ABSTRACT
IN any circumstances The Constitution of Liberty would have been an important book. Given the condition of political philosophy in the English-speaking world today, it is outstandingly important. In recent years contributions to political philosophy have consisted almost exclusively either of historical work, often of a high scholarly excellence* but hardly attempting to bring the ideas discussed to bear on modern issues, or of occasional bal/ons d' essai which have not risen very high despite the absence of mooring-lines.t
Professor Hayek's book is rich in historical material, but it is not primarily historical. At the end of it, he speaks of 'the principles I have tried to reconstruct by piecing together the broken fragments of a tradition' (p. 411). His massive annotation is not a mere scholarly indulgence. It indicates much better than Hayek's own listings of his heroes (e.g. Milton, Burke, Macaulay, Gladstone, de Tocqueville, Lord Acton) the range and detail of the material he has digested and organised into a coherent and comprehensive, distinctive and uncompromising political philosophy. At the centre of this philosophy is a view of the way in which social processes of adaptation and development work and of the proper role of human deliberation and planning within them. Whereas in The Counter-Revolution of Science and The Road to Serfdom this view was pressed home against
socialist doctrines, in The Constitution of Liberty it is pressed home against the welter of dubious practices and expedients which inflation, progressivist slogans, pressures, ill-conceived projects, administrative convenience, and downright intellectual laziness and dishonesty have brought into existence in the post-war Western world. I have the highest admiration for the controversial chapters on trade unions, taxation, town planning, agriculture and education where the principles worked out earlier are applied with salutary and sometimes startling effect. This presents a leftish reviewer with an easy way of dismissing the book. He has only to hold up for amazed inspection some of its more drastic recommendations without mentioning the arguments behind them, and to shake his head over their shocking and unrealistic character. I think that Hayek does press his proposals with a somewhat doctrinaire insistence, and that a lighter and less insistent style would have been more effective. But what matters is not so much the book's practical conclusions as the views behind them - both of the way a society should work and of the way contemporary policies actually work. Whether or not these views are true - and I suspect that Hayek's understanding of contemporary policies is more detailed and shrewd than that of some of his critics - they certainly constitute a challenging corrective idea; and the only adequate way for a leftish critic to meet Hayek's challenge would have been to come to grips with this corrective idea, and not just to pour scorn on the proposals to which it leads.
