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

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Of course intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen to govern the communities into which they happen to have been born; and this will lead them into conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, those who quietly accept prevailing rules of conduct. Moreover, they also understandably will want to align themselves with science and reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical sciences during the past several centuries, and since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason. Thus a distinguished historian has written in this vein: ‘Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be mocked and deplored’ (Seton–Watson, 1983:1270). By definition: Barry (1961, mentioned above) wanted to make morality and justice immoral and unjust by ‘analytic definition’; here Seton–Watson would try the same manoeuvre with tradition, making it by definition reprehensible. We shall return to these words, to this ‘Newspeak’, in chapter seven. Meanwhile let us look more closely at the facts.