ABSTRACT
It may seem strange to say that neither of two such overtly political people as Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek had substantial or consistent theories of the specifically human, and universal, social activity of politics. However, this becomes more understandable when we recognise that, in their different ways, the views they held about politics were essentially derivative from the thrust of their social philosophies, on which they would not compromise. Marx viewed the actual means and processes of production – that is,
the productive forces – of human subsistence as the base, or primary, factor of social life. Culture, law, politics and intellectual life in general belonged to a superstructure, a derivative or secondary social construct that he designated as ‘relations of production’. For him, politics thereby became an activity directed towards the predetermined goal of the rapid development of the productive forces, which the existing, capitalist, form of society would eventually hamper or even prevent. But the processes of production would also, inexorably, produce a human social force – the class of wage-workers – which, at least for the sake of their own survival but ideally also for society as awhole, would return property to public ownership at a qualitatively higher level than at the hunter-gatherer stage. This would end human prehistory and begin real history. For Hayek, the key factor in all social formations was private property,
the ‘universal rules of just individual conduct’ concerning property; capitalism in which the market system dominated, was in effect the peak of social development. In this context it is worth noting again what Hayek wrote on this topic:
The rule of law is therefore not a rule of the law, but a rule concerning what the law ought to be, a meta-legal doctrine or a political ideal. It will be effective only in so far as the legislator feels bound by it. In a democracy this means that it will not prevail
unless it forms part of the moral tradition of the community, a common ideal shared and unquestioningly accepted by the majority.1
He immediately goes on to say: ‘It is this fact that makes so very ominous the persistent attacks on the principle of the rule of law.’ This does not, however, follow from his premise: people cannot be accused of attacking the rule of law simply on the basis that they disagree with Hayek’s ‘political ideal’, or without examining what others may accept as the content of the rule of law. But so sacrosanct did he believe his own political ideals to be that he even devised a new form of constitution. This would have an upper house whose prime purpose was to preserve this constitution, allowing at the most only some ‘tinkering’ (his word) around the edges. Between the political ideals of Marx and Hayek there is clearly no
meeting ground, no possibility of reconciling these extremes, no possibility of a resolution by the usual forms of political activity – struggle, negotiation and compromise. The crucial question this raises is whether persisting in one or other of these dogmatic assertions is likely to offer a way forward to meet today’s challenges.
