An Insightful Essay on Hayek's Road to Serfdom
Larner may be characterized as some sort of democratic/libertarian socialist and has written an informed and insightful essay about Hayek's political philosophy as revealed in The Road to Serfdom. (Yes, of course, there's tensions and contradictions between these three concepts -- democracy, liberty, and socialism -- but clearly many writers identify with and defend some combination of these ideas, from which some offer thoughtful criticisms of classical liberal/libertarian arguments.)
Larner's article may be read with advantage by (at least) two groups of people. First, those on the left who likely have not read Hayek but are nonetheless apt to dismiss Hayek as a conservative reactionary who wrote nothing worth reading. And, second, admirers of Hayek whose understanding of his ideas would benefit from thoughtful criticism of their hero from whatever perspective, not least in order to participate seriously in the debate about Hayek's ideas.
What does Jesse Larner have to say? He believes that "Hayek understood at least one very big thing: that the vision of a perfectible society leads inevitably to the gulag." Larner also argues that "[t]he absence of any consideration of more libertarian, less top-down approaches (the socialisms of Luxembourg, Kropotkin, Proudhon, many others; or of the possibility of nontotalitarian models of social democracy, like those that emerged in Europe after the war) should alert the reader to Hayek’s limitations." This may seem old hat to Hayek scholars and, of course, at least some of his criticisms have been made before. Moreover, many libertarians would happily tolerate, indeed embrace, some of Larner's examples of "libertarian collectivism."
Larner concludes thus: "In most of [Hayek's writings] he shows a tendency to an abstract idealism that it is hard to imagine as compatible with actual human social life, and with the exception of his powerful critique of the planned economy, his ideas have not been resoundingly vindicated by historical experience. This is not what those who honor Hayek as the valiant individualist who destroyed the intellectual foundations of the left would like to believe. To them, Hayek is the author of universal truths, and he has taken on the status of a prophet. The rest of us, I hope, have learned to be wary of prophets."
Putting to one side the question of whether this is a fair representation of what at least many of Hayek's admirers believe, I suggest that Larner does well to remind the reader that Hayek was writing at a particular time and those circumstances have changed profoundly during the course of the subsequent decades. I also suggest that those of us who believe that Hayek is in some sense "the author of universal truths" would do well to distinguish between universal truth and observations that may not be entirely or even largely true.