Hayek's Views Against Constructivism

1967 Words8 Pages

I Background: Born in 1899 in Vienna, Hayek was an Austria-British economist who is most well-known for his fundamental contributions to modern liberal thinking, proponents against “scientism” and constructivist rationalism Against constructivism: His criticisms against constructivism refer to the erroneous logic behind socialist economists’ and their notions of reason, of which they more or less tend to attribute social order to central planning and conscious intention. This notion regarding the deliberate design of societal orders was known as taxis, and according to Hayek, was doomed to fail due to the dispersed nature of knowledge, in which no individual mind can truly possess all the information required to understand the implications …show more content…

He adopts the Kantian idea of universality to draw a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate coercion. Hayek considers that laws can truly be legitimate if they are universal, ensuring that no particular individual or interest group is targeted, and these laws instead directed at the normal, average human being. So that when we abide by such rules irrespective of how they may apply to us, we are not subject to another’s will and are therefore then considered to be free. Such universal rules work to inhibit people from acting in manners that would be regarded by the general as dangerous. Thus, they are not coercive because they only condition, not direct an individual’s decisions or behavior and work to enforce a private sphere in which individuals may pursue their own ends protected from outside intervention. Hence, liberal order does not impose limits on …show more content…

What hayek is trying to say is that it’s a universally empirical generalization that every organization on this world, of which includes even tyrannies, are in a sense to some degree spontaneous, but also partly an ongoing product of ordering processes. The core idea behind the rule of law and why Hayek deems the need for government is that government’s responsibility is to limit its coercive power through the rule of law. That is, the effects of these general, abstract rules are foreseeable and applied equally to all, so that individuals are able to regulate their own conduct and act to place themselves in a position as to avoid to coercion by the state Historically, the state has seized a monopoly of power in society which has led to aggressive and detrimental consequences, but Hayek argues that a free liberal society solves this issue by monopolizing coercion on the state and by following the rule of law. What Hayek is thus saying is that the rule of law is moreover necessary for the protection of liberty, and that a free society would not exist without a rule of law Additionally if coercion is confined to the boundaries of the rule of law, then individuals’ liberties will be