The self-blame game: the only one worth playing

And other acts of non-self-harm I found on the internet this week

In this episode of "Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality," Gene Tunny and I explore the implications of President Trump's tariffs on international trade. We discuss the micro and macroeconomic aspects of tariffs, and how these policies could reshape the U.S. and global economies.

We discuss the ways in which foreigners can be induced to pay some of the tariff, even if not as much as Donald Trump says they will, while also addressing the\ impacts on industries and employment. We emphasise how abstract the economists' models are and how poorly they account for supply chain disruptions. The broader implications for U.S. foreign relations, and the rule of law are also touched upon. Why would anyone trust the US when, under this president, it breaks previous agreements whenever it fancies?

If you fancy just listening to the audio, it’s here on spotify.

Helping Kate beat Gina

As you’ll recall. I’ve been raising money for Kate Chaney, nice person, good politician and niece of my favourite ex-politician with whom I’ve been privileged to spend a bit of time - Fred Chaney. Anyway, I explained the situation last week. I’ll match your donations and one week later 15 readers have tipped in $1,675 to Kate’s campaign - that’s $3,350 already. At this point I say something manipulative to get you folks who haven’t contributed yet to contribute. Over to you Claude AI:

Urgent! Can't let Gina win this...

Friend,

I'm literally shaking right now. Gina just threatened to behead two baby seals and some of those penguins now living behind tariff walls (will our enemies stop at nothing?.

We're FINISHED unless you chip in $3 immediately.

Your $3 isn't just a donation. It's a STATEMENT that you won't let democracy DIE. (Or baby seals - please pay attention!)

We've set an EMERGENCY goal for donations by MIDNIGHT. We need the same number of dollars that there are penguins in the antarctic.

Chip in now. I'm begging you.

Kate

(who hasn't slept in 72 hours because of this crisis).

But seriously folks, I’ll match your donation if you do so by clicking on this link. (And don’t donate $3. That would be scungy. You should have more self-respect. And if you just are scungy, think of me. It would make my matching donation scungy.

Don’t be a scunge. Don’t make me a scunge. Give more than $3. Give it now!

Bernard Keane on Agonocracy

Brought to you from a national treasure near you. From The Mandarin.

Are you an agonocrat? Come to Hobart Stadium and watch a fake contest of ideas

Manipulative tactics, not genuine debate, drive costly stadium plans, exposing flaws in political governance.

Nicholas Gruen calls it "agonocracy" or, rule by strife. It's a neologism of his own devising. "Government by factions whose views are pre-determined by political advantage, culture war, and party discipline. Politicians, talking heads, and their supporting players in consulting or the bureaucracy are strategic performers seeking outcomes — manipulative effectiveness, not deliberative authority."

Gruen, one of Australian public policy's national treasures and one of the few real big-picture thinkers in that space, has a good idea of what he's talking about after his role in the controversy over a new stadium in Hobart to host an AFL team.

Like all stadia built on the public dime, the project is a costly exercise being pushed by a government that is only interested in winning votes rather than acting in accordance with the public interest.

As is standard, the Tasmanian government, via the Macquarie Point Development Corporation, hired a Big Four audit firm, KPMG, to conduct an economic analysis of the project, which in the planning stage alone ballooned in cost from $715 million to $774 million. The Tasmanian government is committed to spending $375 million, with the federal government handing over $240 million. KPMG found the stadium would operate at a loss and that, with a host of other taxpayer funding factored in, would produce a benefit-cost ratio of 0.69. But the firm reckoned that was not unusual for a stadium and anyway, it reflected the fact that "a large component of benefit is either not quantifiable or not able to be monetised"...

Enter Gruen, whose firm was hired by the Tasmanian government after the government was forced into minority following the recent state election and Jacqui Lambie Network MPs demanded an independent assessment of the project. His team found that the costs had been understated by over $300 million, and the benefits significantly overstated, due to major flaws and questionable assumptions in the KPMG report. He backed these up with evidence from a Tasmanian parliamentary inquiry.

What did KPMG say in response to having their work so forensically dissected? Nothing. They had the opportunity to refute Gruen's critique — which Gruen provided directly to the firm — when they prepared an addendum recently and failed to mention it.

Put a pin in that failure — we'll come back to it.

Gruen was vindicated recently when the Tasmanian Planning Commission released its own draft report on the project at the end of March. Though its mix of cost drivers was different, its assessment of the costs was only slightly below Gruen's. However, it found about $100 million more benefits, yielding a benefit-cost ratio of 0.53, still far below that put forward by KPMG.

The Macquarie Point Development Corporation then angrily attacked the commission's report, even claiming it was unlawful. The Tasmanian government is now trying to devise ways to remove the commission entirely from the stadium's approval process.

So, consider the strategies of the Tasmanian government and its agents — the forces determined to inflict a stadium on Hobart regardless of its merits. Pretend that a critical report from a credentialed economist simply doesn't exist. Argue that another critical report from a government regulator is illegitimate. Simply go around the regulator charged with assessing projects...

These aren't the actions of those with a commitment to the public interest, or with achieving a better understanding of the costs and benefits to the public of spending what will likely end up being well north of a billion dollars by the time the inevitable cost blowouts occur (the replacement for the Sydney Football Stadium blew out by $100 million several years ago).

They are the actions of people following political imperatives — and not just partisan imperatives like building a new stadium, which may or may not be effective at the ballot box (the stadium was a key issue in an election campaign that saw the Liberals reduced to minority), but small-p political imperatives such as the need for participants to be seen not to lose face or admit error.

The traditional political system hasn't delivered any remedy to this crowding out of the public interest: the opposition Labor party backflipped on its initial opposition to the stadium and is content merely to attack the government over its handling of the project...

In an agonocracy, Gruen argues, "decisions are upstream of debate, debate is legitimating theatre; and participating sincerely is how you get played." The TPC's draft report was supposed to be the commencement of a consultation process until May 2025 as part of the Project of State Significance process. The Tasmanian government wants to junk the process. More to the point, there is no meaningful debate, no exchange of views that might enable the government, or the public, to get closer to an understanding of how the project fits with the public interest. The decision has been made "upstream" already; the rest is noise.

And there's no role for sincere participation in such a process: the decision has been made as a result of the exercise of power, not the contest of ideas. An immensely powerful institution, the AFL, has dictated to a small state that it will only be granted a team with a new, expensive stadium; a supine state government and opposition have kowtowed to it, and engaged a large audit firm to deliver the paraphernalia of policy development, while intending to proceed anyway...

Agonocracy is a useful concept, as it explains not so much what is occurring — which is what a term like state capture does — as how it occurs, through the creation of a fake process intended to legitimise decisions reached in the absence of any meaningful internal debate or investigation. In other words, clothing the exercise of naked power in the dress of effective public policymaking ...

They said the election was about democracy and made it about themselves: SHOCK!!

Andrew Sullivan’s editorial.

By April of last year, the health of the president had clearly declined. As with many older men in their eighties, this didn't happen in a slow, predictable glide-path down — but in swift, turbulent declines. Suddenly he took a while to get out of his limo, and then would emerge "with a blank look in his face," according to the new campaign book, Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. By early summer, Biden was suddenly freezing up in public, staring motionless into the air. At a fundraiser in Los Angeles, Obama had to jump in to answer some questions, and then had to guide Biden off the stage by hand. We had already seen Joe wander weirdly off the set of MSNBC and during a Medal of Honor ceremony. His memory lapses mounted.

Everyone around him saw this. Everyone close to him had seen it for over a year by then. Everyone in his campaign knew that upwards of 86 percent of Americans thought he was too old to serve another term. And no one did anything about it.

Sometimes human folly is just human folly. Sometimes, even at the pinnacle of the world, you find flawed people struggling with familiar human problems, like how to tell a beloved but fast-aging man that he needs to leave the stage before he falls off it. Just because she was First Lady did not prevent Jill Biden from putting family before country; and just because he was president didn't mean that Biden reacted to his own decline with denial, anger, pig-headedness, and arrogance.

Do we learn anything new in this book and another one, Uncharted, by Chris Whipple out next week? Not really. We know, in fact, that everything I guessed happened did actually happen. Among the unsurprising confirmations: Obama was so aloof he didn't even watch the fateful June debate live; he and Pelosi then wanted an open primary and did all they could to get one. ("He goes. She goes" was their mantra.)...

The Democrats, even as late as July, could have found a fresh candidate capable of taking on what they said was a vital moment for democracy's survival. We might have avoided our current abyss:

"It would have been very cheap. It would have been quick. A rocket ship for your career and no loss," said one Democratic former governor. "If this had been a year earlier, twenty people would have gotten in," said one governor who had kicked the tires on a 2024 bid.

Why didn't they? That is a question that will reverberate through history. Wokeness was a factor. The only reason the embarrassingly mid Harris was made veep in the first place was to fill a slot Biden had already marked for a woman, and, in the wake of the Floyd murder, a black woman seemed the only option. Everyone, particularly Pelosi and Obama, knew Harris was a disaster about to happen, and her vice-presidency had the lowest approval ratings in history...

And yes, they lied. Jill Biden was one of the worst offenders. She insisted in January 2024, "I see his vigor, I see his energy, I see his passion every single day. I say his age is an asset." Before the June debate, Joe had been drained by grueling international travel, was catching a cold and couldn't last more than 45 minutes in the practice debates. But the First Lady went out and told the world: "The president's feeling great. He's ready. We're going to win this thing." The woman who had covered up her husband's decline for the previous two years now set expectations that were, of course, utterly ruinous.

Her own former press secretary said:

Cover-up to me is a little hard, a little harsh. Every politician, everybody, every human being tries to cover up age. We were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue... The president's team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, un-rehearsed, unpracticed, un-choreographed, anything, they couldn't compete for the attention economy. They just couldn't do it.

What were they thinking? Their very actions were rooted in the understanding that Joe Biden couldn't function as president any longer; and yet they kept insisting he could govern for four more years!...

But in the end, the story of 2024 is painfully, excruciatingly human. Biden's prickly pride and long-nurtured insecurity, the insularity of his too-loyal circle, and the entitlement that comes from decades of public life at the top all led to collective tragedy. We are now living in the wake of this man's fallibility and stubbornness. It's a story we all know well in our private capacities: the tale of trying to get grandpa to give up his car keys before he drives into a ditch and hurts someone.

Well, welcome to the ditch. And the casualties are mounting.

Intellectual dwarfism in the academy

The aping of the natural sciences (though it is a dumbed down idea of the natural science) has laid economics low. And here’s someone arguing the same in psychology.

There's a peculiar form of intellectual cowardice in our modern academies ~ one that manifests most eloquently in their treatment of Carl Jung.

I was recently reminded of a story when I joined a conversation regarding the topic on X.

Years ago, while dining with a professor of psychology and family friend, our discussion drifted to the collective unconscious. My conversational companion (brilliant in his field, I should note) began to shift uncomfortably in his chair. "Of course," he muttered, reaching for his glass, "we don't discuss such things in serious circles anymore."

Serious circles. How perfectly that phrase captures the provincial small-mindedness that has overtaken our institutions of higher learning.

The Greeks understood that wisdom requires both Apollo and Dionysus ~ reason and mystery, order and chaos.

Yet modern psychology has become a purely Apollonian enterprise in their desperate pursuit of "scientific legitimacy."...

Jung's great crime was not that he was wrong. His crime was that he was right in ways that couldn't quite be contained within the confines of contemporary methodology. He dared to suggest that perhaps the human psyche was more akin to Dante's Divine Comedy than to a mechanistic flowchart. One can hardly imagine a more grievous offense against our current intellectual orthodoxy...

Jung understood something that our contemporary scholars seem to have forgotten: that truth is not always amenable to statistical analysis. The mysteries of human consciousness – our dreams, our myths, our intuitive understanding of archetypal patterns – these refuse to be reduced to p-values and confidence intervals.

Yet watch any psychology conference today (dreary affairs, though they occasionally serve decent champagne), and you'll witness the curious spectacle of brilliant minds pretending human consciousness can be fully understood through brain scans and behavioral metrics...

The academy's treatment of Jung shows us the level of insecurity at the heart of modern psychological science.

Just like a nouveau riche businessman desperately trying to hide his humble origins ~ contemporary psychology seems terrified that someone might discover it's not quite as scientifically rigorous as it pretends to be...

Everywhere we look, we see unprecedented mental health challenges of various shades. But we've deliberately marginalized one of the most profound investigators of the human psyche, whose ideas might actually have some merit. In a way, we've traded wisdom, understanding, and depth, for data, measurement, and precision...

In the end, Jung's absence from contemporary psychological discourse says far more about our own limitations than his. We've created an academic culture that prefers comfortable half-truths to uncomfortable whole ones.

How utterly, predictably, tragically small of us.

But then again, as Jung himself might observe, the shadow always returns ~ especially when we try our hardest to deny it.

Cute

Steel-Manning the Tariffs

In the best piece I’ve read about the extraordinary tariff policies - exempting Russia and Nth Korea was a nice touch. Anyway, as Noah Millman reports even after steel-manning the tariffs “I think they're a fiasco”. I’ve heavily shortened the article, so do click through for the other 2/3rds of it. Also, this was written about a week ago and so the details of the tariff arrangements it contemplates are now completely different.

[In considering President Trump's recent "Liberation Day" tariff announcement,] the Iraq [War offers a useful parallel]. The Iraq bet didn't just require balls. It required a commitment to an idea, an assessment of the state of the world and America's place in it and how those needed to change. 9-11 provided the pretext and the proof for action, but for those who believed in the idea the pre-attack status quo had been unacceptable for some time. America had allowed a specific problem—Islamist terrorism—to fester and grow to the point where it was an existential threat, and we now had to be willing to reorder the entire region to eliminate it at the source. ...

That idea was nuts, in retrospect, and the wisest observers at the time saw that it was nuts in prospect. But they also saw something else: that without that animating fundamental idea, the whole war made no sense. Without the idea, all you were left with was an emotional impulse—we've got to do something more substantial after 9-11 than invading Afghanistan and hunting individual terrorists—bad risk analysis—can we really invade every country that might have a clandestine nuclear weapons program?—outright mendacity and political and bureaucratic inertia. The idea may have been nuts, but it was necessary.

What's the animating idea behind Trump's tariffs? Is it nuts? Is it even plausible that Trump and his team believe it? ...

At the end of World War II, the United States was the overwhelmingly dominant economic power on the planet, and in that context established the Bretton Woods system of managed exchange rates between major currencies anchored by a dollar convertible to gold. The United States encouraged the development of allied economies and the outflow of dollars through programs like the Marshall Plan. As allied economies recovered, pressure on fixed exchange rates became a serious problem. Already by the late 1950s, the system was showing signs of strain, but the fiscal deficits and incipient inflation of the Johnson years made the existing arrangements untenable, and in 1971 the Nixon administration ended the system of fixed exchange rates and allowed the price of gold to float.

Since then, the United States has run persistent and large fiscal and trade deficits. We are able to run these deficits because the dollar is the global reserve currency, which means there is persistently more demand for dollar-denominated assets than assets denominated in other currencies, and that demand can only be met by creating dollar-denominated assets, namely: debt. ...

In the second phase, though, America's budget deficit has ballooned completely out of control, while the rise of China has completely transformed the shape of global trade and manufacturing. Both were plausibly made possible by America's unique position as the global reserve currency, which allowed China for decades to recycle its massive trade surpluses by purchasing U.S. Treasuries, allowing America to grow in wealth even as it lost productive capacity. ...

The idea seems to be: force the collapse early and on America's terms so as to forestall the most extreme outcomes. By raising enormous tariffs unilaterally not only on China but on our allies, the United States will make the continuation of the current trade regime impossible, provoking a sharp economic contraction and raising the specter of something even worse. ... Facing impending catastrophe, all the world's major economies—including China, whose economic model depends on running a massive trade surplus—will have to come to the table and negotiate a new trade and monetary regime, one that will be more balanced in America's favor. ...

That, in any event, is the idea. Is it nuts? Probably. I can't fathom why our allies, for example, would want to reorder the world's economy to be even more favorable to the United States right after we blew it up in their faces. Why wouldn't they negotiate with China on a new arrangement, and then present us with a fait accompli? ...

The tariffs President Trump slapped on the world on "Liberation Day" were calculated in an absolutely idiotic manner. The initial claim was that they were based on how much each of our trading partners was "cheating" us, but in fact they were just based on a simpleminded ratio between the bilateral trade deficit and the total amount of imports. The assumption seems to be that any bilateral trade deficit is caused by cheating—which is completely absurd. ...

More laughably, we imposed tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins. Whatever idea may have been behind such moves, they make America look ridiculous. Dangerous, yes, but not in a "we'd better give them what they want" kind of way; more in a "we'd better take away their car keys" kind of way.

You too can have an A1 education

Responding to tariffs

Do ever wonder how far the forelock can be tugged?

Negotiations with the Trump administration over an exemption to the tariffs it announced last week — or from the previously announced steel and aluminium tariffs — are in abeyance currently due to the government being in caretaker mode. That means any non-trivial policy decisions are halted pending the swearing in of the next government, of whatever stripe it may be.

If Nine's Peter Hartcher... is to be believed, that may have saved Australia from a disastrous act of economic sabotage.

Hartcher observed in passing today that the government, desperate to avoid the reciprocal tariffs announced last week, has instructed ambassador Kevin Rudd to offer "a reliable supply chain of critical minerals to the US", as well as other, secret elements. Hartcher linked Labor's offer to the prime minister's mention last week, without detail, of his intention to create a "critical minerals reserve". ...

Trade Minister... Don Farrell has previously talked about making an offer Trump couldn't refuse in relation to critical minerals. It now appears that Labor is [seeking] to in effect bribe Trump with special access to Australian critical minerals. Only the calling of the election appears to have halted momentum on the Australian side for handing Trump a special deal on critical minerals — without any public consultation or parliamentary debate. ...

Hartcher's revelation is particularly ironic because there's an important counterfactual here: what would have been the reaction if the Morrison government, or Labor after its 2022 election win, had offered China preferential access to Australia's critical minerals... in exchange for China lifting its tariffs on selected Australian products? ...

[According to the article], Trump and his coterie are engaged in a global-scale effort to interfere in — to dictate — the domestic policies of other countries. It's not merely about tariffs on US goods, which in any event aren't the basis for the calculated rates of "reciprocal" US tariffs. In our case it's about America seeking to destroy our biosecurity, our social safety net in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and Australian culture via content requirements.

Funny

Political correctness or Trump?

The concrete choice in front of us is as asked on Swedish TV "Political correctness or Donald Trump?" I'm in John McWhorter's camp, not Glenn Loury's. There's no comparison for me. One side isn't slightly better than the other. One flirts with catastrophe. The other is one of a number of decadent features of liberal democracy, and largely inevitable in our politico-entertainment complex unless our democracy can marshall new resources to lift itself up.

David Brooks: I should have seen this coming

Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: "All my life I have had a certain idea about France." Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.

Until January 20, 2025, I didn't realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country's goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I've had trouble describing the anguish I've experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I'm living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I'm feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation's honor is embarrassing and painful.

George Orwell is a useful guide to what we're witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake," an apparatchik says in 1984. "We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power." How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell's character continues: "Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation."

Russell Vought, Donald Trump's budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains," he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. "We want to put them in trauma."

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman's power. The rule of law restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Oversight mechanisms are a potential restraint on power, so they must be neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state.

Although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Many of Musk's DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. This political moment isn't populists versus elitists; it is like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids.

The MAGA elite rode to power on working-class votes, but—trust me, I know some of them—they don't care about the working class. An administration that cared about the working class would address its problems, such as the fact that the poorest Americans die an average of 10 to 15 years younger than higher-income counterparts, or that by sixth grade, many children in the poorest school districts have fallen four grade levels behind those in the richest. Instead of helping workers, they focus on destroying the places where they think liberal elites work—the scientific community, the foreign-aid community, universities.

America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances and build the structures of democracy—and only weeks to decimate them. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations have gone through worse crises and recovered.

The most salient historical parallel might be the America of the 1830s. Andrew Jackson is the American president who most resembles Trump—power-hungry, rash, narcissistic, driven by animosity. He was known as "King Andrew" for his expansions of executive power. "The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet," Senator Asher Robbins said. Jackson brazenly defied the Supreme Court on a ruling about Cherokee Nation territory (a defiance that Vice President Vance has explicitly endorsed). "Though we live under the form of a republic," Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote, "we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man."

But Jackson made the classic mistake of the populist: He overreached. Fueled by hostility toward elites, he destroyed the Second Bank of the United States and helped spark an economic depression that ruined his chosen successor's administration.

In response to Jackson, the Whig Party arose to create a new political and social order. Anti-authoritarian, the Whigs were a cultural, civic, and political force that emphasized both traditional morality and progressive improvements. They championed prison reform, women's participation in politics, public schools, and pro-business policies. Though we call the early-to-mid-19th century the Age of Jackson, it was not Jackson but the Whigs who created the America we know today. To begin its recovery from Trumpism, America needs its next Whig moment.

A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what's likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy, not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. When you create an administration where one man has all the power and everybody else must flatter his ego, stupidity results.

The DOGE children are doubtless brilliant in certain ways, but they know as much about government as I know about rocketry. They announced an $8 billion cut to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract—though if they had read their own documents correctly, they would have realized that the cut was less than $8 million. They eliminated workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently without realizing that this agency controls nuclear security, and had to undo some of those cuts shortly thereafter. Trump seems to be trying to give a bunch of Sam Bankman-Frieds access to America's nuclear arsenal and IRS records. What could go wrong?

Like M. E. Rothwell says “No one ever painted the sea better than Ivan Aivazovsky.”

Kurt Vonnegut explains the geometry of stories

thishowthingswork

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Heaviosity Half-Hayek

I’m sorry, I’ll read that again

Heaviosity Half-hour

Raymond Aron on Hayek

Hayek’s masterwork, The Constitution of Liberty was published in 1960 and attracted this famous review by Raymond Aron the following year. But I’ve found it hard to get hold of and finally got a copy in the original French and fed it into ChatGPT to be translated.

Aron was an original member of the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society which Hayek founded in 1947. I’m not using neoliberal as a slur - the term was proposed by Milton Friedman back then. But by the mid 1950s Aron was wising up that Hayek was quite the ideologue. At a Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in (I think) 1955 Aron described Hayek’s mission in leading the Society as ‘inverse Marxism’, a suggestion which seems bang-on to me but it outraged Hayek. In any event from that point, a group of centrist neoliberals - particularly Michael Polanyi, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Aron, either left the Society or drifted away.

Though Aron praised the book, I think his critique is devastating. I first became aware of this review in this passage in a book on Jouvenel by Daniel Mahoney.

Contemporary academic political theory, especially in the United States, is dominated by a largely sterile debate between liberals and communitarians. Academic liberals affirm the moral autonomy of the individual and the priority of rights over a commonly shared understanding of the good life. To a remarkable degree, they take for granted the moral preconditions of a free society--those habits, mores, and shared beliefs that allow for the responsible exercise of individual liberty. Raymond Aron's forceful retort to Hayek applies equally to other currents of academic liberal theory: they "presuppose, as already acquired, results which past philosophers considered as the primary objects of political action." Contemporary liberals fail to see that "a society must first be, before it can be free”.¹

Hear hear. (I’d add parenthetically that we do the same with democracy. We assume that competitive elections are the heart and soul of democracy, but as we are seeing, the competitive dynamic they set off takes it’s toll on social solidarity.) In any event, you’ll find this passage at the end of section II in Part Two though in a different (ChatGPT) translation.

For me this paragraph summarises Aron’s problem with Hayek’s attempt to define freedom or liberty tendentiously - it omits much of what most people care about liberty.

The initial definition—liberty (in English freedom and liberty interchangeably) is nothing other than the absence of constraint—nonetheless has the consequence of excluding three other ideas that are, in our time, frequently linked to the concept of liberty: participation in the political order or, more precisely, the choice of governors by the electoral procedure, the independence of a population that rejects foreign masters and is governed by men of its own race or nationality, the power of the individual or the collective, capable of satisfying its desires or achieving its own ends.

The Liberal Definition of Liberty^[1]

Regarding F.A. Hayek's book "The Constitution of Liberty"

Part One

F.A. Hayek's book has been ignored or nearly so in France, and many of those in Great Britain and the United States who should have read it have neglected it, being hostile in advance to the theses of the author of "The Road to Serfdom." Personally, I unreservedly approve of Professor J.W.N. Watkins' formula:

In any circumstances The Constitution of Liberty would have been an important book. Given the condition of political philosophy in the English-speaking world today, it is outstandingly important. In recent years contributions to political philosophy have consisted almost exclusively either of historical work, often of a high scholarly excellence but hardly attempting to bring the ideas discussed to bear on modern issues, or of occasional ballons d'essai which have not risen very high despite the absence of mooring-lines.^[2]

The criticisms that I will formulate should not be misleading: they do not prevent me from subscribing to the judgment I have just quoted and from admiring the breadth of the construction.

Let us translate the title of the book literally: The constitution of liberty. The term "constitution" clearly has a richer comprehension than in its strictly legal usage. Constitution is understood here as being in relation to society what the constitution, in the narrow sense of the term, is in relation to the political system. It determines the laws according to which communal life is organized. Under what conditions does this social organization deserve to be called liberal, that is to say, does it respect the liberty of individuals?

The research has as its starting point and foundation a definition of liberty. Liberty is defined first negatively by the absence of coercion or constraint (coercion). But constraint is not a much clearer notion than liberty; it in turn calls for a definition (which the reader finds at the beginning of the second part). The initial definition—liberty (in English freedom and liberty interchangeably) is nothing other than the absence of constraint—nonetheless has the consequence of excluding three other ideas that are, in our time, frequently linked to the concept of liberty: participation in the political order or, more precisely, the choice of governors by the electoral procedure, the independence of a population that rejects foreign masters and is governed by men of its own race or nationality, the power of the individual or the collective, capable of satisfying its desires or achieving its own ends. Neither should "inner freedom," the capacity to choose intelligently or reasonably, be equated with the liberty that Hayek wants to preserve or promote.

Thus defined, liberty is a negative but indivisible reality. Unlike counter-revolutionaries or conservatives who speak more willingly of liberties than of liberty, Hayek sticks to the singular. Men are more or less free, that is to say that the constraint to which they are subjected is greater or lesser, but their liberty does not break down into various rights or separable powers. If they escape constraint, they are free, or rather the measure of their liberty is that of the reduction of constraint.

This argument obviously assumes that the latter, in turn, is also an indivisible reality, although it is susceptible to more or less. This result is obtained by the following definition: "Coercion occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his own but for the other's purpose".^[3] And, a little further on: "Coercion implies both the threat of inflicting harm and the intention thereby to bring about certain conduct".^[4] The essence of constraint is therefore the threat of inflicting on another, if he does not submit to our will, a sanction, most often but not always by the use of force. The one who is constrained loses the ability to use his intelligence to choose his means and ends. He becomes the instrument of the one whose will he submits to.

Since coercion is the control of the essential data of an individual's action by another, it can be prevented only by enabling the individual to secure for himself some private sphere where he is protected against such interference.^[5]

The definition of constraint confirms the negative conception of liberty. The latter consists essentially in the sphere of decision and action reserved for each person. Free is he who is not a slave. Free is he who has the legal status of a protected member of the community, one who does not risk arbitrary arrest, one who has the right to choose his work and to move about as he pleases.^[6] Hayek does not evoke four "liberties" but four rights, these being only an enumeration (neither exhaustive nor final) of what is normally contained in the private sphere, reserved for each person.

Starting from these initial definitions, it is easy to pose the fundamental questions raised by this philosophy of liberty: 1) Is it possible to circumscribe from the outside the domain of constraint, to discriminate between constraining and non-constraining influences that men exercise on each other? 2) In this task of discrimination, is it possible to stick to the radical separation between liberty—the sphere of private decision—and the other meanings of liberty? 3) Is it legitimate to determine the good society or the free society by reference to the single criterion of unconstrained liberty? It is to these three questions that we will try to give answers in the following pages.

II

It is quite clear that life in society implies the coordination of individual activities. This coordination, in turn, requires rules, that is to say the distinction between what is authorized and what is forbidden. It also requires a hierarchy of authority in any collective enterprise, whether economic or military. Whether the objective is to kill game, to storm an enemy redoubt, or to build a bridge, the actions of each—hunter, soldier, or worker—are and must be parts of a whole that exists, entire, only in the mind of one or a few leaders. Hunters, soldiers, and workers are inevitably the instruments of their leaders, and thus constrained—unless one uses another definition of constraint.

Probably Hayek would admit that a soldier is not free. But this proposition, which in one sense is incontestable, is nonetheless awkward because the citizen who accepts, by his vote, compulsory military service, subscribes so to speak to the temporary alienation of his liberty. Constrained in daily action, he morally consents to this constraint by his decision as a citizen. By defining liberty exclusively by the "sphere of individual decision," one loses the possibility of discriminating between the situation of the individual forcibly enrolled in a conquering army and that of the citizen who fulfills the military obligations of which he has been, by his vote, a legislator. Or, at least, the discrimination, according to Hayek's concepts, would have nothing to do with liberty.

To this objection, Hayek responds almost directly:

It would be difficult to maintain that a man who voluntarily but irrevocably has sold his services for a long period of years to a military organization such as the Foreign Legion remained free thereafter in our sense; or that a Jesuit who lives up to the ideals of the founder of his order and regards himself "as a corpse which has neither intelligence nor will" could be so described.^[7]

Unquestionably, the legionnaire or the Jesuit accepts to obey the direct and specific will of another. But non-liberty, thus defined by Hayek, is a concept that is not very usable or, at the very least, too vague. Suppose a legionnaire who loves the military profession, who believes in the causes for which he will be led to fight, and who has confidence in his officers: he will feel no sense of oppression.^[8] Similarly, the Jesuit effectively alienates his liberty in the sense that he renounces all or part of his private sphere of decision. He is not free in Hayek's sense; he is constrained and constantly constrained. In this sense, he is oppressed since ^[9] "oppression, which is perhaps as much a true opposite of liberty as coercion, should refer only to a state of continuous acts of coercion."

The difficulty, it seems to me, lies in a definition of constraint that is too broad, visible moreover in the text itself. Indeed, either there is constraint as soon as there is alienation of the right of personal decision and action, and in this case, all enterprises of the military type involve constraint; or constraint begins only from the moment when the individual becomes, against his will, the instrument of another and yields to the latter out of fear of sanction, and in this case, it is appropriate to introduce between liberty-personal activity and constraint operated by threat, a domain of neutral activity as such. The individual cannot be said to be free since he does not choose his object, his project, or even his means, but he cannot be said to be constrained or oppressed either since he recognizes the necessity or (and) the legitimacy of the commands to which he submits.

If, in the case of the legionnaire or the Jesuit, Hayek can at most argue that one and the other choose servitude, he could not advance the same argument about the worker. Now the latter, in obeying the orders of the foreman, the engineer, or the director, manifestly serves the objectives of another; he chooses neither his goals nor his methods, and he is threatened with sanctions in case of disobedience. Hayek is probably aware of the possible objection since he uses the opposition, in his eyes decisive, between general law and specific command to reintroduce into the enterprise or the domestic household a sphere of individual liberty:

The manner in which the aims and the knowledge that guide a particular action are distributed between the authority and the performer is thus the most important distinction between general laws and specific command [...] Such general instructions will already constitute rules of a kind, and the action under them will be guided by that of the acting persons. It will be the chief who decides what results are to be achieved, at what time, by whom, and perhaps by which means; but the particular manner in which they are brought about will be decided by the individuals responsible. The servants of a big household or the employees of a plant will thus be mostly occupied with the routine of carrying out standing orders, adopting them all the time to particular circumstances and only occasionally receiving specific commands.^[10]

The preceding quotation calls for two remarks: is it true that work, in the home or the enterprise, consists essentially in executing permanent instructions? Is it true that the liberty of the worker is measured by the relationship between permanent instructions and precise commands? Does liberty increase with the increase in the percentage of the former and the decrease in the percentage of the latter? I have doubts about these two propositions. The first seems true for enterprises of a certain type, but not for all. As for the second, it can only be posed as a language decision: by definition, the liberty of the worker in the enterprise will be measured by the initiative he will enjoy in the implementation of permanent instructions. But, obviously, the feeling of liberty and oppression of the worker in the enterprise depends on multiple factors, the extension of permanent instructions and initiative in execution being only one of these factors.

Let us conclude these first analyses: Hayek wanted to define liberty by the absence of constraint and constraint by an objectively identifiable situation. Since every individual who appears as an instrument in the service of another is constrained, any project, conceived by a single man and executed by many, will entail the constraint of those who are not the leaders. Unless one introduces the notion of "threat" on the part of the leader and refusal or resistance on the part of the executors. But, in this hypothesis, the emphasis shifts: the essential thing is no longer that the individual does not choose his goals or his means; the essential thing is that the individual obeys a discipline that he does not approve of, that he judges contrary to his rights or to equity. But if one introduces this subjective element into the definition of constraint, one will also have to introduce it into the definition of liberty. No more than obedience to specific commands entails constraint, submission to permanent instructions or to general laws guarantees liberty.

III

Hayek, indeed, and this goes without saying, does not deny that life in society requires a certain volume of constraint. He does not deny that, in private life or inter-individual relations, each of us is exposed to the risk of being constrained by his relatives, his friends, or people of chance encounter. He does not deny either that, apart from laws or public powers, customs and collective prejudices can constrain the individual. But he considers these risks of constraint to be weak compared to those created by the progressive repression of the rule of law by the government of men. It is not true, he says, that in a free society, men rule over men: it is the laws that rule equally over the governors and the governed.

The conception of freedom under the law that is the chief concern of this book rests on the contention that when we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man's will and are therefore free.^[11]

And, a little further on:

The fact is that, if "to rule" means to make men obey another's will, government has no such power to rule in a free society.^[12]

Hayek belongs to a long and glorious tradition, the one that confounds liberty with obedience to laws and strives to reduce as much as possible the hold that certain men exert over others.

A first difficulty that Hayek himself notes is that an abstract, general law, equally applicable to all, can nevertheless restrict liberty. He admits that religion has often provided the pretext for the establishment of rules that have been felt to be extremely oppressive, and he even adds that religious beliefs have been the only reason why "general rules seriously restrictive of liberty have ever been universally enforced".^[13]

The problem, in truth, is twofold: is obedience to general laws as such liberty, according to the definition given to this word? Or does the generality of the law create a probability that the laws are not oppressive? To tell the truth, Hayek's thought on this point is fluctuating. He says that laws can restrict liberty; he does not say that they can be "constraining" (subjecting someone to the will of another man). He says that general laws can be felt as "oppressive"; he does not say that they are. They could only be oppressive in the proper sense in the case where these general laws would appear as the expression of the will of a person or a group of men. But if Hayek admitted that the general law expresses, by camouflaging it, a human will, the opposition on which the doctrine is based would lose its rigidity.

Nothing is easier than to imagine laws conforming to the essence of legality and which nevertheless can be felt as "oppressive". If a law prohibits all citizens from traveling abroad, it is not discriminatory without being liberal for all that. A law, discriminatory in fact, can be formulated in terms such that it presents all the characteristics of generality and abstraction: for example, if henceforth no one has the right to own more than a third of the capital of a daily publication, only a small number of people will be affected, but the form does not allow one to discern whether it is a "command" or a "law".

The generality of the law therefore does not allow one to affirm that the prohibition enacted by it is not considered oppressive by those who are subject to it. Nor is it sufficient to guarantee the elimination of the element of "personal command" that Hayek considers to be the essence of constraint. Take the case of sumptuary laws; these can be formulated in general rules: no one shall have the right to own more than so many hectares... no one shall have the right to spend more than so many millions... no one shall have the right to manufacture such and such jewelry... They do not target anyone in particular, but they target all those who may fall under these prohibitions. Now laws, however general they may be, although they target all persons, effectively concern only those who are in a position to do what is prohibited. Where is the separation between discriminatory laws and others?

Hayek suggests two responses: a law is not discriminatory if it applies equally to the governors and the governed. A law must be acceptable to those whom it strikes as well as to those whom it does not concern. The first response has a certain pragmatic value. One is tempted to admit, at first instance, that if the governors are subject to the same laws as the governed, "little that anybody may reasonably wish to do is likely to be prohibited".^[14] But a first exception, recognized by Hayek, is that of "true believers," whatever their religion, who do not hesitate to impose on others what they themselves judge in accordance with their faith. Let this faith be economic, let it proclaim, in the manner of Proudhon, the equivalence of commerce and theft, and the prohibition of private property of the instruments of production will become law. This law will present all the formal characteristics of law. If Hayek, in his system, can condemn it, it is because the suppression of private property entails the reduction or elimination of the individual sphere, the enlargement of the domain of personal commands. It is easier to condemn certain laws by referring to the ideal of the sphere of personal action than to present the generality of the law as proof that it is not oppressive.

As for the second criterion—laws that apply only to a category of persons must be acceptable to the members of this category as well as to the rest of the community—it would end up giving any minority group a moral right of veto over legislation. Although the idea is not formulated in a categorical manner, it arises, in an attenuated form, on various occasions. When it comes to social services that the State must finance by using constraint, Hayek writes:

It is not to be expected that there will ever be complete unanimity on the desirability of the extent of such services, and it is at last not obvious that coercing people to contribute to the achievement of ends in which they are not interested can be morally justified.^[15]

Regarding the progressive tax, the same argument is taken up:

What is required here is a rule which, while still leaving open the possibility of a majority's taxing itself to assist a minority, does not sanction a majority's imposing upon a minority whatever burden it regards as right.^[16]

The fiscal law that provides for the progressivity of income tax is formally a law, it is abstract and general, it does not target particular persons. It is nonetheless a form of constraint since it makes the revenues of persons serve the ends set by the State, that is to say, other persons. But, given that a certain state constraint is inevitable, the question arises as to within what limits state constraint is legitimate. The non-discriminatory character of this constraint or, in the case of discrimination, the acceptance of it by the minority as well as by the majority would be the external sign and at the same time the confirmation of the equity of the discrimination:

If the classifications of persons which the law must employ are to result neither in privilege nor in discrimination, they must rest on distinctions which those inside the group singled out, as well as those outside it, will recognize as relevant.^[17]

Whatever one thinks of the progressive tax, it would be excessive to hope that the rich minority accepts it as willingly as the poor majority. Either the former will complain of discrimination, or the latter will take issue with privileges. It is not the minority or the majority that will find the solution, of a nature to avoid discrimination and privileges, but reasonable men in both. This amounts to saying that there is no objective criterion of non-discrimination and non-privilege (no more than there is an objective and external definition of constraint).

From that point on, I would be inclined to reject a comparison that holds a place of prime importance in Hayek's philosophy: general laws, enacted by the State, would be comparable to natural laws; they determine the conditions to which each of us must adapt or which he must master in order to act; they leave intact our personal sphere, our freedom of action. On the other hand, commands, whether they come from other persons or from the State, would imply constraint.

Is it true that general rules can be considered the equivalent of natural laws? I don't think so. First, in our time, men judge otherwise. They know that laws, however general they may be, are the work of men; the fact that the law providing for two and a half years of military service does not include exemptions does not make it, in the eyes of those concerned, comparable to natural laws. In other words, the comparison is in any case false, in relation to the feelings of men.

How could it be otherwise? Laws can be circumvented, the ingenious individual can violate them without incurring sanctions, the honest individual can strive to obtain their modification. In any case, the generality of a legal prohibition or authorization does not have the same meaning as physical impossibility or possibility. As Durkheim would have said, the link between the violation of the law and the sanction is synthetic, between the act and its consequences, analytical. Each of us will refuse, and rightly so, the assimilation of social law to natural law whenever the law seems to us unjust or absurd.

Hayek, quite rightly, refuses to circumscribe the sphere of personal autonomy, apart from the circumstances of time and place. It was legitimate for the State, he writes, to impose religious conformity as long as men believed in collective responsibility towards some divinity. To trace the boundaries of the protected zone, the important question is to know "whether the actions of other people that we wish to see prevented would actually interfere with the reasonable expectations of the protected person".^[18] In other words, the State is right to prohibit what the individual, at each epoch, reasonably considers as not belonging to his individual sphere. The individual sphere is more or less large depending on the societies, the content of individual liberties is historically variable. But, if this is so, how does the eternal definition of non-constraint through the generality of the law combine with the historicity of the delimitation of the personal sphere? In my opinion, the reconciliation requires that the emphasis be placed less on the non-constraining character of a general law than on the concrete character of the prohibitions enacted by the laws. Or again, it is not impossible to impose, by means of general laws, prohibitions that will be oppressive because they will make illegal the exercise of personal decision in domains where the governed expect to enjoy it.

Once the historical, variable character of the limits of the personal sphere is established, the other criteria—non-discrimination, generality of the rule, reduction of the domain of specific commands—retain significance. None, by itself, is decisive, but all together suggest an ideal: that of a society where the State would leave to individual initiatives a margin of maneuver as wide as possible, where the governors would be subject to the same obligations, the same prohibitions and the same authorizations as ordinary citizens, where privileges and discriminations would be reduced to a minimum. But there is no more objective definition, eternally valid, of what will be called "discrimination" than there is such a definition of constraint and, consequently, of liberty.

Hayek's thought is perfectly clear at the level where it is usually situated, that is to say as a doctrine of what modern society should be. On the other hand, the philosophical foundations he has tried to give to this social ideal seem to me fragile. He has wanted to define liberty by the absence of constraint and constraint by an objectively recognizable situation. But he has overlooked the fact that all collective enterprises make certain individuals the instruments of their leaders without soldiers or workers therefore judging themselves "oppressed". He has posed a radical difference between obedience to persons and submission to rules, and he has ignored or neglected the fact that general rules could also be oppressive and that, in the final analysis, it is the relationship between the content of prohibitions and obligations on the one hand, the legitimate expectations of individuals on the other, that determines the effective measure of liberty in a given society.

We must now know if and to what extent the critique of philosophical foundations entails consequences regarding the economic-social doctrine itself.

Part Two

The goal of a free society must be to limit as much as possible the government of men by men and to increase the government of men by laws. This is, without a doubt, the first imperative of liberalism as conceived by F. A. Hayek.

It happens that, personally, I share this ideal. The reservations that I will formulate will therefore not have their origin in a different hierarchy of values but in the consideration of some facts.

There has never existed and there does not exist a "human collectivity". There are "human collectivities". Each of them finds itself in relations that are by turns friendly and hostile, peaceful and warlike with some others. The management of external relations belongs and cannot not belong to one or some men. The designation of this man or these men operates differently according to the centuries and regimes. But the direction of foreign policy is the work of men and not of laws. Locke, in the second treatise, explicitly distinguishes two aspects or two modalities of executive power: this has, on the one hand, the function of ensuring the execution of laws, on the other hand the function of treaties, peace and war. Hayek, like most liberals, does not deal with foreign policy. He merely indicates, in passing, that, provisionally, the world state seems to him dangerous for individual liberty and that it is better, in these conditions, to accommodate oneself to the plurality of States and eventual wars.^[19]

But the federative power, to take up Locke's term, nevertheless remains the government of men by men and not by laws. In matters of treaties, peace and war, writes Locke, there are hardly any laws or rules. States, in their mutual relations, are subject to the obligations of natural law, but as there is neither tribunal nor police, they are indeed obliged to do justice themselves. And it is men, not laws, who decide what this "justice" requires. According to Hayek's definitions, I fear that all diplomatic action, in any case any action leading to war must be considered as "constraint" of the governors on the governed, the entire collectivity being the instrument of projects conceived by the governors alone. Will it be said that this is not the case if the people are in intimate agreement with the decisions taken by their leaders? The objection, within the framework of Hayek's thought, would not be valid since constraint has been defined by the absence of personal choice, by the manipulation of data or by the threat in case of disobedience. All these characteristics are present whenever diplomatic action obliges citizens to honor the commitments made by those who govern them.

But if this is the case, if peace and war result from the action of men in power, it is no longer possible to claim that the rule of law leaves no place for the domination of men by men. By the same token, it is understandable, without even leaving the intellectual system of Hayek, why it is impossible to stick to the sole definition of liberty by the absence of constraint, absence itself guaranteed by the generality of laws. Since there is no collectivity without foreign policy, without federative power, since this is always exercised by persons, citizens cannot help but obey specific commands and they are legitimately concerned to know to which individuals and under what conditions they will obey.

By the same token, two of the meanings of the concept of liberty—meanings that Hayek has indicated and that he has not rejected but subordinated to the fundamental notion of non-constraint—inevitably reappear. If there is no lack of men who, between individual liberty and the liberty of their nation, do not hesitate, in case of necessary choice, to sacrifice the former to the latter, we would be wrong to ignore the intelligible, if not rational, motives of this preference. As long as there will be wars, belonging to a political unit will be equivalent to discriminating between friends and enemies. If I must pay for the liberty I enjoy in peacetime by the obligation to fight against my brothers of race or language or nationality in case of war, I can, in all lucidity, resign myself to the loss of my peaceful liberty in order to find myself among my brothers on the day when each faces death.

The same argument applies to liberty defined as participation in the procedures by which governors are chosen. If the latter, by the federative power, have the right of life and death over us, is it not intelligible that we should consider as essential participation, however indirect it may be, in their designation? Whether it is a question of laws or specific commands, the feeling of obeying oneself depends on the relationship that exists between the citizen and the legislator, between the leader and the soldier. Hayek could reject this argument if he had discovered an objective definition of constraint, a definition that would not take into account what happens in the consciousness of individuals in relations. But, since Hayek himself introduces the notion of threat—constraint is confused with the threat of sanctions—the state of consciousness of the one who commands and the one who obeys is part of the very notion of liberty (which is nothing but the negation of constraint).

The threat is necessary when the citizen does not obey spontaneously or does not recognize the legitimacy of power, or the rationality of the order given. The individual will have the feeling of being oppressed, he will be effectively oppressed (subject to constant threats) to the extent that he does not recognize the State, or the regime, or the governors as legitimate.

Hayek's aim was to philosophically found a theory of liberty, which would justify the reduction to a minimum of state intervention in the private sphere, the maximization of this sphere itself. To achieve this goal, he sought an objective definition of constraint (becoming the instrument of another) and decreed that there existed a radical opposition between the general law (comparable to a law of nature) and the specific command. But this strictly objective definition is impossible, from the very fact that he evokes threat. Now, from the moment when states of consciousness must be taken into consideration, liberty does not depend only on the non-interference of other men in the private sphere. On the other hand, if the law, however general it may be, nonetheless expresses the wills of certain men, if the governors, responsible for the federative power, impose on citizens the consequences of their decisions, then the rule of law remains perhaps an ideal in some respects, but it cannot be fully realized. All power involving a part of government by men, liberty is not adequately defined by the sole reference to the rule of law: the manner in which the holders of this power are chosen and in which it is exercised is felt, in our time, as an integral part of liberty. Rightly or wrongly, men judge themselves free or not free, according to the nationality of those who draft the laws and not only according to the respective part of laws and commands in the management of society.

Perhaps the ultimate reason for what I hold to be the insufficiency of the philosophy elaborated by Hayek in order to found his liberalism lies in his refusal to take into consideration the problem of inner liberty. Hayek who, on so many points, opposes positivist tendencies, who reproaches Kelsen for granting the dignity of law to any system of state norms, has allowed himself to be impressed by a current school of philosophy to the point of believing that the so-called metaphysical controversies about the freedom of the will are meaningless.^[20] Without entering into this metaphysical controversy, let us simply note that Hayek rightly links liberty to responsibility. Only one who can be held responsible for his actions can claim liberty, thus one who is capable of acting rationally:

The assigning of responsibility thus presupposes the capacity on men's part for rational action, and it aims at making them act more rationally than they would otherwise. It presupposes a certain minimum capacity in them for learning and foresight, for being guided by a knowledge of the consequences of their actions.^[21]

It seems to me less easy than Hayek seems to believe to determine which human beings, in fact, meet these requirements. At what age do children cease to be "irresponsible"? From what level of education can a population living under a tribal regime claim to no longer be treated as irresponsible? In other words, within a society, the discrimination between "responsible" and "irresponsible" people is not self-evident. Similarly, is a so-called civilized society authorized not to recognize the rights of liberty to members of a so-called archaic society? Hayek's theory takes for granted, by hypothesis, men who have received the education that will make them worthy of liberty. But concrete politics, at each epoch, includes an educational component: will education be called constraint? At what point does the education necessary for rationality become a way of denying men the right to their own errors? Within collectivities as between tribes or peoples, men have never ceased to impose on each other, by force, threat or prestige, systems of values or ideas. Hayek rightly writes, somewhere, that "a free society will function successfully only if the individuals are in some measure guided by common values".^[22] He sees in this the explanation of the fact that philosophers have sometimes defined liberty as "action conforming to moral laws". Hayek is mistaken, it seems to me, in explaining thus the equivalence, established by many philosophers, between morality (or rationality, or universality) and liberty. It suffices to oppose passions and reflections, or animality and consciousness for liberty (inner) to appear as the term of the effort by which the human animal accedes to humanity.

It is true that defining liberty by the morality of conduct is dangerous: in the name of the requirements of education, one who claims to be invested with a mission will seek to constrain those who think differently from him. But the danger also exists on the other side. No collectivity has been able to accede to existence and consciousness, that is to say to the respect of common values, without an education that was often a bringing into line. The ideal of a society in which each would choose his gods or his values cannot spread before individuals are educated to collective life. Hayek's philosophy assumes, by definition, the results that the philosophers of the past considered as the primary objects of political action. In order to leave to each a private sphere of decision and choice, it is still necessary that all or most want to live together and recognize the same system of ideas as true, the same formula of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free, it must be.

III

Hayek, as we know, is an economist by training. The distinction between liberty and coercion, which serves as the foundation of his philosophy, originates from a reflection on economic conduct. The economic subject, left to himself, freely uses, that is to say by choosing his goals and his means, the resources at his disposal. On the other hand, subject to a plan, individuals are nothing more than the cogs of a mechanism, the instruments of the "planners". Starting from a similar analysis, Mr. Jacques Rueff had established, for his part, a distinction between two modes of action of the State.^[23] Constraint, he said, always consists in modifying the desirability or undesirability of an act by modifying its consequences:

The intervention of a constraining authority, by modifying, by way of additional desirability or undesirability, the effective consequences of the acts likely to be accomplished, leads the constrained person to freely will the acts that the constraining authority chooses for her.^[24]

Thus, writes Mr. Rueff, "the governed man is always in his own counsel, he remains a free man." And similarly, "Though the coercee still chooses, the alternatives are determined for him by the coercer so that he will choose what the coercer wants".^[25]

Constraint, that is to say the modification by sanctions (punishments and rewards) of individual preferences, is therefore inseparable from government in policed societies, but this constraint, in relation to the rights possessed by individual owners, can be exercised in two ways:

Either the government in no way affects the mastery of rights holders over the domain that is not withdrawn from them. Their field of sovereignty is reduced by the content of the rights transferred to the government, but as it subsists after the tax levy, it remains subject to the sole will of the owner. The latter therefore remains entirely free within the domain possessed. It is for this reason that the corresponding government regime is qualified as liberal. The second method does not modify the delimitation of individual fields of sovereignty, but it imposes on the holder of property rights to will, for certain of his rights, the content and use necessary for the accomplishment of the governmental mission.^[26]

This is how the government proceeds when it prohibits the owner of a field from sowing in it such a product whose harvest is surplus.

Hayek and Rueff both take individuals acting as conceived by economic science. Each chooses and remains, in all circumstances, in his own counsel. But, remaining at the level of sociological theory, Mr. Rueff first distinguishes two methods of government, liberal and authoritarian, then two ideal types of society, individualist and communist, according to whether the governmental power fully respects the rights of owners or, on the contrary, denies them any right of appropriation. Preferring the liberal method and the individualist society, Mr. Rueff admits the necessity of certain recourses to the authoritarian method and resigns himself to the enlargement of the functions of the State provided that inflation does not multiply false rights and sow disorder. In other words, he draws from his analysis an indictment against inflation even more than against the authoritarian method.

Hayek wanted to move from coercion—modification of the desirability of acts by sanctions—to a philosophy of liberty through the intermediary of the generality of laws. These prohibit, under penalty of punishment, such and such conducts, but they leave a margin of choice. They constitute the equivalent of natural laws to which men must adapt, but they do not encroach on the sphere of individual decision. This argumentation is vulnerable to two objections: there is no universally valid delimitation of the private sphere. Hayek rightly recognizes, against J. S. Mill, that there is no individual act that is not likely to affect others. On the other hand, individuals may have the feeling of being oppressed and effectively be so, according to Hayek's definition, by general laws.

On the level of a theory of the good society, Hayek is not wrong to insist on two ideas, in my eyes as in his fundamental: liberty is first negative, non-constraint, preservation of a private sphere; the more the orders of power are expressed in depersonalized rules, the more liberty has a chance of being preserved. But these two ideas are sufficient neither to constitute a philosophy of liberty nor even, in our time, to specify the criteria of a free society.

Hayek insists, at the outset, on the necessity of a rigorous discrimination between liberty (non-coercion) and other notions such as self-government, democracy, power, status. It is good, indeed, not to confuse concepts: participation in the political process, or self-government, although it is often considered as an element of liberty, must be separated from it. Similarly, democracy, whether defined in the manner of Hayek by the government of the majority or by the organization of a peaceful rivalry for the exercise of power, is perhaps favorable to liberty (it is, in general, favorable to it), it is not confused with it. That an unskilled worker, who has nothing to sell but his labor power, has no power, in other words that he cannot satisfy his desires, is indisputable, he is not therefore an instrument of others: the tramp can enjoy liberty. Finally, if the members of a minority claim equality against a majority that treats them as inferiors—either individual equality within the existing community, like the Negroes of the United States, or collective equality through the constitution of an independent community—this claim is certainly legitimate but it is not a claim of liberty.^[27]

But, if one has gone to the end of this reduction, one will be ill-advised subsequently to be surprised that this sort of liberty has been rare throughout history and that even today most men do not subordinate all their aspirations to it and do not hold it as a unique or supreme criterion of the social order.

It is clear, indeed, that the feeling of liberty will not be proportional to the effective liberty, measured according to the adopted definition. The proletarians observed by Marx, whatever the legislation, could not experience any feeling of liberty because they were deprived of the minimum of power without which the right to choose ends and means is purely illusory. For the mass of Muslims in Algeria, the liberty assured to them by French law weighed less heavily than the humiliation provoked by discrimination. At each epoch, in each society, the feeling of liberty depends, in priority, on a circumstance. Perhaps it even depends on the elimination of a certain form of oppression, experienced as intolerable. The requirement of a private sphere may constitute the essential content of the claim of liberty. But this case has been rare in history: men have protested against the violence done to their beliefs or their customs by the victors, against the violence done to their faith by the inquisitors, against the violence done to their dignity by masters who treat them as slaves or sub-humans, against the misery inflicted on them by men or fortune.

Even today, as much as it is legitimate to consider the respect and enlargement of this sphere as one of the goals, eventually the primary goal of the social order, so much is it unacceptable to refer to this unique criterion to judge all current societies. Perhaps one is wrong to use the same word to express liberation in relation to the police and liberation in relation to hunger. But one is not wrong to maintain that, neither in theory nor in practice, is it good to relate everything to a single objective. Men sacrifice part of their private sphere to be governed by brothers of race, language or religion, to be treated as equals, to give themselves a homeland, or even in the hope of escaping from misery.

At this point, it is true, Hayek would object that he has not justified liberty as such, as a final value, that he has, on the contrary, justified it pragmatically, by its fruits. Should we therefore accept on the economic-social level the primacy of liberty as conceived by liberals, primacy that we have not accepted without reservations on the philosophical level? Would the society conforming to the ideal of liberals be not only the best morally but the most effective?

I have always had difficulty, personally, in believing that things are so made that morality and utility fully coincide. I am wary of the ruses of reason as of the virtuosity of economists. I will not refuse my admiration to Hayek's demonstration, but I will reserve my faith. The liberals sometimes tend, like the Marxists, to believe that the order of the world could reconcile our aspirations with reality. This confidence is not without grandeur. "Suffer me to admire it and not imitate it" *.

* I will continue, in a forthcoming issue, the examination of the liberal theory of liberty.

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^[1] From “La définition libérale de la liberté”,Raymond Aron, European Journal of Sociology / Volume 2 / Issue 02 / December 1961, pp 199 - 218, DOI: 10.1017/S0003975600000400, Published online: 28 July 2009. Translation: Claude on 9th April, 2025.

^[2] J. W. N. WATKINS, "Philosophy", Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, published by Arthur Seldon in Agenda for a Free Society, Essays on (London, Hutchinson, 1961)

^[3] Constitution, p. 133.

^[4] Ibid. p. 134.

^[5] Ibid. p. 139.

^[6] Ibid. p. 20.

^[7] Ibid. p. 14.

^[8] Page 143, alluding to military service, Hayek writes: "Though compulsory military service, while it lasts, undoubtedly involves severe coercion, and though a lifelong conscript could not be said ever to be free, a predictable limited period of military service certainly restricts the possibility of shaping one's own life less than would, for instance, a constant threat of arrest, resorted to by an arbitrary power to ensure what it regards as good behavior." This text is interesting because it does not consider the limitation of constraint within military service. It thus implies that the soldier as such undergoes severe constraint. Hayek does not draw the conclusion that certain human and social activities do not involve liberty in the sense in which he has defined this concept.

^[9] Ibid. p. 135

^[10] Ibid. pp. 150-51.

^[11] Ibid. p. 153.

^[12] Ibid. p. 156.

^[13] Ibid. p. 155.

^[14] Ibid. p. 155.

^[15] Ibid. p. 144.

^[16] Ibid. p. 314.

^[17] Ibid. p. 314.

^[18] Ibid. p. 145.

^[19] Ibid. p. 263: I wish to add here my opinion that, until the protection of individual freedom is much more firmly secured that it is now, the creation of a world state probably would be a greater danger to the future of civilization that even war.

^[20] It appears that the assertion that the will is free has as little meaning as its denial and the whole issue is a phantom problem, a dispute about words in which the contestants have not made clear what an affirmative or a negative answer would imply. The debate on the meaningful or non-meaningful character of the traditional debate on the freedom of the will has replaced this latter debate. I do not see this as progress.

^[21] Ibid. p. 76.

^[22] Ibid. p. 80.

^[23] Jacques RUEFF, L'ordre social (Paris, 1945), 2 vol.

^[24] Op. cit. t. II, p. 568.

^[25] Constitution, p. 134.

^[26] RUEFF, op. cit. t. II, p. 607

^[27] One should also refer to Sir Isaiah BERLIN's essay, Two concepts of liberty (Oxford, 1958).

1. Daniel J. Mahoney, 2005. Bertrand de Jouvenel the conservative liberal and the illusions of modernity, ISI Books WIlmIngton, Delaware, at p. 53.