Why can’t liberals provide a fair portrait of a thinker they disagree with? It was a reasonable prediction that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his VP appointee would ignite a discussion over the first principles of politics and the role of government in society. So far, however, it hasn’t been much of a discussion: rather, we shall speak of a goofy attempt to graft the practice of smearing the enemy from day-to-day politics to the realm of political thinking.
David Boaz has wisely commented upon Adam Davidson’s piece on Hayek. Even more surprising is a blog post from historian Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books. Professor Snyder sees Mr. Ryan as aiming to revive an “outdated ideology”—as “taking some of the worst from the twentieth century and presenting it as a plan for the twenty-first.”
What he finds outdated is, basically, Hayek’s allegiance to the principle of limited government. Revealingly, he maintains that “Austria became a prosperous democracy after World War II because its governments ignored Hayek’s advice and created a welfare state.” Linking the economic performance of Western democracies after WWII to the institutions of the welfare state (a national health care service, compulsory education, unemployment insurance et cetera) is at best naive.
Making “provisions for citizens in need” may be “an effective way to defend democracy” from the temptations of populism and authoritarianism but this doesn’t say much per se. Which provisions? Provided by whom? For the benefit of whom? The answers to these questions aren’t trivial.
What is most surprising in Snyder’s piece is how he portrays Hayekianism as the opposite of what it is. He writes:
Like Marxism, the Hayekian ideology is a theory of everything, which has an answer for everything. Like Marxism, it allows politicians who accept the theory to predict the future, using their purported total knowledge to create and to justify suffering among those who do not hold power.
You may wish to make a caricature of a thinker. A successful caricature should, however, resemble the subject, at least a little.
A cursory glance at the titles of Friedrich von Hayek’s books should be enough to understand that what he was preoccupied with was precisely the hubris of decision-makers who pretend to predict the future and manage it. Hayek’s best known paper is poignantly entitled “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” His last book was called The Fatal Conceit. His best work in history of ideas bore, as a subtitle, a reference to the “abuse of reason.”