Hayek’s generosity of spirit

Hayek never described his opponents as bad or base, but guilty only of intellectual error. It's a characteristically generous attitude, and in some respects an admirable one, but it is not without its tensions.

The strongest argument for Hayek's position is epistemological. If Hayek's core insight is correct, that knowledge is dispersed, that no one can survey the full consequences of policy, and that even brilliant minds operate with necessarily limited information, then intellectual error is precisely what we should expect from people who advocate central planning or collectivist solutions. They are not villains, but victims of the same epistemic constraints they propose to overcome. The humility is consistent with the theory.

There is also a strategic and rhetorical virtue to it, in that charitable engagement disarms opponents, builds credibility with undecided observers, and keeps the conversation rational. Hayek's debate with Keynes, for instance, remained genuinely respectful, which elevated both men. Treating adversaries as misguided rather than malevolent also makes conversion possible. You cannot persuade someone you have publicly accused of bad faith.

And historically, many architects or supporters of collectivist disaster, the Webbs, Shaw and Wells, were not cynics but true believers, sometimes catastrophically wrong precisely because they were sincere. Moral condemnation, in such cases, misidentifies the mechanism of error.

But the position has limits, and perhaps conceals a certain fastidiousness about conflict. In the first instance, intellectual error and moral culpability are not always separable. A man who persists in an error after its consequences have become visible, who suppresses evidence, who argues in bad faith to maintain position or funding, or who deploys ideas primarily to serve power, such a man is not simply mistaken. Hayek's charity, generously applied perhaps too widely, can become a form of naivety, declining to assign blame where blame is genuinely due.

Second, the attitude may underestimate the role of interest. Many advocates of interventionist policy are not confused about the consequences; they benefit from them, in bureaucratic power, institutional prestige, or political constituency. Treating this as mere intellectual error is to misread the phenomenon. Concentrated interests and dispersed costs explain a great deal of bad policy that pure epistemic modesty does not.

Third, there is something slightly self-congratulatory embedded in the position. To say ‘my opponents are merely wrong’ can be patronizing, implying that one's own side has achieved the clear-sightedness that others lack. The person accused of bad motives can at least defend himself, but the person who is told they are simply confused has nowhere to stand.

Hayek's stance is probably right as a default, the most intellectually honest and rhetorically effective opening position. Error is a better first hypothesis than malice, and Chesterton's fence applies to imputed motives as much as to institutions. But it should not harden into a rule that forecloses moral judgement altogether. There are cases of persistence, of interest, of demonstrated cynicism, where the charitable reading becomes its own form of intellectual error.

The best attitude is probably Hayek's in tone, but with one's eyes open to the cases where he was too generous.

I believe that people like Owen Jones and George Monbiot (if they don’t mind being lumped together) are both sincere in wanting to achieve a better world, especially for those currently disadvantaged, but I do not think the policies they advocate will help to bring that about. However, I do not regard many politicians with the same generosity of spirit because Public Choice theory keeps tapping on my shoulder.

Madsen Pirie