This post is my second reply to Robin’s defense of his piece in The Nation. It focuses on Robin’s reading of Hayek. It’s long, and for a reason. I want to show people who aren’t already Robin fans how to distinguish him from a responsible intellectual historian. I slowly review his claims about Hayek’s purported cultural elitism. By the end, I think you’ll agree that Robin’s reading of Hayek is seriously problematic.

My general point is this: the basis for Robin’s entire thesis (whatever it is) is incredibly narrow. The relevant passages come mostly from six pages of a single chapter in a single book in Hayek’s entire corpus. And even those quotes are heavily cherry-picked. In some ways, therefore, Robin’s method is even more objectionable than the content, and it exposes his work on Hayek as fundamentally flawed. I hope this will be clear by the end of the post.

Let’s begin with Robin’s core claim about Hayek in The Nation:

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek developed this notion into a full-blown theory of the wealthy and the well-born as an avant-garde of taste, as makers of new horizons of value from which the rest of humanity took its bearings. Instead of the market of consumers dictating the actions of capital, it would be capital that would determine the market of consumption—and beyond that, the deepest beliefs and aspirations of a people.

Remember: Robin says Hayek has a full-blown theory of the wealthy, culture, etc. That’s critical to his thesis. If Hayek has some stray or peripheral remarks on the subject, but no full-blown theory, then Robin’s thesis fails.

In my response to Robin, I remarked that the only part of The Constitution of Liberty that could even be construed that way were passages where Hayek argued that synchronic (simultaneous) inequalities of wealth can work to the benefit of the least-advantaged over time because the luxury consumption of the rich paves the way for manufacturers to create cheaper versions of the same goods and market them to the masses. I went back and read through my notes. I remembered a passage from Chapter 4 (pp. 100-2 in the “Definitive Edition”). This is one of the main passages where Hayek is trying to justify income inequality, which I guessed could be construed as kind of elitist.

In his reply, Robin calls my claim “ludicrous” and then goes on to cite a bunch of passages from Hayek without mentioning where they come from. The reader is left with the impression that they are somehow representative of Hayek’s work as a whole. So I went back and searched Hayek’s works for these passages. First, they’re all from The Constitution of Liberty. Second, here they are in order (from the definitive edition): pp. 97, 193, 190, 192, 191, 196, 153, 154, 83.

If Hayek has a “full-blown theory” of X, you may need to look at more than nine pages of one book, but set that aside for the moment. Let’s go through the quotes carefully, in sequential order. Feel free to skip around. But do read Section IV.

I. Chapter 2, The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization – No Elitism

On p. 83, Hayek argues that one of the best arguments for classical liberalism is that a market economy helps us to make new discoveries. So we can’t confine liberty to cases where we “know it will do good.” It’s going to follow that the importance of freedom is not that some majority of people are going to use it. Because “to grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely.” Here’s the part Robin cites:

The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.

Hayek even goes further, arguing that in some ways such liberties are more important because we could easily miss the gains from having that freedom. Obviously this passage cannot be used to support Robin’s elitist charge because Hayek isn’t trying to pick out any one group of people as having special importance in this process.

Robin recognizes that this isn’t an obviously elitist thing to say (though he uses the passage anyway). So Robin argues that we should interpret in an elitist fashion because Hayek cited someone else (in this case, Hastings Rashdall) who said something that sort of sounds elitist. Three points in response:

(i) The Hayek passage was never ambiguous between an elitist and non-elitist reading in the first place, so it’s odd to use the passage to reinterpret it.

(ii) The Rashdall passage isn’t elitist. I think Robin implicitly realizes this because after quoting Rashdall, he distorts his own point by saying, “There’s no wisdom of crowds here. Not only is Hayek speaking of the wealthy, but he is claiming that their wealth, and the inequality it generates, will have cultural benefits for the masses.” I for one never said Hayek’s point was based on the “wisdom of crowds.” Instead, Hayek’s not-at-all-elitist point is that economic freedoms are beneficial even if only the rich can use them.

(iii) Hayek doesn’t just cite Rashdall in the footnote. He also cites co-authors who say this: “If there is to be freedom for the few who will take advantage of it, freedom must be offered to the many. If any lesson is clear from history, it is this.” Nothing even remotely elitist here, so that counteracts the effect of using the Rashdall passage, even if the Rashdall passage was needed to interpret Hayek, and even if it supported Robin’s conclusion.

There’s no elitism in this Hayek passage.

II. Chapter 4, The Common Sense of Progress – No Elitism

On p.97, Hayek claims that “it is necessary that the developments that will bear fruit for the masses in twenty or fifty years’ time should be guided by the views of people who are already in the position of enjoying them.”

Robin thinks this quote shows that Hayek believes that the rich and powerful are some kind of cultural vanguard that are rightly seen as a moral ideal.

Now, like Robin, I’ve taken that quote out of context. What Hayek is arguing at this point in the chapter is that the advanced position of the first consumers of new goods has various advantages for everyone. For one thing, it results in cheaper versions of the goods available to all. But that’s not the most important point. What really matters is the potential for innovation and progress for everyone: “The path of advance is greatly eased by the fact that it has been trodden before.” Hayek again: “What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to the many.” The rich experiment by spending lots of money, and the poor get the benefits: “Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.”

Hayek is not trying to justify the claim that the masses must in any sense be deliberately “guided” by people but rather institutionally guided by their consumption choices, which is different. The word “guided” is crucially ambiguous. It is not that people ought to follow elites because they have superior knowledge, character, etc. Instead, the information and options available to the masses have been made available to them via those who have as a matter of fact discovered, produced and consumed things for the first time. How could it be otherwise?

Hayek is trying to illustrate how complex systems evolve and discover, not just how capitalism does so. He says that even “a socialist society would … have to imitate a free society. It would be necessary in a planned economy … to designate individuals whose duty it would be to try out the latest advances long before they were made available to the rest.” (99) The difference between a socialist society and a capitalist society in this respect is that the group of experimenters is dictated by the government rather than left to accidents of birth.

Notice what Hayek says just a paragraph down, “We do not wish, of course, to see the position of individuals determined by arbitrary decision or a privilege conferred by human will on particular persons.” (99) Right, because we wouldn’t want some kind of cultural or hereditary elite, would we? With respect to the leisure class, liberals should try to preserve their liberty to engage in cultural and economic experimentation. But they should never be given special privileges.

III. Chapter 6, Equality, Value, and Merit – No Elitism

Robin offers two quotes from pp. 153-154. In this chapter, Hayek has a number of aims, one of which is to contradict the idea that the case for markets is tied to merit. The rich don’t deserve to be rich. The fact that Robin tries to find elitism here is prima facie suspect for this reason (see pp. 156-160). But Robin again engages in dishonest selective quoting. For instance, he quotes a passage on p. 153 where Hayek says that the family can justifiably pass on inequalities through the transmission of morality, taste and the like. But Hayek explicitly says, on the same page, that his attempt to justify inequalities of wealth through inheritance has nothing to do with merit. The idea instead is for society to harness the benefits of birth so all benefit from it.

There’s no elitism here. Hayek is making a point he makes repeatedly throughout the book that inequalities of wealth aren’t always problems to be corrected but resources to be harnessed. It’s a standard classical liberal point that focusing on wealth inequality is both mistaken and harmful. In fact, it’s even sometimes a point that egalitarian liberals make (think Rawls). There’s no elitism here, especially because Hayek rejects the claim that the rich and powerful are those with high relative merit.

IV. Chapter 8, Employment and Independence – No Elitism

Now let’s turn to the main group of passages, all of which come from six pages in Chapter 8. These passages are supposed to constitute a “full-blown theory” of the wealthy, culture, etc. They’re also supposed to exhibit Hayek’s belief in a moral ideal of cultural elites leading the minds of the people. The problem is that this chapter contains passages that directly contradict this point, because Hayek explicitly says that we might as well create a leisure class at random, and that capitalism will, unfortunately, produce a lot of rich conspicuous consumers who add little to social progress.

Hayek’s primary aim in this chapter is to show that the liberal principles developed in the previous chapters are still applicable in a modern industrial society that consists mostly of workers in large industry and service firms. Hayek is worried that the employed, as a majority of the electorate, will use democratic legislation to make the economy look more like them, eliminating other forms of economic life. The problem is that many uses of economic liberty are of little interest to people who work all the time. They have little time to read or write or engage in big creative projects. As a result, their voting preferences sometimes threaten freedom because they’re not going to preserve economic liberties they don’t directly use. In particular, they’re going to legislate in ways that restrict the liberty of people with greater risk appetites, like artists and entrepreneurs. Most of the time the employed want to avoid risk, so they vote for social programs that insulate everyone from risk.

The challenge here is that engaging in such legislation will not only make the employed worse off, it will make them less free. Hayek emphasizes in the chapter that the employed as free only if they have lots of occupational choices available to them. But they only have those choices if there are entrepreneurs and others with big risk appetites to create new occupations, businesses and the like. These are people who “can take the initiative in the continuous process of reforming and redirecting organizations” (p. 190).

Hayek stresses that the gains from the choices of these “independents” are not merely material in nature (a point I underemphasized in my first post). So independents will tend to function as trendsetters in the fine arts, in education, religion, etc. The only way we’re going to get positive social change is if these people are free to do lots of crazy stuff.

Along these lines, Hayek suggests that it’s possible we could create this class at random from the populace.

If we knew of no better way of providing such a group, there would exist a strong case for selecting at random one in a hundred, or one in a thousand, from the population at large and endowing them with fortunes sufficient for the pursuit of whatever they chose (p. 191).

The issue was never that some group of people is special. If we knew of no better way, we might as well choose people at random to experiment. That’s not elitism.

The only reason not to choose a leisure class at random is because, in general, parents are the best transmitters of cultural discoveries. So what rich parents learn in one generation, they can pass on to the next. If we picked elites randomly, we’d lose that reservoir of knowledge. Inheritance, both cultural and economic, then, allows some people to engage in experiments that benefit all of us.

What’s always important for Hayek is that people have chances to experiment, to push social evolution along in a positive direction. You can’t do that without an independent minority because if you try to make social progress solely by collective agreement, you have to already settle on what you’re going to do, and people are too diverse to agree.

Hayek doesn’t want to denigrate the idea that hard work is admirable. But if a wealthy class justifies its wealth solely on the basis of its productivity, then the justification fails. The justification for a leisure class is that their behaviors have positive spillover effects.

Note that Hayek stresses that the leisure class is going to produce a lot of snooty conspicuous consumers (“bons vivants”). But Hayek thinks producing these obnoxious sorts is the “price of freedom.” Some experiments go wrong, and so do some potential experimenters. Notice that having conspicuous consumers, for Hayek, is a price, a cost, not a benefit. Where’s the elitism?

The problem that Hayek identifies is that the masses believe that they have only gotten rich by making the wealthy worse off. In fact, the wealthy leisured class is important because they engage in most of the experimenting. And so Hayek ends the chapter and Part I of The Constitution of Liberty like so:

A world in which the majority could prevent the appearance of all that they did not like would be a stagnant and probably declining world (p. 196).

So Chapter 8 is Hayek’s way of showing that modern societies have a mechanism for developing and moving forward through free-market based experimentation, such that classical liberal principles can be justified even in modern industrial economies. People who have enough money not to work menial jobs can do the relevant experimenting.

The Chapter 8 discussion is geared to answering a particular objection to classical liberalism, namely that its principles don’t fit modern economies. Hayek’s response is that we need experimentation, but that not everyone can be an experimenter. The ultimate justification for this class’s advantages is that their experiments have positive spillover effects. And if it weren’t for the transmission of inheritance, we might as well pick a class at random. It doesn’t matter who the experimenters are. It just matters that we not destroy the leisure class no matter however we got them.

This is more or less the same point as the one made in Chapter 4. It’s all about trying to stop people from crushing the creation engine in their desire to impose equal distributions on the populace.

V. Robin is Bad at Hayek

Now, given the Hayek discussion, do you think that Robin can use these passages to justify his claim that Hayek was an elitist in a way that bears an “elective affinity” with Nietzsche? What’s more, do you think that Hayek has anything resembling a “full-blown theory” of the wealthy and the high born as a cultural vanguard?

It’s blazingly obvious that Hayek is not making cultural elites into heroic, morality-inventing individuals. The leisure class, save for the lower transactions costs of transmitting leisure through inheritance, could have been chosen at random. And leisure classes will produce lots of obsequious jerks. Hayek just doesn’t want society to be too employee-normative because it will root out a lot of creative benefits. Equalizing income has costs because it reduces the benefits provided by an experimenting social class.

There’s no moral elitism here. Let me say it again: there’s no moral elitism here.  Certainly not enough to even begin to justify an “elective affinity” with Nietzsche.

As I stated at the outset, the basis for Robin’s entire thesis (whatever it is) is incredibly narrow. The relevant passages come mostly from six pages of a single chapter in a single book in Hayek’s entire corpus. And even those quotes are heavily cherry-picked.

For anyone who has ears, let him hear: Corey Robin is bad at Hayek. You don’t do intellectual history like this. It’s irresponsible.