The Whiggery: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Professor F A Hayek

From The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek Reviewed by Irving Kristol From issue: April 1960 Last of the Whigs

• To this reproach, Professor Hayek makes a twin rejoinder. First, it is by no means certain that people would be happier if they knew their condition in life to correspond to their true capacities—life might be intolerable if one had to assume full responsibility (and blame) for one's fate. Second, no human being, or class of human beings, has the ability to make a fair or comprehensive judgment of a man's potentialities—or even to define them.

• This last point is the crucial one. The Constitution of Liberty is one long (570 pages) argument from ignorance. “Human reason,” Professor Hayek insists, “can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.” Here, too, the influence of Professor Hayek's vocation as an economist is visible. For the single premise of all modern economic thought is that philosophical wisdom (or what used to be considered as such) is impossible: no one can know better than a man himself what he most truly wants, and therefore a market economy is the most reasonable of economic arrangements. (It is interesting to observe that Professor Hayek's “liberal” critics do not openly reject this premise; they simply deny that the free market any longer exists, or that it can be reconstituted.)