The Fatal Conceit Quotes

“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.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Nevertheless, the possibility that the evolved order in which we live provides us with opportunities for happiness that equal or exceed those provided by primitive orders to far fewer people should not be dismissed (which is not to say that such matters can be calculated). Much of the ‘alienation’ or unhappiness of modern life stems from two sources, one of which affects primarily intellectuals, the other, all beneficiaries of material abundance. The first is a self-fulfilling prophecy of unhappiness for those within any ‘system’ that does not satisfy rationalistic criteria of conscious control. Thus intellectuals from Rousseau to such recent figures in French and German thought as Foucault and Habermas regard alienation as rampant in any system in which an order is ‘imposed’ on individuals without their conscious consent; consequently, their followers tend to find civilisation unbearable – by definition, as it were. Secondly, the persistence of instinctual feelings of altruism and solidarity subject those who follow the impersonal rules of the extended order to what is now fashionably called ‘bad conscience’; similarly, the acquisition of material success is supposed to be attended with feelings of guilt (or ‘social conscience’). In the midst of plenty, then, there is unhappiness not only born of peripheral poverty, but also of the incompatibility, on the part of instinct and of a hubristic reason, with an order that is of a decidedly non-instinctive and extra-rational character.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The question then is how to secure the greatest possible freedom for all. This can be secured by uniformly restricting the freedom of all by abstract rules that preclude arbitrary or discriminatory coercion by or of other people, that prevent any from invading the free sphere of any other (see Hayek 1960 and 1973, and chapter two above). In short, common concrete ends are replaced by common abstract rules.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“General freedom in this sense is nevertheless impossible, for the freedom of each would founder on the unlimited freedom, i.e., the lack of restraint, of all others.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Freedom requires that the individual be allowed to pursue his own ends: one who is free is in peacetime no longer bound by the common concrete ends of his community. Such freedom of individual decision is made possible by delimiting distinct individual rights (the rights of property, for example) and designating domains within which each can dispose over means known to him for his own ends. That is, a recognisable free sphere is determined for each person. This is all-important. For to have something of one’s own, however little, is also the foundation on which a distinctive personality can be formed and a distinctive environment created within which particular individual aims can be pursued.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Some rationalists would want to advance an additional complaint that we have hardly considered: namely, that the morality and institutions of capitalism not only fail to meet the logical, methodological, and epistemological requirements reviewed already, but also impose a crippling burden on our freedom – as, for example, our freedom to ‘express’ ourselves unrestrainedly. This complaint cannot be met by denying the obvious, a truth with which we opened this book – that moral tradition does seem burdensome to many – but can only be answered by observing again, here and in subsequent chapters, what we derive from bearing this burden, and what the alternative would be. Virtually all the benefits of civilisation, and indeed our very existence, rest, I believe, on our continuing willingness to shoulder the burden of tradition. These benefits in no way ‘justify’ the burden. But the alternative is poverty and famine.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“only calculation and distribution in terms of market prices make it possible to utilise our discoverable resources intensively, to guide production to serve ends lying beyond the range of the producer’s perception, and to enable the individual to participate usefully in productive exchange (first, by serving people, mostly unknown to him, to the gratification of whose needs he can nonetheless effectively contribute; and second, by himself being supplied as well as he is only because people who know nothing about his existence are induced, also by market signals, to provide for his needs: see the previous chapter).”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Production for use’ means here the kind of work which, in the small group, is guided by anticipating for whose use the product is intended. But this sentiment fails to take into account the sorts of considerations advanced in the foregoing chapters, and to be argued again in the following: only the differences between expected prices for different commodities and services and their costs, in the self-generating order of the market, tell the individual how best to contribute to the pool from which we all draw in proportion to our contribution.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The slogan that ‘in the long run we are all dead’ is also a characteristic manifestation of an unwillingness to recognise that morals are concerned with effects in the long run – effects beyond our possible perception – and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view. Keynes also argued against the moral tradition of the ‘virtue of saving’, refusing, along with thousands of crank economists, to admit that a reduction of the demand for consumers’ goods is generally required to make an increase of the production of capital goods (i.e., investment) possible. And this in turn led him to devote his formidable intellectual powers to develop his ‘general’ theory of economics – to which we owe the unique world-wide inflation of the third quarter of our century and the inevitable consequence of severe unemployment that has followed it (Hayek, 1972/1978).”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“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.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“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.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“adding that there are other strands within what might be called rationalism which treat these matters differently, as for example that which views rules of moral conduct as themselves part of reason. Thus John Locke had explained that ‘by reason, however, I do not think is meant here the faculty of understanding which forms trains of thoughts and deduces proofs, but definite principles of action from which spring all virtues and whatever is necessary for the moulding of morals”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“What led the greatly advanced civilisation of China to fall behind Europe was its governments’ clamping down so tightly as to leave no room for new developments, while, as remarked in the last chapter, Europe probably owes its extraordinary expansion in the Middle Ages to its political anarchy”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Governments have more often hindered than initiated the development of long-distance trade. Those that gave greater independence and security to individuals engaged in trading benefited from the increased information and larger population that resulted. Yet, when governments became aware how dependent their people had become on the importation of certain essential foodstuffs and materials, they themselves often endeavoured to secure these supplies in one way or another.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The more one learns about economic history, the more misleading then seems the belief that the achievement of a highly organised state constituted the culmination of the early development of civilisation. 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.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Similarly, of the revival of European civilisation during the later Middle Ages it could be said that the expansion of capitalism – and European civilisation – owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy (Baechler, 1975:77). It was not under the more powerful governments, but in the towns of the Italian Renaissance, of South Germany and of the Low Countries, and finally in lightly-governed England, i.e., under the rule of the bourgeoisie rather than of warriors, that modern industrialism grew. Protection of several property, not the direction of its use by government, laid the foundations for the growth of the dense network of exchange of services that shaped the extended order.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“If morals and tradition, rather than intelligence and calculating reason, lifted men above the savages, the distinctive foundations of modern civilisation were laid in antiquity in the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. There, possibilities of long-distance trade gave, to those communities whose individuals were allowed to make free use of their individual knowledge, an advantage over those in which common local knowledge or that of a ruler determined the activities of all.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“While facts alone can never determine what is right, ill-considered notions of what is reasonable, right and good may change the facts and the circumstances in which we live; they may destroy, perhaps forever, not only developed individuals and buildings and art and cities (which we have long known to be vulnerable to the destructive powers of moralities and ideologies of various sorts), but also traditions, institutions, and interrelations without which such creations could hardly have come into being or ever be recreated.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Social Darwinism is wrong in many respects, but the intense dislike of it shown today is also partly due to its conflicting with the fatal conceit that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“cultural evolution is brought about through transmission of habits and information not merely from the individual’s physical parents, but from an indefinite number of ‘ancestors’. The processes furthering the transmission and spreading of cultural properties by learning also, as already noted, make cultural evolution incomparably faster than biological evolution. Finally, cultural evolution operates largely through group selection; whether group selection also operates in biological evolution remains an open question”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively displaced innate responses, not because men recognised by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and to displace other groups.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason – logically, psychologically, temporally.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Shaped by the environment in which individuals grow up, mind in turn conditions the preservation, development, richness, and variety of traditions on which individuals draw. By being transmitted largely through families, mind preserves a multiplicity of concurrent streams into which each newcomer to the community can delve.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“It is less accurate to suppose that thinking man creates and controls his cultural evolution than it is to say that culture, and evolution, created his reason.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Competition is a procedure of discovery, a procedure involved in all evolution, that led man unwittingly to respond to novel situations; and through further competition, not through agreement, we gradually increase our efficiency.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Nonetheless it is true that the greater part of our daily lives, and the pursuit of most occupations, give little satisfaction to deep-seated ‘altruistic’ desires to do visible good. Rather, accepted practices often require us to leave undone what our instincts impel us to do. It is not so much, as is often suggested, emotion and reason that conflict, but innate instincts and learnt rules. Yet, as we shall see, following these learnt rules generally does have the effect of providing a greater benefit to the community at large than most direct ‘altruistic’ action that a particular individual might take.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Mankind achieved civilisation by developing and learning to follow rules (first in territorial tribes and then over broader reaches) that often forbade him to do what his instincts demanded, and no longer depended on a common perception of events. These rules, in effect constituting a new and different morality, and to which I would indeed prefer to confine the term ‘morality’, suppress or restrain the ‘natural morality’, i.e., those instincts that welded together the small group and secured cooperation within it at the cost of hindering or blocking its expansion.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“These modes of coordination depended decisively on instincts of solidarity and altruism – instincts applying to the members of one’s own group but not to others. The members of these small groups could thus exist only as such: an isolated man would soon have been a dead man. The primitive individualism described by Thomas Hobbes is hence a myth. The savage is not solitary, and his instinct is collectivist. There was never a ‘war of all against all’.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The contention that we are constrained to preserve capitalism because of its superior capacity to utilise dispersed knowledge raises the question of how we came to acquire such an irreplaceable economic order – especially in view of my claim that powerful instinctual and rationalistic impulses rebel against the morals and institutions that capitalism requires.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“It is important to confront these consequences, for the notion that, in the last resort, the whole debate is a matter of value judgements and not of facts has prevented professional students of the market order from stressing forcibly enough that socialism cannot possibly do what it promises.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)