The conservative, or the traditional liberal-or libertarian, or whatever we may call him-will surely concede this proposition in the large. He will say that this is precisely the problem of our times: to educate the typical American to the dangers of gradual loss of liberty. One would think that if liberty is so important that a statue is erected to her, then the demonstration that a moderate decline of personal freedom leads with high probability to tyranny would be available in paperback at every drugstore. Such a book is not so easy to find. In fact, it may not exist.
No one will dispute that there have been many tyrannies, and indeed it is at least as easy to find them in the twentieth century as in any other. Moreover, the loss of vital liberties does not take place in a single step, so one can truly say that a tyranny is entered by degrees. But one cannot easily reverse this truism and assert that some decrease in liberties will always lead to more, until basic liberties are lost. Alcoholics presumably increased their drinking gradually, but it is not true that everyone who drinks becomes an alcoholic.
An approach to a demonstration that there exists a tendency of state controls to increase beyond the limits consistent with liberty is found in Hayek's Road to Serfdom. But Hayek makes no attempt to prove that such a tendency exists, although there are allegations to this effect. This profound study has two very different purposes: (1) A demonstration that comprehensive political control of economic life will reduce personal liberty (political and intellectual as well as economic) to a pathetic minimum. (I may observe, in passing, that this argument seems to me irresistible, and I know of no serious attempt to refute it. It will be accepted by almost every one who realizes the import of comprehensive controls.) (2) If the expansion of control of economic life which has been under way in Britain, the United States, and other democratic western countries should continue long enough and far enough, the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy will eventually be reached. This second theme is not a historical proposition-and no historical evidence was given: it is the analytical proposition that totalitarian systems are an extreme form of, not a different type from, the democratic "welfare" states to which the book was addressed. Hayek was telling gentlemen drinkers, and especially some Englishmen-who were becoming heavy drinkers-not to become alcoholics.
The thirty-five years that have passed since the outbreak of World War II have seen further expansions of political control over economic life in the United States, and in most western European nations except Germany. Yet no serious diminution of liberties deemed important by the mass of educated (or uneducated) opinion has taken place. Another hundred years of governmental expansion at the pace of these recent decades would surely destroy our basic liberties, but what evidence is there that such an expansion will continue? Quite clearly, no such evidence has been assembled. But it is one thing to deny that evidence exists for the persistence of present trends to the point where they will endanger our liberties, and quite another to deny that such a momentum exists. Or, differently put, where is the evidence that we won't carry these political controls over economic life to a liberty-destroying stage?
This may be an impeccable debating point, but it will carry much less conviction than an empirical demonstration of the difficulty of stopping a trend. When men have projected the tendency of a society to a distant terminus, they have invariably committed two errors. The tendency develops in a larger number of directions than the prophet has discerned: no tendency is as single-minded as its observer believes it to be. And the tendency encounters in the society other and contradictory forces which eventually give the course of events a wholly different tum. We have no reason to believe that the current prophets are any wiser.
So I conclude: we should fish or cut bait. On the subject of liberty the conservative should either become silent or find something useful to say. I think there is something useful to say, and here is what it is.--G.J. Stigler (1975) The Citizen and the State, pp. 17-18
Among Hayek scholars it is a well known fact that the Chicago economist (and self-described 'conservative'), G.J. Stigler, was rather critical of Hayek's road to serfdom thesis. (See especially the rather intense exchanges between Bruce Caldwell, one side, and Andrew Farrant with Edward McPhail, on the other.) But I haven't seen the point discussed in wider scholarship on the nature of neoliberalism, so it can't hurt to amplify its existence. In addition, to the best of my knowledge Caldwell, Farrant and McPhail rely on Stigler's (1988) autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist, and on his earlier essay (1961) "Reflections on the loss of Liberty." This early essay was reprinted with modifications as "reflections on Liberty" as chapter 2 in The Citizen and the State. The passage quoted above is pretty much identical in substance to the earlier essay. But in virtue of its context -- it's now part of a larger argument in a book -- it is worth revisiting in its incarnation in the Citizen and the State, which is Stigler's contribution to the liberal art of government (and art of economics).
When Stigler's essay first appeared in 1961 in New Individualist Review, which originated at The University of Chicago and had strong connections to its faculty, he had just returned to The University of Chicago where Hayek was still in the Committee on Social Thought. The Review was a central vector in the intellectual revitalization of the anti-New Deal forces on the Right, and in fact Hayek and his students played a central role in it. Interestingly enough, the Review published major criticisms of Hayek. In addition to Stigler, Hamowy's "Hayek’s Concept of Freedom: A Critique" also originated in it. Sometimes Hayek is not named, but the critical thrust of the argument is clear enough (see, for example, Milton Friedman's "Is a Free Society Stable?"). This original context also helps to explain Stigler's emphasis on educating 'typical Americans.' (In those days conservatives could not take their own typicality for granted.)
Recall that a road to serfdom thesis holds that an outcome unintended to political decisionmakers is foreseeable to the right kind of observer and that in addition the outcome leads to a loss of political and economic freedom over the medium term. I use ‘medium’ here because the consequences tend to follow in a time-frame within an ordinary human life, but generally longer than one or two years (which is the short-run), and shorter than the centuries’ long process covered by (say) the rise and fall of civilization. Crucially for a road to serfdom thesis, along the way, in order to ward off some unintended and undesirable consequences, decisions are taken that tend to lock in a worse than intended and de facto bad political unintended outcome. It is pretty clear that Stigler attributes a road to serfdom thesis in this sense to Hayek. (A lot of the debate in Hayek studies is whether Hayek thought the welfare state must lead to serfdom.)
Now, Stigler's overall point is to try to turn the road to serfdom thesis from prophecy to a theory that can be tested empirically, which is treated as useful speech. Part of its utility is to "frighten" modern man "with [empirical] evidence." (18) But it is worth noting that lurking in Stigler's argument is a hypothesis that social tendencies naturally encounter and, perhaps even trigger, "other and contradictory forces which eventually give the course of events a wholly different turn." So Stigler's account presupposes, in fact, a commitment to a certain kind of pluralism as a social reality which can counterbalance serfdom inducing forces. (At the very end of this long post I return to characterize this pluralism.) To put it politically: there is a clear commitment to the proposition that New Deal Coalition can be defeated.
As an aside, Stigler's point about the plurality of social forces that may be a countervailing internal balance seems to anticipate Milton Friedman's ideas on the matter. In 1962, Friedman writes, "I HAVE BEEN EMPHASIZING forces and approaches that are mostly pessimistic in terms of our values in the sense that most of them are reasons why a free society is likely to be unstable and to change into a collectivist system. I should like therefore to turn to some of the tendencies that may operate in the other direction." ("Is a Free Society Stable?"). And Friedman thinks this is also an effect of the fact that (the side-effects of) tendencies in one direction become visible and become grounds for mobilization. (Since the two were close colleagues it's possible Friedman is the source of Stigler's point despite publishing later.) Friedman's essay is worth reading because he puts the road to serfdom thesis in the context of Dicey's arguments and a general awareness that liberal societies are historically rare.
The evidence of loss of liberty Stigler will point to are primarily economic, but some of them (media monopolies/oligarchies, land-management) clearly do have an effect on political issues. Yet, it's worth noting that when Stigler first published the piece, Jim Crowe had not been defeated even formally in the South. So, this, and the claim just before the passage I quoted above that "our franchise is broad...we have the political system we want" (16) suggests remarkable complacency about the state of civil rights (this is no surprise (recall) after Brad de Long called attention to his racist and condescending essay directed at students and civil rights leaders a few years later).
In fact, in The Citizen and the State, "The Loss of Liberty" follows a chapter called, "The Unjoined Debate." It seems to have gone unnoted that there, too, he address the Road to Serfdom thesis:
Let us begin with the most fundamental issue posed by the increasing direction of economic life by the state: the preservation of the individual's liberty-liberty of speech, of occupation, of choice of home, of education.
The situation is presently this: everyone agrees that liberty is important and desirable; hardly anyone believes that any basic liberties are seriously infringed today. The conservatives believe that a continuation of the trend toward increasing political control over economic life will inevitably lead to a larger diminution of liberty. The liberals believe that this contingency is remote and avoidable. The more mischievous of the liberals point out that the conservatives have been talking of the planting of the seeds of destruction of liberty for decades-perhaps the seeds are infertile. Liberty is thus not a viable subject of controversy; neither side takes the issue seriously.
The lack of any sense of loss of liberty during the last two generations of rapidly increasing political control over economic life is of course not conclusive proof that we have preserved all our traditional liberty. Man has an astonishing ability to adjust to evil circumstances.
It is not possible for an observant man to deny that the restrictions on the actions of individuals have been increasing with the expansion of public control over our lives. I cannot build a house that displeases the building inspector. I cannot teach in the schools of the fifty states because I lack a license, although I can teach in their universities.This list of controls over men can be multiplied many-fold, but it will not persuade the liberal that essential freedoms are declining. The liberal will point out that restrictions on one man may mean freedom for another. (5-6)
What's notable about this passage is that the veracity of the road to serfdom thesis has been elevated to it being "the most fundamental issue" in the modern administrative state. But simultaneously he thinks the conservative has engaged in "indolence parading as prophecy" with his "seeds-of-destruction talk." (6) That is to say on the acknowledged key question -- can liberalism [in its wider sense] survive? -- Stigler thinks Hayek's case is underwhelming.
What's also notable, and I realize I am testing your patience, is that Stigler clearly resists the idea that liberty is merely freedom of contract and simultaneously elevates freedom of speech beyond the other (unmentioned) political liberties. This is, in fact, no surprise because the chapter/essay is framed by the idea that "the controversy between conservatives and liberals in the United States is so ineffective that is serving the purposes of controversy. The quality of controversy is not only but in fact declining, and what was once a meaningful debate is becoming completely unjoined." (4). This passage was first written in 1966 (in the middle of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights debates). And even if you reject much of Stigler's political stance in the age (as I do), the fact that this idea is conventional wisdom of our own age (about the recent past) should give us pause. There is a sense in which liberal democracy is co-extensive with the further thought 'that the quality of controversy has declined.' Foucault (recall) picks up on this and treats liberal democracy as co-constituted with a sense of crisis.
Somewhat surprisingly, I think, the proper purpose of debate according to Stigler is announced on the following page, "the believer in democracy, or even more basically a believer in the dignity of man, has a moral obligation to seek to remove differences of opinion among groups by honest argument." (4) And this will also make "progress into our policies" possible. (13) We are not far removed from Rawls' idea that conceptual engineering will make overlapping consensus possible. And the reason for this position in Stigler is ground in a kind of negative Condorcet-ian insight (Condorcet goes unmentioned) that "the larger the group, the more certain we can be that is not insane in the sense of being divorced from apparent fact and plausible reasoning." (4, emphasis in original) And so their common position reflects "common factual beliefs and the same causal processes." (4) If large groups disagree, Stigler implies, they are both latching onto something fundamental in social reality.
Now, Stigler recognizes that eliminating "differences of opinion on public policy" is not likely because there are "unresolved factual and theoretical questions" and so "alternative policies" may well be equally reasonable. (13) This passage echoes Friedman's views in 1953 (which in turn echo Stigler's own views from the 1940s). But he also allows genuine value disagreement: "we shall still have men [sic] disagreeing on the comparative roles of individual responsibility and social benevolence." (13) That is, when confronted by the social tensions of the 1960s, at least one leading Chicago economists became receptive to the reality of value pluralism. And thought it important enough to repeat it in his major book on liberal, political statecraft.
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