The Fatal Conceit Quotes

“They assume that, since people had been able to generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to design an even better and more gratifying system. But if humankind owes its very existence to one particular rule-guided form of conduct of proven effectiveness, it simply does not have the option of choosing another merely for the sake of the apparent pleasantness of its immediately visible effects.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The demands of socialism are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the extended order that made civilisation possible. Rather, they endeavour to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised consequences.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“there is no known way, other than by the distribution of products in a competitive market, to inform individuals in what direction their several efforts must aim so as to contribute as much as possible to the total product.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person’s right to dispose over a recognised private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relations among different communities.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Such new rules would spread not because men understood that they were more effective, or could calculate that they would lead to expansion, but simply because they enabled those groups practising them to procreate more successfully and to include outsiders.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Nor do I dispute that reason may, although with caution and in humility, and in a piecemeal way, be directed to the examination, criticism and rejection of traditional institutions and moral principles.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Although I attack the presumption of reason on the part of socialists, my argument is in no way directed against reason properly used. By ‘reason properly used’ I mean reason that recognises its own limitations and, itself taught by reason, faces the implications of the astonishing fact, revealed by economics and biology, that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection – the comparative increase of population and wealth – of those groups that happened to follow them.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“La curiosa tarea de la ciencia económica es demostrar a los hombres lo poco que realmente saben de lo que imaginan que pueden diseñar. Para la mente ingenua que puede concebir al orden sólo como el producto de una ordenación deliberada, puede parecer absurdo el hecho de que en condiciones complejas, el orden y la adaptación a lo desconocido se pueden lograr de manera más efectiva mediante la descentralización de las decisiones y que una división de la autoridad en realidad extenderá la posibilidad de orden general. Que la descentralización en realidad conduce a que se tome en cuenta una mayor cantidad de información.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

“the religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee. If we bear these things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat sceptical of the validity of some of their teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith would lead to a decline of morals.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“To call by the same name such completely different formations as the companionship of individuals in constant personal contact and the structure formed by millions who are connected only by signals resulting from long and infinitely ramified chains of trade is not only factually misleading but also almost always contains a concealed desire to model this extended order on the intimate fellowship for which our emotions long.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“When words lose their meaning people will lose their liberty. Confucius”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“But if wealth generated by such ‘rearrangements’ bewildered folk, the information-searching activities of tradesmen evoked truly great distrust. The transport involved in trade can usually be at least partly understood by the layman, at least after some patient explanation and argument, to be productive. For example, the view that trade only shifts about already existing things can be readily corrected by pointing out that many things can be made only by assembling substances from widely distant places. The relative value of these substances will depend not on the attributes of the individual material components of which they consist but on relative quantities available together at the locations required. Thus trade in raw materials and semi-finished products is a precondition for increase in the physical quantities of many final products that could only be manufactured at all thanks to the availability of (perhaps small quantities of) materials fetched from far away. The quantity of a particular product that can be produced from resources found at a particular place may depend on the availability of a very much smaller quantity of another substance (such as mercury or phosphor, or perhaps even a catalyst) that can be obtained only at the other end of the earth. Trade thus creates the very possibility of physical production. The idea that such productivity, and even such bringing together of supplies, also depends on a continuous successful search for widely dispersed and constantly changing information remains harder to grasp, however obvious it may seem to those who have understood the process by which trade creates and guides physical production when steered by information about the relative scarcity of different things at different places.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Man’s inventiveness contributed so much to the formation of super-individual structures within which individuals found great opportunities that people came to imagine that they could deliberately design the whole as well as some of its parts, and that the mere existence of such extended structures shows that they can be deliberately designed. Although this is an error, it is a noble one, one that is, in Mises’s words, ‘grandiose . . . ambitious . . . magnificent . . . daring’.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“The extended order depends on this morality in the sense that it came into being through the fact that those groups following its underlying rules increased in numbers and in wealth relative to other groups. The paradox of our extended order, and of the market – and a stumbling block for socialists and constructivists – is that, through this process, we are able to sustain more from discoverable resources (and indeed in that very process discover more resources) than would be possible by a personally directed process. And although this morality is not ‘justified’ by the fact that it enables us to do these things, and thereby to survive, it does enable us to survive, and there is something perhaps to be said for that.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“there is much to indicate that those who aimed simply at happiness would have been overwhelmed by those who just wanted to preserve their lives.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“not one of them shows any awareness that there might be limits to our knowledge or reason in certain areas, or considers that, in such circumstances, the most important task of science might be to discover what these limits are.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“one of the important insights that John Stuart Mill had gained in his youth: namely, that ‘the demand for commodities is not a demand for labour’.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“teachers, journalists and ‘media representatives’ who, having absorbed rumours in the corridors of science, appoint themselves as representatives of modern thought, as persons superior in knowledge and moral virtue to any who retain a high regard for traditional values, as persons whose very duty it is to offer new ideas to the public – and who must, in order to make their wares seem novel, deride whatever is conventional. For such people, due to the positions in which they find themselves, ‘newness’, or ‘news’, and not truth, becomes the main value, although that is hardly their intention – and although what they offer is often no more new than it is true.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Indeed, the basic point of my argument – that morals, including, especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a creation of man’s reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution – runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including ‘socialist’). The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Descending in the modern period from René Descartes, this form of rationalism not only discards tradition, but claims that pure reason can directly serve our desires without any such intermediary, and can build a new world, a new morality, a new law, even a new and purified language, from itself alone.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“David Hume saw that the market made it possible ‘to do a service to another without bearing him a real kindness’ (1739/1886:II, 289) or even knowing him; or to act to the ‘advantage of the public, though it be not intended for that purpose by another’ (1739/1886:II, 296), by an order in which it was in the ‘interest, even of bad men to act for the public good’. With such insights, the conception of a self-organising structure began to dawn upon mankind, and has since become the basis of our understanding of all those complex orders which had, until then, appeared as miracles that could be brought about only by some super-human version of what man knew as his own mind. Now it gradually became understood how the market enabled each, within set limits, to use his own individual knowledge for his own individual purposes while being ignorant of most of the order into which he had to fit his actions.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“What is more important is that in order for a custom or innovation to be preserved, there were two distinct prerequisites. Firstly, there must have existed some conditions that made possible the preservation through generations of certain practices whose benefits were not necessarily understood or appreciated. Secondly, there must have been the acquisition of distinct advantages by those groups that kept to such customs, thereby enabling them to expand more rapidly than others and ultimately to supersede (or absorb) those not possessing similar customs.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“only an individual, not his group, could gain peaceful admission to an alien territory, and thereby acquire knowledge not possessed by his fellows. Trade could not be based on collective knowledge, only on distinctive individual knowledge. Only the growing recognition of several property could have made such use of individual initiative possible.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“the error, later so common, of confusing two senses of freedom: that curious sense in which an isolated individual is supposed to be able to be free, and that in which many persons collaborating with one another can be free. Seen in the latter context of such collaboration, only abstract rules of property – i.e., the rules of law – guarantee freedom.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“In any case, the idea that at some point conscious design stepped in and displaced evolution substitutes a virtually supernatural postulate for scientific explanation. 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.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“Man became intelligent because there was tradition – that which lies between instinct and reason – for him to learn. This tradition, in turn, originated not from a capacity rationally to interpret observed facts but from habits of responding. It told man primarily what he ought or ought not to do under certain conditions rather than what he must expect to happen.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“operate beneficially, competition requires that those involved observe rules rather than resort to physical force. Rules alone can unite an extended order. (Common ends can do so only during a temporary emergency that creates a common danger for all.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“In our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of the things which we get. Almost all of us serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions – economic, legal, and moral – into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood in the sense in which we understand how the things that we manufacture function.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

“if our present order did not already exist we too might hardly believe any such thing could ever be possible, and dismiss any report about it as a tale of the miraculous, about what could never come into being. What are chiefly responsible for having generated this extraordinary order, and the existence of mankind in its present size and structure, are the rules of human conduct that gradually evolved (especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain, and privacy).”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)