Last week (recall) I noted the significance to Foucault's Weberian reading of Hayek that in The Road to Serfdom (1944) Mannheim's historicist interpretation of the law is one of the official targets of Hayek (especially in chapter “Planning and the Rule of Law”). In the passage from Mannheim's Man and Society (1940) that Hayek cites (without page-number), Mannheim himself calls attention to Weber (and his differences with Weber).* In his (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek drops the Mannheim reference and near the end of chapter 10 criticizes Weber's (indeed slightly different) historicist interpretation of the law (recall here). In both cases, he offers detailed responses to the historicist. That's not the end of the matter because in Volume II of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976: p. 86), Hayek then uses the very same Mannheim quote, albeit shortened, as he had used in The Road to Serfdom (but now with page-number reference--see note 33!)
As it happens, Mannheim goes unmentioned in the The Constitution of Liberty. This is quite a difference from The Road to Serfdom, where Mannheim -- and his Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction in particular, which Hayek calls "a widely acclaimed book" (p. 21) --is really one of Hayek's main negative exemplars.+ Mannheim is presented as holding the "extreme position" which defends "planning for freedom." This position entails, on Hayek's reconstruction, the "collective and "conscious" direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals." And Hayek alerts the reader that "we shall have to comment [on it] yet more than once." (p. 21) And on the same page, Hayek lists Mannheim among the German thinkers who have helped perfect "socialism" in the more radical and less radical forms (p. 21-22).
Unsurprisingly, then, later in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek treats Mannheim not just as a defender of legal historicism, but also as somebody who holds that collective planning is compatible with parliamentary control (and so democracy) over the planning process (p. 72). And, in fact, while Hayek doesn't mention this, on the very page he quotes from Man and Society, Mannheim also asserts that by reshaping the separation of powers along "functional lines" these can be "more easily applied to a planned society than to a liberal democratic one." (Man and Society, p. 340) And while Mannheim seems to grant that in a planned society sovereignty may take the form of a dictatorship, he denies that it is "necessary." Interestingly enough, Hayek, in response, does not assert the necessity, but only claims explicitly that such a system "tends toward the plebiscitarian democracy." (p. 72) So, here Hayek and Mannheim actually agree formally about the facts, but we might say have a different risk tolerance.
Finally, in the chapter ("the end of truth"), Hayek returns a final time to Mannheim (in The Road to Serfdom). In order to note that the old meaning of 'liberty' has been destroyed and discarded for a new idea of 'freedom.' (The Road to Serfdom, p. 162) Hayek treats Mannheim's ideas about "collective freedom" as entirely "misleading." (And even compares Mannheim here explicitly to "totalitarian politicians.") For Hayek, such collective freedom merely involves "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) I return to this below.
It is worth noting that Mannheim's historicism, leads him to distinguish among three uses of 'freedom' and so three kinds of liberty depending on the three social/historical stage. More important from the perspective of Hayek's criticism, Mannheim explicitly recognizes the worry that under planning there is no restriction on the "powers of the planner." (Man in Society, 378) And so his response to the worry that Hayek presses later is that the "existence of essential forms of freedom" have to be secured by the plan itself. (378) He sometimes also calls for the "creation of free zones within the planned structure." (379) For Mannheim, "the advent of planned freedom [in the third stage] does not mean that all earlier forms of freedom must be abolished." (379) And, in fact, for Mannheim this means that independence of intermediary institutions such as "hospitals, schools, and universities" is preserved. (380) As we have seen, Hayek finds this idea to preserve Burkean platoons under planning impossible to take seriously as a genuine possibility under planning.
Anyway, the disappearance of Mannheim in The Constitution of Liberty after being so important to the rhetoric and argument of the Road to Serfdom was striking to me. I also thought it odd that Hayek only focuses on Man and Society, and the not more famous Ideology and Utopia. This got me curious about Hayek's wider engagement with Mannheim.
And, in fact, in earlier work published as the (1952) Counter-Revolution of Science, but mostly dating to the early 1940s, Hayek had engaged with the idea that consistently pursued historicism leads to a sophisticated sociology of knowledge (p. 76). But Hayek doesn't name anyone in particular. In his edition, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell plausibly suggests Hayek has Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in mind here (p. 139 n).
In another essay, ""Conscious" Direction and the Growth of Reason," in The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek explicitly quotes again from Man and Society (p. 213) in order to illustrate the tendency in modern thought (he also cites Hobhouse and Needham) for "the growth of the human mind itself" under conscious control (p. 88). And he quotes Mannheim as follows: "man's thought has become more spontaneous and absolute than it ever was, since it now perceives the possibility of determining itself." ** So, this echoes (or historically anticipates) the treatment of Mannheim on p. 21 in The Road to Serfdom quoted/discussed above.
Finally, in his chapter, "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek writes that "in recent years this desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems has become very explicit." (p. 94) And in the accompanying footnote he cites Mannheim's Man and Society, pp. 240-4 at length:
"functionalism made its first appearance in the field of the natural sciences, and could be described as the technical point of view. It has only recently been transferred to the social sphere... Once this technical approach was transferred from natural sciences to human affairs, it was bound to bring about a profound change in man himself. . . The functional approach no longer regards ideas and moral standards as absolute values, but as products of the social process which can, if necessary, be changed by scientific guidance combined with political practice. . . The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable . . . Progress in the technique of organization is nothing but the application of technical conceptions to the forms of co-operation. A human being, regarded as part of the social machine, is to a certain extent stabilized in his reactions by training and education, and all his recently acquired activities are co-ordinated according to a definite principle of efficiency within an organized framework."
This passage is not quoted in The Road to Serfdom. But it is definitely alluded to in Hayek's claim that in a system of collective planning, "The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such, the pleasure of being obeyed and of being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way." (Hayek (1944 [2001]), p. 155) And Hayek's position here relies on the idea (already quoted above) that under collective planning there only freedom that exists is "the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases." (162) And Hayek clearly means to imply that Mannheim's identification with the social planner makes him unreliable on the possible experiences of those whose lives are planned.
So, what Hayek's explicit response to Mannheim in "Engineers as planners" The Counter-Revolution of Science helps explain is that even when Mannheim is not mentioned in The Road to Serfdom, he is still polemically engaged with Mannheim as the exemplary intellectual who advocates planning. I would not be surprised if a close reading of Man and Society in light of The Road to Serfdom would find more polemical points of contact between Hayek and Mannheim.
The reason I think that is because if we look at what Hayek cites from Man and Society (pp. 240-244) in "Engineers as planners," we can discern that at a key moment, Mannheim embraces a species of historical determinism: "The extension of the doctrine of technical supremacy which I have advocated in this book is in my opinion inevitable." (this is from p. 243 in Man and Society.) And in context, Mannheim makes clear that while his "dynamics of history" is indebted to Marx, it's also distinct. And the reason it's distinct, according to Mannheim, is that for Mannheim modern weapons technology alters the nature of warfare and the class system by producing a kind of mind that is neither bourgeois nor proletariat. (This kind of anticipates Burnham by the way.) And this new kind new kind of mind with access to weapons that can shape the economy, will make an entirely different dictatorship (than the dictatorship of the proletariat) possible. (p. 243)
And, in fact, if I understand him correctly, it is in order to prevent this new kind of dictatorship that, according to Mannheim, collective planning for freedom is required!++ So, in order to avoid a road to serfdom in which as a consequence of modern technology and social techniques of control (see especially p. 260 of Man and Society), military dictatorships that are immune to revolution -- a view more common in the era -- become entrenched that collective planning is required (pp. 260-261). That is to say, while the idea of a road to serfdom anticipates Hayek's account (we have seen it in Hobhouse, Mises, Belloc, and it has been attributed by Knight to Lippmann), Hayek's road to serfdom is -- inter alia -- a rather explicit response to Mannheim's own road to serfdom thesis.
*Hayek's citations are to the English translation. I am not enough of a Hayek scholar to know if he read Mannheim in the German (1935) original or in the translation.
+All my citations to The Road to Serfdom are to the 2001 Routledge edition.
**To be sure, Hayek recognizes that Hobhouse, Needham, and Mannheim are by no means identical in their intellectual orientation:
Though, according as these doctrines spring from Hegelian or positivist views, those who hold them form distinct groups who mutually regard themselves as completely different from and greatly superior to the other, the common idea that the human mind is, as it were, to pull itself up by its own boot-straps, springs from the same general approach: the belief that by studying human Reason from the outside and as a whole we can grasp the laws of its motion in a more complete and comprehensive manner than by its patient exploration from the inside, by actually following up the processes in which individual minds interact. (Hayek (1952) The Counter-Revolution of science, p. 88)
I have to admit that I do not think this is a fair representation of the views of Hobhouse or Mannheim.
++I think Bruce Caldwell "Hayek and Socialism" (1997) comes quite close to saying this too, see, especially, the phrasing of p. 1868.
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