Hayek (and Robert Bork on Mill) and permissiveness

BORK:   Well,  in  your  latest  book.  Law,  Legislation  and  Liberty,  you're  starting  from  a  premise,  I  take  it,  that liberty  is  really  declining  throughout  Western  democracies,  and  in  fact  is  in  considerable  danger  of  extinction  within  the  foreseeable  future.   I  wonder  if  you'd  care  to  talk  a little  bit  about  the  evidence  you  see  for  the  proposition that  liberty  is,  in  fact,  declining  and  is  in  danger.

HAYEK:   Well,  of  course,  the  original  occasion  was  my analysis  of  the  causes  of  the  intellectual  appeal  of  the Nazi  theories,  which  were  very  clearly--  I  mean,  take  a man  like  Carl  Schmitt,  one  of  the  most  intelligent  of  the German  lawyers,  who  saw  all  the  problems,  then  always  came down  on  what  to  me  was  intellectually  and  morally  the wrong  side.   But  he  did  really  see  these  problems  almost more  clearly  than  anybody  else  at  the  time--that  an omnipotent  democracy,  just  because  it  is  omnipotent, must  buy  its  support  by  granting  privileges  to  a  number of  different  groups.   Even,  in  a  sense,  the  rise  of Hitler  was  due  to  an  appeal  to  the  great  numbers.   You can  have  a  situation  where  the  support,  the  searching  for support,  from  a  majority  may  lead  to  the  ultimate  destruction of  a  democracy.

...

BORK :   Well,  I  wonder  if  you  see,  for  example,  in  the United  States,  evidence  of  the  decline  of  freedom.

HAYEK:   Well,  I  think  in  a  way  the  necessity  for  an American  government,  in  order  to  capture  the  support  of  all kinds  of  splinter  groups,  to  grant  them  all  kinds  of  special privileges  is  more  visible  than  in  almost  any  other country.   It  hasn't  gone  as  far  yet,  because  your  development is  not  a  steady  one,  unlike  the  British  one,  which  has been  continuously  in  the  same  direction.   You  make experiments  like  the  New  Deal  and  then  undo  it  again.

BORK:   Well,  we  never  really  undid  a  lot  of  the  New  Deal, I'm  afraid,  did  we?

HAYEK:   No,  it's  quite  true.   But  at  the  time  I  formed  these ideas,  because  it  was  during  the  New  Deal,  the  New  Deal was  very  largely  evidence  for  me  that  America  was  going  the same  way  in  which  Europe,  at  least  England,  had  gone  ahead.

BORK:   I  suppose  a  lot  of  people  would  say  that,  in  fact, in  some  sense  freedom  was  increasing  in  America,  because we  certainly  now  have  much  more  freedom  for  racial  minorities

HAYEK:   Yes.

BORK:   There  is  much  more  freedom  in  the  area  of  sexual permissiveness.   There  is  much  more  freedom--if  you  want to  call  these  things  freedom--in  the  area  of  things  that  may be  said  or  written  or  shown  on  film  or  shown  on  the  stage. Now,  I  suppose  the  latter  could  be  evidences  of  depravity rather  than  freedom,  but  I  take  it  you  think--

HAYEK :   Well,  I  think  America  is  in  a  very  early  stage  of the  process.   You  see,  it  comes  with  a  restriction  of economic  freedom,  which  only  then  has  effects  on  the  mental or  intellectual  freedom. In  a  way,  American  development  is probably  a  generation  behind  the  one  which  gave  me  the illustrations--the  German  development. The  American  degree of  restrictions  of  freedom  is  perhaps  comparable  to  what it  was  in  Germany  in  the  1880s  or  1890s  under  Bismarck, when  he  began  to  interfere  with  the  economic  affairs.   Only ultimately,  under  Hitler,  did  the  government  have  the  power which  American  government  very  nearly  has.   It  doesn't  use it  yet  to  interfere  with  intellectual  freedom. In  fact, perhaps  the  danger  to  intellectual  freedom  in  the  United States  comes  not  from  government  so  much  as  from  the  trade unions.

BORK:   Well,  I  think  what  you're  saying,  then,  is  that although  in  some  ways  society  is  becoming  more  permissive, that  the  basic  freedom  upon  which  all  others  ultimately depend  is  economic  freedom.

HAYEK:   Yes.   And,  you  know,  even  the  permissiveness--  I have  certain  doubts  whether  this  sort  of  permissiveness, in  which  the--  I'm  not  now  speaking  about  governmental activities.   The  change  in  morals  due  to  permissiveness is  in  a  sense  antiliberal,  because  we  owe  our  freedom  to certain  restraints  on  freedom.   The  belief  that  you  can make  yourself  your  own  boss--and  that's  what  it  comes  to--is probably  destroying  some  of  the  foundations  of  a  free society,  because  a  free  society  rests  on  people  voluntarily accepting  certain  restraints,  and  these  restraints  are  very largely  being  destroyed.   I  blame,  in  that  respect,  the psychologists,  the  psychoanalysts,  as  much  as  anybody  else. They  are  really  the  source  of  this  conception  of  a  permissive  education,  of  a  contempt  for  traditional  rules, and  it  is  traditional  rules  which  secure  our  freedom.

BORK:   I  think  somebody  said  that  the  reason  John  Stuart Mill  and  others  could  talk  about  the  requirements  of  now almost  absolute  freedom  in  some  areas  was  that  they  were really  relying  upon  an  understood  set  of  morals,  which people  would  not  transgress.   Once  the  moral  capital of  that  era  has  been  dissipated,  that  kind  of  permissive-ness or  freedom  is  no  longer  restorable.

HAYEK:   John  Stuart  Mill's  attitude  toward  this  was  very ambiguous.   In  a  sense,  his  argument  is  directed  against the  tyranny  of  the  prevailing  morals,  and  he  is  very  largely responsible  for  the  shift  from  protest  against  government interference  to  what  he  calls  the  tyranny  of  opinion.   And he  encouraged  a  disregard  for  certain  moral  traditions. Permissiveness  almost  begins  with  John  Stuart  Mill's  On Liberty.

BORK:   So  that  there's  a  direct  line  between  John  Stuart Mill  and  Times  Square  in  New  York  City,  which  is  a  rather overly  permissive  area?

HAYEK:   Yes,  yes,  I  think  he  is  the  beginning.   You  know, I  sometimes  said--I  don't  want  really  to  exaggerate--that the  decline  of  liberalism  begins  with  John  Stuart  Mill's On  Liberty.--recorded on November 4, 1978, pp. 278-282 "Nobel prize-winning economist oral history transcript by Hayek, Friedrich A. von Pacific Academy of Advanced Studies; University of California, Los Angeles. Oral History Program

At the start of The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (2019, Verso), Jessica Whyte writes "Hayek distinguished morals from laws by arguing that morals lacked coercive enforcement, but that this did not make them any less crucial to the functioning of a market society. Indeed, Hayek believed that liberalism had taken a significant wrong turn in the nineteenth century, when the British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill had begun to criticise the 'tyranny of the prevailing morals' thereby encouraging a disregard for moral traditions and a growing 'permissiveness' in society." (p. 11) In the accompanying footnote Whyte cites the end of the material I have quoted above. Switching to citing different passages from volume 2 of Law, Legislation and Liberty, Whyte goes on to attribute to Hayek what she calls a 'deeply functionalist' (p. 12) account of the morals of the market or "commercial values that prioritised the pursuit of self-interest above he development of common purposes. A market society required a moral framework that sanctioned wealth accumulation and inequality, promoted individual and familial responsibility, and fostered submission to the impersonal results of the market process at the expense of the deliberate pursuit of collectively formulated ends. It also required that moral obligations are limited to the requirement that we refrain from harming others, and do not require positive obligations to others." (11-12)

Now, none of what Whyte says here is exactly wrong. But I was curious about the wrong turn attributed to Mill and its relationship to growing permissiveness. So, I went to the interview with Hayek. As the quoted passage above suggests this part of the interview is conducted by Robert Bork, who was then, I think, at Yale Law School. (Other parts of the interview are conducted by other luminaries.) Bork was already infamous for his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre," but his (failed) supreme court nomination was still a few years away.

The whole interview is fascinating, but also frustrating because neither Bork nor Hayek distinguishes between different kinds of freedom in a careful way. But I think it is pretty clear that Bork ("sexual permissiveness") is concerned with what used to be called 'license' (and distinguished from liberty). 

Now, I started the block quote where I do because I was struck by how Hayek invokes Schmitt without prompting from Bork. Now, in that part of the quote, Hayek suggests a road-to-serfdom thesis in which for electoral gain, governments give groups economic privileges (tariffs, monopolies, subsidies, etc.). And these privileges set off a slippery slope of planning, further privileges, and eventually democracy is undermined by itself. I am not  going to try to formulate the mechanism here that Hayek might have in mind in a way that tries to make this compelling because, interestingly enough, in the interview (that I cut out) Hayek kind of admits that his initial formulation (in the Road to Serfdom) of the road to serfdom thesis is unsatisfactory, because he grants "it's only now, almost forty years after I started on the thing, that in Law, Legislation and Liberty I've finally written out the basic ideas as they have gradually shaped themselves."

Unfortunately, Bork doesn't ask Hayek to spell out the new mechanism. But rather, he asks Hayek to explain what the evidence is that liberty is really declining. (At this point we're in the first Reagan administration.) And Hayek's answer is a bit of a muddle, because while he notes the reality of "special privileges" to different "splinter groups" he then actually says "It  hasn't  gone  as  far  yet,  because  your  development is  not  a  steady  one... you  make experiments  like  the  New  Deal  and  then  undo  it  again." So, this suggests that for Hayek liberty has not really declined very far Stateside (although he seems to think the potential for decline is very strong

Then Bork (of all people) suggests it's not obvious that freedom is declining in the States because (some people will say) "we  certainly  now  have  much  more  freedom  for  racial  minorities." And Hayek assents to this.

And then the conversation turns to permissiveness. And while Hayek is clearly no advocate of license (and sexual permissiveness), what he is exercised by and is attacking -- the 'belief  that  you  can make  yourself  your  own  boss' as promoted by psychologists and psychoanalysts -- is really the idea of authenticity. And this stance he takes to be illiberal. Because he thinks it is antithetical to the idea of respecting self-imposed restraints, that is, to act with responsibility and self-prescribed limitations (I'll call this 'freedom with responsibility').* Hayek is clearly a certain kind of mitigated Kantian in these passages (and lurking in his view are ideas about duty associated with the following of traditional rules of morality to which one submits freely). And while it almost makes no sense (except for polemical purposes) to associate Mill with the idea of sexual license, it is fair to treat Mill as one of the godfathers of promoting authenticity. 

Along the way, a new road to serfdom mechanism is introduced (by Bork). This is an idea that exists in different variants (including ones promoted by critics of liberalism inspired by Karl Polanyi) in which liberalism presupposes moral and social capital that it "runs down." As Daniel Nientiedt recently reminded me, in Germany there is a version of this debated as the Böckenförde Dilemma, which suggests that secular liberal states draw on and draw down the religiosity that make them possible.

Now, Bork seems to thinks that Mill promoted license and thereby undermined existing moral capital, whereas, if I am right, Hayek seems to think that Mill promoted an agenda for authenticity and thereby undermines a form of autonomy associated with freedom with responsibility (which accepts socially useful constraints on one's behavior). Whyte tracks this tendency in Hayek in the quote above as 'individual and familial responsibility' and this is not false at all. But it's not quite right to conflate this with the critique of 'permissiveness' if that's understood in Bork's sense of license.

Of course, in certain contexts (say, 1960s Californian counter-culture) license and authenticity may be the same side of the coin, but I think it's fair to say that Bork and Hayek are exercised by slightly different demons (even to be sure Hayek is no friend of license). We can discern in Bork the culture-warrior, whereas Hayek's position is much more compatible with a private/public distinction, where what really matters is how one takes responsibility for certain socially facing public actions (in the market place and in one's community).

Either way, and I will return to this in the near future, both positions are a political disaster because they prevent folks inspired by so-called 'classical liberalism' from appreciating (and taking partial credit for) and building social/political coalitions with all kinds of emancipatory movements (related to identity, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) that are freedom enhancing and true experiments in living.  (Luckily, there is a strain in American libertarianism that does recognize this!) And as Melinda Cooper has shown it has made the libertarian/classical liberal side of what before the rise of Trump was known as fusionism too complicit in the carceral state and the force-able regulation of the lives of poor and darker skinned.

I could stop here, and this was the main point of this post, but the interview continues in a remarkable  way that illustrates the problem I am diagnosing:

BORK: That's an interesting thought. Do you agree with the suggestion that Mill was really a much more sensible writer when he was not under the influence of Harriet Taylor?

HAYEK: Yes, but I think that influence can be overrated. He always needed a moral-- He was not a very strong character fundamentally, and he was always relying on the influence of somebody who supported him. First his father, then Comte , then Harriet Taylor. Harriet Taylor led him more deeply into socialism for a time, then he stayed. Well I'll tell you, the next article I'm going to write is to be called, "Mill's Muddle and the Muddle of the Middle." [laughter]

I don't think Hayek ever completed that article. He did publish an essay, "The Muddle of the Middle," which I will discuss some other time (it is only very partially about Mill).+ 

 

*I use that phrase because Hayek regularly speaks of the inseparability of freedom and responsibility.

+ I warmly recommend Sandra Peart's introduction to "Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings"