parts together. The most familiar instances of such wholes are the biological organisms. …
pg 81
… If, in the form in which Adam Smith put it, the phrase that man in society “constantly promotes ends which are no part of his intention” has become the constant source of irritation of the scientistically-minded, it describes nevertheless the central problem of the social sciences. …
pg 83
… In so far as we learn to understand the spontaneous forces, we may hope to use them and modify their operations by proper adjustment of the institutions which form part of the larger process. But there is all the difference between thus utilizing and influencing spontaneous processes and an attempt to replace them by an organization which relies on conscious control.
pg 84
… Though our civilization is the result of a cumulation of individual knowledge, it is not by the explicit or conscious combination of all this knowledge in any individual brain, but by its embodiment in symbols which we use without understanding them, in habits and institutions, tools and concepts, 78 that man in society is constantly able to profit from a body of knowledge neither he nor any other man completely possesses. Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately co-ordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. They are greater than any individual precisely because they result from the combination of knowledge more extensive than a single mind can master.
One curious aspect of this problem which is rarely appreciated is that it is only by the individualist or compositive method that we can give a definite meaning to the much abused phrases about the social processes and formations being in any sense “more” than “merely the sum” of their parts, and that we are enabled to understand how structures of interpersonal relationships emerge, which make it possible for the joint efforts of individuals to achieve desirable results which no individual could have planned or foreseen. The collectivist, on the other hand, who refuses to account for the wholes by systematically following up the interactions of individual efforts, and who claims to be able directly to comprehend social wholes as such, is never able to define the precise character of these wholes or their mode of operation, and is regularly driven to conceive of these wholes on the model of an individual mind.
pg 85
IX “Conscious” Direction and the Growth of Reason
THE UNIVERSAL DEMAND for “conscious” control or direction of social processes is one of the most characteristic features of our generation. It expresses perhaps more clearly than any of its other cliches the peculiar spirit of the age. That anything is not consciously directed as a whole is regarded as itself a blemish, a proof of its irrationality and of the need completely to replace it by a deliberately designed mechanism. Yet few of the people who use the term “conscious” so freely seem to be aware precisely what it means; most people seem to forget that “conscious” and “deliberate” are terms which have meaning only when applied to individuals, and that the demand for conscious control is therefore equivalent to the demand for control by a single mind.
pg 87
This belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition. It would be truer to say, as A. N. Whitehead has argued in another connection, that on the contrary “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.” 81 If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometimes solves problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, any social processes which deserve to be called “social” in distinction to the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. …
… If truth is no longer discovered by observation, reasoning and argument, but by uncovering hidden causes which, unknown to the thinker, have determined his conclusions, if whether a statement is true or false is no longer decided by logical argument and empirical tests, but by examining the social position of the person who made it, when in consequence it becomes the membership of a class or race which secures or prevents the achievement of truth, and when in the end it is claimed that the sure instinct of a particular class or a people is always right, reason has been finally driven out. …
pg 90
… The presumptuous aspiration that “reason” should direct its own growth could in practice only have the effect that it would set limits to its own growth, that it would confine itself to the results which the directing individual mind can already foresee. … It is the extreme stage of these self-destructive forces of our modern “scientific” civilization, of that abuse of reason whose development and consequences will be the central theme of the following historical studies.
pg 90/1
It is because the growth of the human mind presents in its most general form the common problem of all the social sciences that it is here that minds most sharply divide, and that two fundamentally different and irreconcilable attitudes manifest themselves: on the one hand the essential humility of individualism, which endeavors to understand as well as possible the principles by which the efforts of individual men have in fact been combined to produce our civilization, and which from this understanding hopes to derive the power to create conditions favorable to further growth; and, on the other hand, the hubris of collectivism which aims at conscious direction of all forces of society.
pg 91
It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depends.
pg 92
[The] demand that every action should be judged after full consideration of all its consequences and not by any general rules is due to a failure to see that the submission to general rules, couched in terms of immediately ascertainable circumstances, is the only way in which for man with his limited knowledge freedom can be combined with the essential minimum degree of order. Common acceptance of formal rules is indeed the only alternative to direction by a single will man has yet discovered. The general acceptance of such a body of rules is no less important because they have not been rationally constructed. It is at least doubtful whether it would be possible in this way to construct a new moral code that would have any chance of acceptance. But so long as we have not succeeded in doing so, any general refusal to accept existing moral rules merely because their expediency has not been rationally demonstrated (as distinguished from the case when the critic believes he has discovered a better moral rule in a particular instance and is willing to brave public disapproval in testing it) is to destroy one of the roots of our civilization.
pgs 92/3
X Engineers and Planners
THE IDEAL OF conscious control of social phenomena has made its greatest influence felt in the economic field. The present popularity of “economic planning” is directly traceable to the prevalence of the scientistic ideas we have been discussing. As in this field the scientistic ideals manifest themselves in the particular forms which they take in the hands of the applied scientist and especially the engineer, it will be convenient to combine the discussion of this influence with some examination of the characteristic ideals of the engineers. We shall see that the influence on current views about problems of social organization of his technological approach, or the engineering point of view, is much greater than is generally realized. Most of the schemes for a complete remodelling of society, from the earlier Utopias to modern socialism, bear indeed the distinct mark of this influence. In recent years this desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems has become very explicit; M “political engineering” and “social engineering” have become fashionable catchwords which are quite as characteristic of the outlook of the present generation as its predilection for “conscious” control; in Russia even the artists appear to pride themselves on the name of “engineers of the soul,” bestowed upon them by Stalin. These phrases suggest a confusion about the fundamental differences between the task of the engineer and that of social organizations on a larger scale which make it desirable to consider their character somewhat more fully.
pg 94
We must confine ourselves here to a few salient features of the specific problems which the professional experience of the engineer constantly bring up and which determine his outlook. The first is that his characteristic tasks are usually in themselves complete: he will be concerned with a single end, control all the efforts directed towards this end, and dispose for this purpose over a definitely given supply of resources. It is as a result of this that the most characteristic feature of his procedure becomes possible, namely that, at least in principle, all the parts of the complex of operations are preformed in the engineer’s mind before they start, that all the “data” on which the work is based have explicitly entered his preliminary calculations and been condensed into the “blue-print” that governs the execution of the whole scheme. …
pgs 94/5
The engineer … rarely sees that his preference for these particular methods is merely a result of the type of problem he has most frequently to solve, and justified only in particular social positions. …
pg 96
The problem of securing an efficient use of our resources is thus very largely one of how that knowledge of the particular circumstances of the moment can be most effectively utilized; and the task which faces the designer of a rational order of society is to find a method whereby this widely dispersed knowledge may best be drawn upon. It is begging the question to describe this task, as is usually done, as one of effectively using the “available” resources to satisfy “existing” needs. Neither the “available” resources nor the “existing” needs are objective facts in the sense of those with which the engineer deals in his limited field: they can never be directly known in all relevant detail to a single planning body. Resources and needs exist for practical purposes only through somebody knowing about them, and there will always be infinitely more known to all the people together than can be known to the most competent authority. 100 A successful solution can therefore not be based on the authority dealing directly with the objective facts, but must be based on a method of utilizing the knowledge dispersed among all members of society, knowledge of which in any particular instance the central authority will usually know neither who possesses it nor whether it exists at all. It can therefore not be utilized by consciously integrating it into a coherent whole, but only through some mechanism which will delegate the particular decisions to those who possess it, and for that purpose supply them with such information about the general situation as will enable them to make the best use of the particular circumstances of which only they know.
pgs 98/9
This is precisely the function which the various “markets” perform. (sic) … It is as such an instrument for communicating to all those interested in a particular commodity the relevant information in an abridged and condensed form that markets and prices must be seen if we are to understand their function. …
pg 99
[That] something which not only does not rely on deliberate control for its working, but which has not even been deliberately designed, should bring about desirable results, which we might not be able to bring about otherwise, is a conclusion the natural scientist seems to find difficult to accept. (sic)
pg 100
In conclusion it is, perhaps, desirable to remind the reader once more that all we have said here is directed solely against a misuse of Science, not against the scientist in the special field where he is competent, but against the application of his mental habits in fields where he is not competent. There is no conflict between our conclusions and those of legitimate science. The main lesson at which we have arrived is indeed the same as that which one of the acutest students of scientific method has drawn from a survey of all fields of knowledge: it is that “the great lesson of humility which science teaches us, that we can never be omnipotent or omniscient, is the same as that of all great religions: man is not and never will be the god before whom he must bow down.” [M.R. Cohen, Reason and Nature]
pg 102
Part Two THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF SCIENCE
The age preferred the reign of intellect to the reign of liberty.
LORD ACTON
This part describes how revolutions against monarchs and other autocrats, notionally in favour of democracy, failed to satisfy a psychological need for clear ‘moral authority’, which led to science being corrupted into scientism, to fill the felt void. (DJM’s summary.)
Part Three COMTE AND HEGEL
It is impossible in this brief paper to do full justice to so big a subject. Least of all can I hope, with the few remarks I have been able to make on the filiation of ideas, to have convinced you that they are correct in every detail. But I trust I have at least provided sufficient evidence to persuade you of the burden of my argument: that we are still, largely without knowing it, under the influence of ideas which have almost imperceptibly crept into modern thought because they were shared by the founders of what seemed to be radically opposed traditions. In these matters we are to a great extent still guided by ideas which are at least a century old, just as the nineteenth century was mainly guided by the ideas of the eighteenth. But while the ideas of Hume and Voltaire, of Adam Smith and Kant, produced the liberalism of the nineteenth century, those of Hegel and Comte, of Feuerbach and Marx, have produced the totalitarianism of the twentieth.
pg 206 (DJM’s emphasis)
It may well be true that we as scholars tend to overestimate the influence which we can exercise on contemporary affairs. But I doubt whether it is possible to overestimate the influence which ideas have in the long run. And there can be no question that it is our special duty to recognize the currents of thought which still operate in public opinion, to examine their significance, and, if necessary, to refute them. It was an attempt to fulfill at least the first part of this duty which I have tried to outline in this paper.
My Comments
Eighty years on from Hayek, much of his insights still seem relevant, and we might benefit from a more contemporary review. For example, it seems hard to believe that our views on financial crashes, pandemics or sustainability are not corrupted by the kind of misguided views that Hayek highlights (pgs 90/1), and may actually still be having the kind of dire effects which Hayek identified. Hayek’s challenge (pgs 98/9, 206) seems unfulfilled.
In particular, Hayek conceives of ‘markets’, which communicate signals to participants (pg 99). He talks about ‘prices’, suggestive of a market in goods and services restricted to quantitative signals. Yet my own view is that democracies also depend on some kind of ‘market of ideas’, which requires much richer signals than mere ‘price’. It is not at all clear that there is currently such a market, or if it is that it is being effective in overcoming the ‘colonial’ tendencies identified by Hayek (pg 90) in underpinning contemporary societies. This aspect of Hayek’s thinking is perhaps clearer in his ‘Economics and Knowledge’, to which he refers, and his later Nobel acceptance speech. E.g.:
[In a market we may very well have] a position of equilibrium only because some people have no chance of learning about facts which, if they knew them, would induce them to alter their plans. Or, in other words, it is only relative to the knowledge which a person is bound to acquire in the course of the attempt to carry out his original plan that an equilibrium is likely to be reached.
Economics and Knowledge.
My preference has been to try to inform decision-takers of sufficient ‘facts’ which induces them to alter their plans in such a way that their expectations would not seem to me (having discussed the issues with relevant ‘stakeholders’) very much different had they known all the ‘facts’ which I know, and to make reasonable attempts to discover any other significant ‘facts’, whilst bearing in mind the limited ‘facticity’ of any supposed ‘facts’. This at least gives some chance of attaining a more sustainable ‘equilibrium’. In this sense, all markets seem to rely on underpinning ‘markets of ideas’ for their resilience.
There may be few instances in which the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm in the economic field: but the present inflation and employment problems are a very serious one.
… I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false. The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.I must, however, now leave these problems of immediate practical importance which I have introduced chiefly as an illustration of the momentous consequences that may follow from errors concerning abstract problems of the philosophy of science. There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science – or to deliberate control according to scientific principles – more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects. … Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. … Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.
The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science. … If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.
Nobel acceptance speech
djmarsay 