The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

by Friedrich A. Hayek

our values and institutions are determined not simply by preceding causes but as part of a process of unconscious self-organisation of a structure or pattern.

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once. To apply the name ‘society’ to both, or even to either, is hardly of any use, and can be most misleading (see chapter seven).

I believe that an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition.

So far as scientific explanation is concerned, it was not what we know as mind that developed civilisation, let alone directed its evolution, but rather mind and civilisation which developed or evolved concurrently.

Darwin’s work was preceded by decades, indeed by a century, of research concerning the rise of highly complex spontaneous orders through a process of evolution.

The role played by governments is greatly exaggerated in historical accounts because we necessarily know so much more about what organised government did than about what the spontaneous coordination of individual efforts accomplished.

Rousseau’s heady brew of ideas came to dominate ‘progressive’ thought, and led people to forget that freedom as a political institution had arisen not by human beings ‘striving for freedom’ in the sense of release from restraints, but by their striving for the protection of a known secure individual domain. Rousseau led people to forget that rules of conduct necessarily constrain and that order is their product; and that these rules, precisely by limiting the range of means that each individual may use for his purposes, greatly extend the range of ends each can successfully pursue.

What I object to among rationalist intellectuals such as those I shall be discussing is not that they experiment; rather, they experiment all too little, and what they fancy to be experimentation turns out mostly to be banal – after all, the idea of returning to instinct is really as common as rain and has by now been tried out so often that it is no longer clear in what sense it can any longer be called experimental. I object to such rationalists because they declare their experiments, such as they are, to be the results of reason, dress them up in pseudo-scientific methodology, and thus, whilst wooing influential recruits and subjecting invaluable traditional practices (the result of ages of evolutionary trial-and-error experiment) to unfounded attack, shelter their own ‘experiments’ from scrutiny.

In short, common concrete ends are replaced by common abstract rules. Government is needed only to enforce these abstract rules, and thereby to protect the individual against coercion, or invasion of his free sphere, by others. Whereas enforced obedience to common concrete ends is tantamount to slavery, obedience to common abstract rules (however burdensome they may still feel) provides scope for the most extraordinary freedom and diversity. Although it is sometimes supposed that such diversity brings chaos threatening the relative order that we also associate with civilisation, it turns out that greater diversity brings greater order. Hence the type of liberty made possible by adhering to abstract rules, in contrast to freedom from restraint, is, as Proudhon once put it, ‘the mother, not the daughter, of order’.

So, priding itself on having built its world as if it had designed it, and blaming itself for not having designed it better, humankind is now to set out to do just that. The aim of socialism is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the old order and the supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfilment, true freedom, and justice.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

It is a betrayal of concern for others, then, to theorise about the ‘just society’ without carefully considering the economic consequences of implementing such views. Yet, after seventy years of experience with socialism, it is safe to say that most intellectuals outside the areas — Eastern Europe and the Third World – where socialism has been tried remain content to brush aside what lessons might lie in economics, unwilling to wonder whether there might not be a reason why socialism, as often as it is attempted, never seems to work out as its intellectual leaders intended. The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of ‘utopias’ – the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua – should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. But such facts, first explained by economists more than a century ago, remain unexamined by those who pride themselves on their rationalistic rejection of the notion that there could be any facts that transcend historical context or present an insurmountable barrier to human desires.

The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions.

As we have seen, it is one of the necessary conditions of the extension of human cooperation beyond the limits of individual awareness that the range of such pursuits be increasingly governed not by shared purposes but by abstract rules of conduct whose observance brings it about that we more and more serve the needs of people whom we do not know and find our own needs similarly satisfied by unknown persons. Thus the more the range of human cooperation extends, the less does motivation within it correspond to the mental picture people have of what should happen in a ‘society’, and the more ‘social’ comes to be not the key word in a statement of the facts but the core of an appeal to an ancient, and now obsolete, ideal of general human behaviour.

It is difficult to conclude from this list alone whether the word ‘social’ has acquired so many different meanings as to become useless as a tool of communication. However this may be, its practical effect is quite clear and at least threefold. First, it tends pervertedly to insinuate a notion that we have seen from previous chapters to be misconceived – namely, that what has been brought about by the impersonal and spontaneous processes of the extended order is actually the result of deliberate human creation. Second, following from this, it appeals to men to redesign what they never could have designed at all. And third, it also has acquired the power to empty the nouns it qualifies of their meaning.

Socialist accounts which ascribe the existence of the proletariat to an exploitation of groups formerly able to maintain themselves are entirely fictional. Most individuals who now make up the proletariat could not have existed before others provided them with means to subsist. Although these folk may feel exploited, and politicians may arouse and play on these feelings to gain power, most of the Western proletariat, and most of the millions of the developing world, owe their existence to opportunities that advanced countries have created for them.