ABSTRACT
The previous chapters explore the views and theories of Marx and Hayek on particular subjects – economics, politics, morality and other relatively separate areas of human and social life. But to complete the picture we need to look at the general ways in which they approached ideas and the methods they employed to develop their social philosophies. This includes how their individual predilections led them in particular directions and impacted upon their conclusions. Perhaps surprisingly, these two powerful thinkers, whose theories are usually taken to be diametrically opposed, at times used similar approaches and followed parallel procedures. Less surprisingly, they often diverged in their methodologies but it is equally instructive to see the ways in which they did so. It should be remembered that both were strongly political although,
as we saw in the previous chapter, they each lacked substantial and consistent theories about the social activity of politics. Marx differed from Hayek in being a political activist as, for example, in the first Communist Party from 1836-52 and the First International of workers from 1864-76. He never deviated from the political objectives he formed in the early 1840s and which he set out with clarity and verve in the Manifesto. This saw the light of day in early 1848 on the eve of the German and other European revolutions, events which, as we’ve seen, greatly influenced his thinking. As a writer and thinker Marx was engaged in intense and prolonged study to provide the theoretical weapons for what he believed was the imminent proletarian socialist revolution. In Marx’s day, Isaac Newton’s discovery in the seventeenth century
of the laws of physical motion of earth-bound and cosmic material bodies exerted a powerful influence on those studying other phenomena and disciplines. Political scientists and others sought similar laws that governed the operation of the processes they were studying;
analogous laws of development or laws of motion were looked for and sometimes found or believed to have been found. This was what Marx had in mind when, introducing the first volume of Capital in 1867, he said:
It is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.1
