FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, FRIEDRICH HAYEK SEEMED CONTENT to be known as an economist, and in 1974 the Nobel Prize was awarded him for his originality in economics. At crucial points, however, the principles in whose light Hayek proceeded included extra-economic principles; for instance, principles of law and representation on the one side, and on the other, principles of morality, truth, and justice. Thus, although he is most widely known for his originality in rediscovering and creatively advancing the theory of the free economy, some of his most important work regards the constitution of liberty and matters of law and legislation.1 Beyond that, having fought manfully in the war of ideas across most of the breadth of the human experience, in history, philosophy, religion, and social thought, Hayek was also a fierce warrior in the realm of cultural liberty.
Although born in a deeply Catholic culture and ever sympathetic to the religious impulse in human nature, Hayek reluctantly called himself an atheist. He wished he had an “ear” for God, he said, as most people do for music; but he didn’t. He felt it as a lack in himself.
In the heavily ideological post–World War II era, Hayek was keenly aware of the urgent need all around the world to bring together the two parties of liberty, secular and religious. No one party, he thought, could plausibly win the intellectual battle for liberty by itself. Liberty suffered not by too many supporters, but by too few. Hayek correctly foresaw the crucial role religion would play in the defeat of Communism many years later.
Hayek is famous for his sustained and animated criticism of most of the usages of “social justice” to be found in public speech during the middle of the twentieth century. He ripped to tatters the concept as it is usually deployed.2 Indeed, he stressed its fundamental contradiction: Most authors claim to use the term to designate a virtue (a moral virtue, by their account). But, then, most of the descriptions they attach to it appertain to impersonal states of affairs: “High unemployment,” they say, for instance, or “inequality of incomes” or “lack of a living wage,” is a “social injustice.” They expect the economic system to attain every utopian goal, as though all such goals are easily within reach and mutually compatible. They imagine that all social systems are under the command of identifiable persons, or should be, and they intend to find those persons and hold them responsible for outcomes of which they do not approve. Their main concern is to indict an entire system and its central institutions.3 For decades many of them seemed to hold that socialism was a superior economic system, toward which history was moving. Their diagnosis, methods, and remedies belong to diverse intellectual traditions: socialist, social democratic, or Catholic.4 They seem not to analyze the failures of the systems they prefer.
Hayek’s critique laid out a multitude of objections to then-prevailing modes of thought. But his main thrust went to the heart of the matter: Social justice is either a virtue or it is not. Most of those who use the term do not ascribe it to individual virtue but to states of affairs, as when they assert that this or that state of affairs—unemployment, low wages, deplorable working conditions—is “socially unjust.” Social-justice advocates seldom attempt to change minds and hearts one by one. Instead, they use political muscle to change the laws and to coerce mass compliance. In this respect, they are using the term “social justice” as a regulative principle of order, not a virtue, and by their own lights this is an illegitimate use. They are not appealing to “virtue” but to coercion. Thus “social justice” is a term used to incite political action for the sake of gaining political power. In Hayek’s words:
What I hope to have made clear is that the phrase “social justice” is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate, but it has become a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it. If political discussion is to become honest it is necessary that people should recognize that the term is intellectually disreputable, the mark of demagogy or cheap journalism which responsible thinkers ought to be ashamed to use because, once the vacuity is recognized, its use is dishonest.5
Social justice! How many sufferings have been heaped on the world’s poor under that banner! How malevolently it rolled off the presses of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. It is no wonder Hayek loathed it so.
Hayek alludes to a second defect of twentieth-century theories of social justice. Whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition thereof.6 The term is allowed to float in the air as if everyone will recognize an instance when he sees it. This vagueness seems both studied and indispensable. For the minute one begins to define social justice—as a virtue, for instance, related to the classical Aristotelian virtue of justice—one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. For most of those who use the term do not intend to raise the worldwide quotient of virtue. They employ “social justice” as a term of art, whose operational meaning is “we need a law against that.” They employ it, that is, as an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion.
BEFORE CONTINUING, I must note two ironies in what I am undertaking. First, Hayek’s demolition of false understandings of social justice was necessary before a better concept could come to light, a concept he himself lived out in practice before it could be thematized. (Hayek would have enjoyed this primacy of practice to theory.)
Second, Hayek’s love of theory qua theory more than once led him to make bold claims which seemed at the time wildly at variance with observable phenomena, and for which he was often mocked and made fun of. Let me mention but two: first, that socialism was epistemically blind and, therefore, could not possibly produce rational outcomes on a consistent basis and must eventually falter on its own ignorance.7 (For how could state bureaucrats, obliged each day to make up thousands of prices, possibly know how badly multitudes of individuals might want x or y, or how much sweat and effort they would be willing to expend to purchase it?) Again, Hayek argued that the power and permanence of the nation state in the twentieth century were greatly overestimated, and that (for instance) the state’s power to control money would eventually slip out of its grasp. Hayek predicted, when it seemed farfetched, that at some future time private entities in an open market, not governments, would become more reliable guardians of the value of currencies, and that the monopoly power of governments over money would in this way be broken. Today’s internet markets seem to be confirming his point, for through them today’s profligate governments are being disciplined by freely acting individual agents, who emigrate and move their investments elsewhere, learning from many forms of international media what is going on elsewhere and choosing accordingly. New regional institutions broke down isolated nation-state control of unlinked economies, too, such as the Euro and Eurozone, Mercosud, and other unifying creations. As information moved more and more freely, so did freedom of choice.
Hayek made many predictions based upon purely theoretical findings that were later vindicated. I believe, therefore, that he himself would have enjoyed the claim that under a theory of social justice clearer than any he had found in the literature, he himself might be said to have been a practitioner of social justice. That claim will stand, however, only if we first seize the root of Hayek’s objections to the most common construals of social justice that he found around him.
Social Justice Wrongly Understood
Hayek began by noting an anthropomorphic tendency in human thought, an itch to understand all processes, however different in kind, in terms of human agency.8 Consider the human animation and psychology given in all ages to animal life, from Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s fairy tales, to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, to the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. Consider, too, the tendency of humans to understand the general rules by which societies are run in light of individual psychology and individual ethics. Even today many project onto the politics and economics of modern complex societies the same expectations as their ancestors who lived in simple tribes; they personify all outcomes, as if some all-powerful individual chose them or could alter them at will. Initially, Hayek hypothesizes,