ABSTRACT
Hayek has a highly skeptical view of the modern state, if by “modern state” we mean the kinds of government that are usually subsumed under the rubric Western democracies. The “particular set of institutions which today prevails in all Western democracies” (Hayek 1979a:1), he tells us in his study on Law, Legislation and Liberty, “produces an aggregate of measures that not only is not wanted by anybody, but that could not as a whole be approved by any rational mind because it is inherently contradictory” (ibid.: 6). There are, Hayek claims, “certain deeply entrenched defects of construction of the generally accepted type of ’democratic’ government” (ibid.: xiii) that “lead us away from the ideals it was intended to serve,” that let us drift “towards a system which nobody wanted” (Hayek 1973:3). And it is his diagnosis of these defects that made him, as he notes, “think through alternative arrangements” (Hayek 1979a: xiii) and led him to come up with “a proposal of basic alteration of the structure of democratic government” (ibid.), “a suggestion for a radical departure from established tradition” (Hayek 1973:4).
