Liberal Vision

Samuel Fleischacker: a Third Concept of Liberty, Judgement and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (1999)

Fleischacker is a Professor at University of Illinois-Chicago. Though all his degrees and academic appointments are from the USA, he is English in origin. He is a leading Adam Smith scholar, author of On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (2004) and co-editor of Essays on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2010). Amongst currently active thinkers inspired by classical liberalism, he could be taken as representing the other pole to Chandran Kukathas, who was discussed in my last post. Fleischacker is definitely a ‘liberal’ in what is now the normal sense in America, that is someone of egalitarian left leaning inclinations. However, he is also much less of a statist social democrat than the average American ‘liberal’, and he tries to establish an alternative to the kind of top down statism often employed to advance social egalitarianism. He is critical of libertarians for what he sees as indifference to the need for government action to aid liberty, but much of what he says fits with those libertarian thinkers who believe government has a role in promoting public goods.

Fleischacker looks back to Adam Smith and to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who will be addressed soon in this series of posts. Kant was greatly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, and has similar ideas to Smith about the benefits of free trade, property rights, and individual liberty under law. Kant also puts those Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the context of a philosophy much more concerned with ‘transcendental’ questions, that is questions of the limits of knowledge, and the way our knowledge of the world depends on the nature of our consciousness.

One part of Kant’s study of our consciousness is concerned with the power of judgment itself, which he thinks is at work in our taste for beauty and our philosophy of nature. Fleischacker is particularly concerned with beauty in Kant, which Kant connects with the most inner and subjective aspects of judgment. Kant’s view of our power for subjective judgements of beauty, is that it joins with everyone else’s judgement of beauty in ways which are the basis of communication, which join subjective pleasure with universal standards. For Kant, the capacity for judgments of beauty is deeply connected with our freedom as human beings and with our capacity to make moral judgements regarding other free individuals.

This aspect of Kant builds, in part, on ideas in Hume and Smith about the improvement of human morality, liberty, and taste over history. It is this capacity which provides a third concept of liberty beyond, the ‘negative’ liberty of freedom from interference, and the ‘positive’ liberty of collective action to provide conditions of liberty.
Fleischacker looks at liberty and self-determination in Kant in the first part of the book, and follows it up in the second part with an examination of the moral and political aspects of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Fleischacker thinks of Smith’s political economy as referring to the kind of values of moral reflection and freedom from external domination, that can be found in Kant. He looks at how for Smith, the increase in the prosperity and independence of labourers is a prime concern.

Fleischacker refers to the various points in Smith, which identify the manipulation of markets by the rich and powerful who try to exclude competitions. Merchants collude in trying to rig markets against new competitors, guild masters try to limit and control the people entering that guild.

Fleischacker looks at Smith’s famous line about the benefits we receive from the self-interest of butchers, bakers and brewers, rather than from their benevolence. The main point for Fleischacker is the value of personal independence. It is better for me to depend on myself for my food and drink, rather than depend on anyone’s charity. Fleischacker also notes Smith’s enthusiasm for indirect taxes on luxury goods rather than taxes which bear on the poor, and his disdain for those who look down on, and preach at, the poor for their supposed irresponsibility. Fleischacker’s extrapolation that Smith would be a supporter of redistributive tax and welfare policies are no doubt open to debate, but his views are certainly based on deep knowledge of Smith’s writings.

The last part of A Third Concept of Liberty is concerned with John Rawls, the dominant figure in recent egalitarian liberal political theory. Though Fleishacker agrees with Rawls’ overall view, he thinks Rawls leans too much towards rigid views of social organisation and distribution of income. Fleschacker argues for a more contextual approach, in which policy solutions emerge in reaction to particular conditions. He argues for public action to be directed against monopolistic economic power, rather than towards distribution of income. Rawls himself is often take as master thinker of left-liberalism and social democracy, but he also been taken up approvingly by some classical liberal and libertarian thinkers including Friedrich Hayek (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2 The Mirage of Social Justice, 1979). So if Fleishacker takes Rawls, and tries to move away from the more designed from above elements of Rawls thinking, he certainly has something positive for classical liberals and libertarians. Rawls himself will be dealt with in a future post.

CHANDRAN KUKATHAS - THE LIBERAL ARCHIPELAGO: A THEORY OF DIVERSITY AND FREEDOM (2003)

Kukathas is a professor of political theory at LSE and has previously taught in the USA and Australia.  He is a Malaysian Tamil in origin, and brings early memories of Malaysia into the book along with observations of issues around Aborigine rights into The Liberal Archipelago.  The book is written in a specialist academic style, with large parts of it originating in journal articles on the details of recent political theory.  Nevertheless, it does bring a personal passion and message with the specialist style.   This book maybe the best work of minarchist inclined theory (that is the theory of the state which only acts as a law enforcement agency) since Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia of 1974.  Like the first great minarchist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kukathas concedes that his position maybe more of an ideal than a likely real world state of affairs, but hopes to push the political world as far as possible in that direction.

Part of Kukathas’ minarchist orientation is that is sceptical about the political world, certainly as far as it concerns official state structures, and the questions of national belonging and identity which form part of political debate.  Kukathas refers to the ways in which the Malaysian state tries to organise and define sub-national groups, and his father’s experience of harassment by the police when writing journalism that seemed to challenge the state.  Kukathas’ point is that state policies which may start with good intentions to organise just relations between sub-national communities,  only aid state power and intrusion.  He also refers to the way that official attempts of the Australian state to give justice to the Aborigines, who have clearly suffered all kinds of extreme injustice since Europeans first arrived in Australia, have failed to produce good results.  Attempts to arrive at very official legal solutions from above and consult with community representatives, create new forms of intrusion and new forms of privilege for those with a close relation to the state.  Kukathas’s response to these kind of problems is to recall his father saying that while the state is not important, it is relevant in a negative way.  The point being that the state fails to connect with social reality, and organise it as it wishes, and it fails to create carefully delimited identities as it wishes, but can create all sorts of bad results in the attempt.

The best way the state can deal with communities which differ in some way from the community which seems to define national identity, that is minority groups or sub-national groups, is benign neglect.  Trying to compensate for injustice only produces new injustices and perverse incentives, as people try to get some advantage from membership, real or imagined, of a disadvantaged community, through public subsidies, state jobs and so on.  Benign neglect allows anyone who believes themselves to be members of a distinct sub-national community to organise education, cultural and communal life, free of state interference.  This itself produces an argument for minimising the state, since for example if the state does not provide education it cannot discriminate in education or encourage people to fight over who controls the education system.

Kukathas sometimes emphasises the idea that there are very well defined groups within nations, and across national boundaries, and sometimes emphasises that all identities and mixed, complex and ambiguous.  Kukathas suggests that the best way to deal with that kind of conflict is to limit the state and to promote the division of state powers through federalising nations, separation of powers between parts of the state system, transnational institutions.  If we look at history, we can see that there have always been multiple boundaries to sovereignty, different levels of sovereignty, and change in these arrangements.  Kukathas uses that to suggest his model of the ‘liberal archipelago’, that is a model in which sovereign entities are loosely associated like the islands in a archipelago, and may merge or split over time due to unplanned natural processes.  Individuals can move between the islands to live the kind of life they prefer. This is what has been happening in history, things go wrong when states try to freeze that process.

Kutathas does not claim that this is the only way of understanding liberalism in its original form.  He says that for thinkers like J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, the state was understood to be bringing people together in common ideas of liberty to prevent injustice to any member of the community. This idea has origins in the kind of antique republicanism we have looked at in Aristotle and Cicero. Kukathas prefers liberalism to move in the direction of accepting the autonomy of an unlimited number of overlapping communities (something like utopia in Nozick); some of these may be unjust from a liberal point of view, but we should accept them if individuals are free to leave.  That is the ideal form of liberalism for Kukathas, but he concedes that it is likely that this will always exist in interaction with more integrating version of liberalism.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) On The Republic (54-51 BCE)

[Our Liberal Philosophy series hereby continues, after a short pause for the recent elections - Ed.]

Cicero was both a leading thinker and a leading politician of the late Roman Republic. Like Aristotle, he was reflecting on the best aspects of a system which was disappearing. In Aristotle’s case, this was the self-governing democratic city of Athens, which had come under the tutelage of the kings of Macedonia. In Cicero’s case, this was the republican semi-democratic city of Rome, which came under the domination of a series of army generals up to Gaius Julius Caesar. After Caesar was assassinated by republican aristocratic friends of Cicero in 44 BCE, there was a struggle between Caesar’s main supporters Gaius Octavian and Mark Anthony and the republicans, which led to the murder of Cicero. After Octavian and Mark Anthony defeated Cicero’s friends, Octavian defeated Mark Anthony, and created the emperor system under the name of Augustus.

There are many Cicero texts important in the history of thought about liberty, and we will aim to cover them all over time. The one which probably gives the clearest overall view of his position is On the Republic. Cicero is looking back to Aristotle and to Polybius (203-120 BCE) the Graeco-Roman political thinker and historian, whom we need to discuss on another occasion.

He was also looking back to Plato, which might surprise some given that Plato has been struck with the popular modern image of ancestor of totalitarianism. This is not the prevailing view amongst Plato specialists, or many famous thinkers about liberty over the centuries. This is something else we need to return to, but very briefly: those elements of Plato which look totalitarian now, and which are certainly not ideal for liberty, occur in the context of a philosophy which tries to find the best institutional context for the formation of rational, self-commanding and free individuals living in a society governed by morality and reason, rather than force.

Cicero explains his position through a dialogue between notable Romans of an earlier period, including the politician Cato the Elder (ancestor of Cicero’s friend Cato the Younger) and the general and politician Scipio Africanus the Younger. The dialogue is placed in Smyrna (now the Turkish city of Izmir). What emerges is a picture of how the Roman republic grew from its earliest legendary and mythical history, which Cicero recognises to be unreliable.

He was a major sceptic about religion and mythology. The earliest kings are thought of as ruling through the creation of laws and consultative institutions, like the Senate, and to have ruled through consent. This itself is the creation of a ‘res publica’, public thing. When Cicero uses this term, he means both the state in general, and the state in its best possible form where no one person has complete power. This latter meaning is the ancestor of the current sense of republican as opposing all monarchy, including purely symbolic monarchs. It is also the ancestor of the sense of republican, now used in political theory, to refer to the belief that liberty rests on well designed political institutions, and a participatory political life of free citizens determined to defend their liberties.

Cicero refers to the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus as going beyond the limits of the earlier kings, so that the republic could only continue through sending Tarquinius into exile and ending the institution of kingship. This legendary birth of the republic in the strongest sense, was brought about by Lucius Junius Brutus in 509 BCE - an aristocrat who was the ancestor of Marcus Junius Brutus, the friend of Cicero who led the assassination of Caesar.
The role given to Cicero’s friend more than 400 years after his ancestor had ended kingship indicates something else hinted at in the composition of On the Republic. We are looking at a society where rulers normally come from an aristocracy looking back to ancestors (real and imagined) and associated traditions going back over centuries. This emphasis on the continuity of city and its leading families over hundreds of years separates the ancient world from our own, along with other features such as the unquestioning acceptance of slavery, the low status of women, state control of religion and moral codes.

We should also recognise that Cicero, and his predecessors in political thought, advanced ideas about liberty as far as they could be taken at that time, and inspired the classical liberal thinkers from Locke to Mill, who were familiar with Cicero from their classics based education. Cicero’s importance itself sank in general consciousness with the decline of classics based education, but there has been a revived understanding of his legacy in recent years as classical studies has intersected more with moral philosophy and political theory.

Cicero’s thoughts on liberty in the republic include the strongest possible condemnation of Tarquinius and other tyrants, that is kings who go beyond law. Cicero refers to them as inhuman and worse than wild beasts. For Cicero, the right sort of life under the right sort of laws and institutions, is the proper human life and everything else is inferior.

The right sort of institutions for Cicero are explained by him as growing gradually through Roman history, and he refers to this gradual growth as itself better than sudden transformation towards a supposedly ideal constitution. There should be change in the right direction, but step by step. He thought there should be a mix of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy. For Cicero, democracy means the meeting in the town centre of all citizens to discuss and vote on the issues of the day. This was a real aspect of the Roman system, though the voting system was set up in such a way to give aristocrats the most influence in practice. Aristocracy for Cicero, means the senate in which the whole aristocracy meets and which dominates the decision making of the republic. Monarchy in republican Rome means the consuls, two aristocrats who jointly assume the power of kings, under the law, for one year only. In this way, no one person, or group can dominate the state. The best decisions can emerge from this antique form of the separation of state powers, which guarantees reflection and revision. A state restrained in this way, and by respect for the laws which have emerged from customs and history, allows liberty to its citizens.

Max Weber (1864-1920), Political Writings (1994 edition)

Max Weber was one of the greatest social scientists there has been, in a group which includes Weber, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and very few others.  He is normally regarded as one the three ‘Classical’ sociologists who instituted the discipline.  Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany and pursued an academic career in Germany, with a period in the United States, and a longer period in Austria.  He also had periods as an indepedent scholar and in public service.

Weber early on leaned towards nationalist conservatism, though he was certainly never an extreme nationalist by the standards of the time.  Over time he moved to a liberalism strongly against socialism and conservatism.  Some define his thought to the end as ‘nationalist’.  It seems to me that his end point is a mixture of civic patriotism, in values, along with realism about the role of interests,  and competitiveness, in international politics, as in all forms of politics.

His academic work began with a mixture of historical work in law and economics.  From these starting points he moved into a vast synthesising enterprise, using a deep knowledge of the history of Europe in all its aspects, and knowledge of civilisations outside Europe.  He also did more detailed work on aspects of the German society and economy of his time.  The greatest product was the 1,000 page masterpiece Economy and Society, along with many other shorter works.

Weber’s interest in economics was as defined by the ‘Historical School’ in Germany, which was interested in historical comparisons of a kind that put differences between societies above general laws in economics.  However, time he spent as a professor in Vienna led him into a warm friendship with Ludwig von Mises, one of the great figures in liberal economics, and an advocate of economics as a science of universal laws.  If Weber had lived longer, there might have been some fascinating collaboration.  In any case, they certainly influenced each other, and it would be a fascinating though exhausting exercise to read Mises’ Human Action and Weber’s Economy and Society together.

Overall though, Weber was closer in thinking to Joseph Schumpter than Mises, amongst the ‘Austrian’ economists.  That is Weber was less inclined that Mises to shrink the state to almost nothing, beyond national security and its law and order functions.

He explores the nature of the state in the longest piece in Political Writings, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Order’.  This looks at the dysfunctions of the semi-democratic German Empire of 1871-1918, which gave real power to the Emperor and the north-eastern ‘Prussian Junker’ landowning families, who dominated the army and state bureaucracy.  Weber argues that this system was increasingly dysfunctional and that the effectiveness of the state can only be guaranteed, and limited, in the right ways, by democracy, that is from responsibility to a national electorate.

The state needs some central authority to maintain institutions and security, but there must be decentralisation and separation of powers.  Otherwise the state becomes a tool of the person in power, and of a social class that shares the interests of that person, leading to a mixture of authoritarianism and ineffectiveness.

The most famous essay, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, reflects on the role of political leadership.  He looks at the routinisation of politics as it becomes the preserve of full time professionals, and the role of individuals and of weakening political passions.  Weber throughout his thought fears the decline of individual responsibility, diversity and passion.  He thought socialism was a threat, but was just as much concerned with the way that general tendencies to bureaucracy in the state, and in private companies, threatens individuality, preparing the way for socialism.  Like Schumpeter, he was concerned that individual capitalists were seeking to protect themselves from the market, through anti-competitive activities and political influence.  He had great respect for those socialist leaders he regarded as genuine leaders, not just representatives of a party bureaucracy; similarly he respect the willingness of trade unionists to fight through industrial action, even if he rejected the economic arguments used.

Weber wanted a society based on individuality, and a willingness of individuals to struggle with each other, and against authority.  His sociological work showed how such ideas had emerged in history through the market, autonomy of cities from kings, individualistic forms of religious life, and so on, but also led him to fear the rise of conformism.

His ideas about political leadership, and related sociological concepts of charisma, have been widely misunderstood.  It’s often been assumed that when he talks about charismatic, or strongly personal, political leadership, that he was somehow anticipating Hitler.  Though Weber was very conscious that authoritarian leaders could use charisma, and personal appeal, he did not regard it as a necessary feature of authoritarian rule.  He was just as much concerned with voluntary forms of leadership in religion, and the positive role of charismatic liberal leaders, like Abraham Lincoln and William Gladstone, in overcoming bureaucracy and passionless routine in politics.  As strong passionate but responsible individuals, they gave positive examples of individualism, and moved people according to democratic principles towards liberal goals.

Happy birthday, Schumpy

Today is the birthday of Joseph A. Schumpeter, the Moravian philosopher largely responsible for the term “creative destruction”.

Here’s one quotation of his on the subject:

“The process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism … it is not [price] competition which counts but the competition from . . . new technology . . . competition which strikes not at the margins of profits . . . of existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”

Liberal Vision’s Barry Stocker has previously summarised Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy text: click here to read it.

DAVID HUME (1711-76) ESSAYS MORAL, POLITICAL, AND LITERARY (1758)

David Hume was a great figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, even more so than his friend Adam Smith.  He was a great figure in the whole European movement and is one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived, as well as being a major historian, economist, and political thinker.

His contributions to political thought can be found particularly in the Essays, but also in sections of his two philosophical masterpieces, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals (1748-51), along with his 6 volume History of England (1754-62).  His History of England was a best seller and the dominant history of England, or Great Britain, for decades.  Despite these dazzling achievements Hume was not able to have a university career, due to his open religious scepticism.  Fortunately his subsequent career as tutor to the aristocracy, embassy secretary, and freelance writer did not impede his great talents.

The general structure of Hume’s political thought was that human society progresses in history, though he was deeply aware of the great crimes and disasters of human history.  He thought that human rationality makes us able to learn the benefits of cooperation, and to learn from those benefits in further cooperation.  That is cooperation of a voluntary and dispersed kind, which starts with production and exchange within a small community, and which develops into a global human community based on trade, freedom of communication, and liberty.

The rationality in humans is very imperfect, but sufficient to learn how to cooperate in order to first make life more secure from hunger and violence; and then for human character, and society, to keep improving through better morals, finer tastes, and greater liberty.  These capacities interact with a natural human morality of sympathy (that Hume thought some animals share), in which we naturally, and inevitably, see ourselves in other people, and find that our pleasure is improved by their pleasure.

We should not see Hume as a one sided optimist who only saw the best in people; he had a melancholic side underneath a sociable and optimistic manner, and his writings certainly show sensitive awareness, and even anger, at human cruelty and irrationality.

His overall achievement is that he had important explanations for why some human societies have become more prosperous, more moral, more sensitive, more free, and more governed by law and less by violence.  On that basis, he had good reasons for expecting more progress of the same kind.

On the more detailed aspects of his political thought, he defended the British system of the time for achieving as good a balance as existed anywhere between ‘republican’ liberty and ‘monarchical’ institutional stability.  Again this was not a result of complacency, he noticed for example how the state bought support from the upper class through a national debt which benefitted wealthy holders of government bonds, while others had to suffer from higher taxes and a stifled economy.

He certainly saw the need for some to become much more wealthy than others – preferably without state favours – as increased general wealth can only come from property rights and the possibility of individual self-enrichment.

In his economic essays, he argued against economic protectionism, then known as Mercantilism, and for free trade.  He pointed out that the French state caused starvation when it banned the export of wheat.  Farmers grow more wheat when there is a demand for it, from anywhere in the world, and that would benefit the poor and hungry in France more than trying to stop wheat being ‘lost’ to foreign countries.  Freedom from want and increasing prosperity come from the widest possibilities of trade, not from governments trying to prevent supposedly valuable products from leaving the country.

He pointed out the error of thinking that accumulating more money – largely referring to the Mercantilist belief that governments should acquire gold – makes a country richer.  Production stimulated by trade makes a country richer, not having more bits of gold currency.  History shows that where countries suddenly acquire gold, or any kind of wealth, from conquest that it is all wasted on non-productive expenditure very quickly.  Only  freedom to buy and sell, under humane, rational and consistent laws, can lead to genuine increases in wealth.

Hume’s views on the politics of the time are determined by two somewhat contrary tendencies. As mentioned above, he valued both liberty and continuity of institutions.  So on one side, he regarded radical change with extreme suspicion –including challenges to the British monarchy – as leading to war and social breakdown; while on the other side, he had a plan for a perfect British republic balancing different forms of representation and strong legal institutions.  That republican idealism combined with a pessimistic belief that politics inevitably corrupts, as government has to find ways of buying off interest groups, ‘factions’, so that it can govern at all.  Examples of how Hume’s rich personality, and thought, comprise many of the various impulses of liberal thought in his time, and ever since.

Liberal Philosophy button added

As a worryingly obsessive follower of Liberal Vision, you will no doubt have experienced eye-widening shock on 28th December when a new button was added to the menu (above).

“Liberal Philosophy?” you mused, “What treasures await for us now? How much better, by Jove, can this site possibly get?”

Ignoring pleas from your family / spouses / by-the-hour sex workers to return to whatever they wanted you to spend the bank holiday doing,  you clicked on the button to discover a chronologically-ordered list of Barry Stocker’s synopses of philosophical texts.

Most splendid, yes?

The list, I should say, is ever expanding, and I’m working on discovering some dark secrets about Barry’s past with which to blackmail him into reading more and more texts and summarising them so that I don’t have to do any of the hard work myself.

So click on the link, have a butcher’s around. His synopses will continue, as usual, to appear here as regular blog posts too.

Cheers  Baz.

ARISTOTLE 384-322 BCE, THE POLITICS

Aristotle is one of the main thinkers in world history.  Together with his teacher Plato, he established the main outlines of the philosophical tradition, and many other areas of human knowledge.  He was a tutor to the young Alexander the Great at the court of King Philip II of Macedon, and also an enthusiast for the self-governing institutions of the city-state of Athens where he studied, taught and wrote.

As a Macedonian born outside Athens, he was often an object of suspicion to the Athenians, because he was a foreigner and because the Macedonian monarchy had destroyed the independence of the Greek states.  Aristotle avoided the worst consequences by living for two major periods outside Athens.  The first period included his time teaching Alexander and a 2 years in Assos, Ionia (now the Aegean coast of Turkey).   Athens, in its ‘Golden Age’ at that time, represented a peak of individualistic commercial democracy, accompanied by some of the most distinguished drama, poetry, historiography, architecture, sculpture and philosophy ever produced.

The individualism, however, was very lacking by our standards. Conformity to majority opinion and state rituals was strong, as we see in Aristotle’s exile and the condemnation to death of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle’s teacher Plato; slavery and the second class status of women were unchallenged fundamentals of the society.  Nevertheless, Athens was a great step forward for the Ancient world, and Aristotle was a large part of that.  The Ancient republics of Greece and Rome strongly influenced early modern freedom movements from the Italian city state republics to the French and American Revolutions; and Athens was the symbol of a commercial individualistic understanding of that tradition.  Aristotle represents a step towards liberalism compared with his teacher Plato, though we should look beyond the mid-Twentieth Century pop philosophy misunderstanding of Plato as the prophet of totalitarianism.  This was never accepted by Plato scholars, and is slowly receding, not fast enough to avoid continuing confusion though.

Whatever aspects of Plato are unacceptable from a modern liberal point of view, his position is based on the idea of a state based on law not force; and of a human individual with the capacity to subordinate immediate desires to reason in a healthy self-governing character.  Aristotle builds on these ideas in The Politics, while distancing himself from Plato’s suggestion of a class of philosopher rulers, sharing their property in a life devoted to wisdom.  Aristotle argues that property must be privately held in order for it to be used properly and its benefits realised.  Though he does not criticise slavery for ‘natural’ slaves he presumes that most people in a society should be free citizens, and that they should have equal legal and political rights.

The best state for Aristotle is a city, rather than a large territorial monarchy.  In a city, the citizens can be friends and can share the government in the city through a system based on law and agreement, not coercion to maintain the power of one person at the top.  Since the capacity for political affairs is a basic human capacity, all citizens should have some role in government.  Aristotle concedes that there could be good government, government moderated by law and virtue, giving power to one individual (a monarchy) or a minority group (an aristocracy), but the quality of this government depends very much on the quality of individuals and so is always close to collapse into the tyrannical rule of one, or the self-interested rule of an oligarchy.

The best kind of constitution is that of a ‘political state’, the natural form of the state.  In that kind of state, the people as whole have power assembled as a whole in a public assembly, as was normal in ancient city republics.  If that is the only source of decision making, that is pure democracy which Aristotle worries is vulnerable to manipulation by those who appeal to majority opinion of the moment.  He associates democracy with the rule of the poorest, in an unrestrained way, vulnerable to manipulation, just as the rule of the richest  is self-interested.  The government should be administered by people in the middle (presumably the less wealthy landowners), who are less influenced by extremes.

The extremes of democracy are restrained by courts and governmental bodies which are elected or are appointed, as opposed to mass assembly or selection by lottery to service on government bodies.  It is this structure which prevents the state becoming too powerful, and going beyond law.  In this best political system democracy is mixed with aristocracy and oligarchy, so that laws and decisions are made in the common interests, and the equal rights of all citizens are recognised.  Where the right balances and restraints are lacking, pure democracy emerges which tends to threaten law and property, leading to tyranny in order to stabilise the situation; or oligarchy emerges in which the rich destroy the rights of the majority.  These mixed nature of the best political constitution prevents the destruction of individual rights, as when the Athenians voted the least popular citizen out of the state, in fear that the city could be undermined, or taken over, by one or a few people.

Friedrich August Hayek (1899-1992), The Road to Serfdom (1944)

The Road to Serfdom is well known as an inspiration to classical liberals, libertarians and free market conservatives. However, on publication it was praised with great warmth by John Maynard Keynes, the economist and government adviser, often taken as a mascot by social liberals and social democrats. Hayek’s intention at that time was to reduce the influence of socialists and expand the appeal of classical liberalism in all parties. Hayek suggests that state welfare, public services, and regulation of the economy, are compatible with democracy and individual rights, so long as they are not part of an attempt to plan the economy from above.

Hayek was born in Vienna when it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and studied law and economics at the University of Vienna. He moved to Britain in 1931 to work at the LSE, and was then associated with a number of institutions in the USA and Germany, as well as the UK. Hayek’s achievements in economics led to a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. He is also well known for this work in political theory, together with a body of work in theory of knowledge, psychology and neuroscience.

Hayek’s most widely read book is The Road to Serfdom. Part of its appeal is the passion it expresses, which comes from Hayek’s fear that western democracies were moving towards the same kind of state economic planning used by the Nazis, even while fighting a monumental war against Nazi totalitarianism. He also wanted to explain how Marxism in power leads to a totalitarianism which is the same in essence as Fascism and Naziism. All branches of totalitarianism destroy individual rights in assigning economic wealth to some favoured group in society, defined by class, race, or some other distinction irrelevant to individual human capacities. The conflicts between totalitarian movements arose simply from differences about which groups should be favoured.

Hayek accepted that democratic socialists with Marxist ideas had good intentions and did not intend to destroy democracy. However, he thought incremental increases in state planning would inevitably reduce individual freedom and take us closer, step-by-step, down the road to the totalitarianism in which everyone is a slave, or serf, of the state. Hayek pointed out how Germany had become more and more affected by economic planning, under authoritarian nationalist-conservative governments during the Second Empire (1871-1919), and more democratic governments during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). National Socialism in Germany after 1933 intensified that process, destroying all individual rights in Germany.

Though Hayek regarded democratic socialists, influenced by evolutionary Marxism, as well meaning people, he points out that even in such circles there are people calling for restrictions on democracy. He pointed out that Harold Laski, maybe the most influential left-academic and Labour Party thinker of the time, with senior positions in the Labour movement, had openly doubted that Labour should give up government if it lost an election, and was part of efforts to restrict the rights of parliament with regard to government backed legislation. The tendency of socialists to restrict democracy is a necessary product of the supremacy of state planning in the economy. State dominance of the economy requires increasing coercion and ultimately open terror.

In a summary of ideas expounded at length in his economic writings, Hayek suggests that the state can never match the amount of information, and knowledge, available to individual economic agents. Since the state has more limited knowledge than individuals, it will need to coerce individual people and enterprises to fit in with the economic plan. Economies create wealth through forms of cooperation arising from dispersed knowledge, encoded in prices and other forms not determined by a central agency. The coercion necessary to the plan would deprive workers of the right to choose their employment, and way of making a living; and would deprive everyone of the right to consume in the ways they prefer. The attempt to plan everything through a twisted rationalism would undermine the whole evolution of liberties and legal rights as they have evolved in human history.

Here Hayek introduces ideas that he expanded in his work on political theory, with regard to the evolutionary nature of society, and of its laws, which can only be violated at the cost of destroying liberty and economic growth. The role of law in establishing liberty and economic growth is extended to relations between states, in that Hayek supports federation between European democracies and looser federation between world democracies. The main roles of such a federation would be to guarantee free trade and prevent war.