ABSTRACT

By any standard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek must be counted as among the greatest social and political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What they thought, how they thought, and the successes and failures in their thinking are closely related to the current critical point in the future of humanity as global warming and the sustainability of our present economic production and consumption patterns necessarily come to dominate our concerns. Both men were prolific in their output as well as the range of sub-

jects with which they dealt, and both differed from their contemporaries in that early in their careers they set out to develop all-embracing projects, best described as ‘social philosophies’. This was fairly common during Marx’s lifetime but by the twentieth century it was a rare thing for an economic thinker to do. But Hayek embarked upon his project primarily because socialism presented a strong challenge to capitalism in a period when capitalist society was reeling from two world wars and the Great Depression, and also feeling the impact of a successful revolution in Russia and a number of revolutionary outbreaks in several European countries. Their social philosophies covered economics, politics, history, law,

philosophy, epistemology, values and human nature. Each developed them into what post-modern critics would come to call ‘grand narratives’, covering the past and even the future in ways that were speculative and, as I shall argue, misleading. Though I contend that a broadly integrated vision of the human situation is necessary to guide action, particularly at crucial junctures such as the present one, we should take note of the dangers involved in building complete systems, with their inherent tendency to turn partial truths into absolutes, and to transform the totality of these into sets of ideas – ideologies – that are liable to become closed and fixed, certainly in the minds of their adherents.