ABSTRACT
In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek postulated that governments’ rationalist planning can never be truly effective or efficient as such planning is dependent upon imperfect information. 1 Far better, he claimed, for society to be ordered through the expression of individuals’ free choice via the market mechanism. Ostensibly, this choice is rational, in that it furthers the interests of the individual and leads naturally to what Adam Smith described as a ‘harmony of interests’. 2 As mentioned in Chapter 1 , Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, or equilibrium, was challenged by James M. Buchanan, who believed that efficiency should be engineered, rather than left to chance. 3 Buchanan’s Public Choice theory thus makes a case for the ‘positive arm’ of the state to act as both ‘policeman’ and ‘participant’ in the social realm. 4 Consistent with Buchanan’s philosophy, English higher education reform has been presented as a movement towards efficiency, engineered by government but operationally dependent upon students’ exercise of rational choice in the education marketplace. 5 This chapter will argue that, in reality, the marketisation of higher education is a movement towards negative liberty, defined after Isaiah Berlin as unrestricted choice. 6 This unrestricted choice is evident in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, where the relationship between rationality and sensibility is explored through the dramatisation of a series of political decisions of far-reaching consequence. By offering a reading of English higher education reform through Antony and Cleopatra , this chapter considers how negative liberty, far from functioning as a panacea to inefficiency, risks undermining human connectivity and debasing our relationships.
