I

Those who discuss Hayek as a scientific thinker tend to concentrate on his epistemology and methodology. The fierce debate on these issues is unsurprising considering that Hayek drew on manifold sources to produce an epistemology and methodology that was as unorthodox as it was complex. The debate is crucial because Hayek's lasting contribution to economics was, both on his own and on popular accounts, his explication of “dispersed knowledge” and the cognate theory of “spontaneous order.”Footnote ¹⁴

The central dispute is whether Hayek was a scientific or nonscientific thinker. Within the first camp—those who broadly hold that Hayek was scientific—typical views are those of Bruce Caldwell and Viktor Vanberg. Caldwell holds that Hayek affirmed “a modernistic scientific worldview,” while Vanberg considers Hayek's methodology to be “naturalistic subjectivism” and thus “entirely compatible with an empiricist methodology.”Footnote ¹⁵ A fracas emerged within the scientific camp following Terence Hutchinson's argument that there were two Hayeks: the Misesian “Hayek I” who believed in a priori knowledge, and, after “Economics and Knowledge” (1937), the Popperian Hayek who believed that knowledge should be subject to falsification.Footnote ¹⁶ Views on the matter now range from Hayek being neither Misesian nor Popperian, to being part-Misesian and part-Popperian throughout his works.Footnote ¹⁷

It seems to go largely unnoticed, however, that Hayek's position was that “the difference between the views which Professor Mises has long held and the modern ‘hypothetico-deductive’ interpretation of theoretical science (e.g., as stated by Karl Popper in 1935) is comparatively small, while both are separated by a wide gulf from the naïve empiricism which has long been dominant.”Footnote ¹⁸ This article holds that Hayek was always Misesian on the most fundamental premise of praxeology: that the “axiom of action” must be accepted a priori as the foundation of all social-scientific knowledge.

Scholars in the “scientific” camp often look to Hayek's ideas on psychology.Footnote ¹⁹ Manfred Streit, a Mont Pèlerin Society member and founder of the F. A. von Hayek Society, set an unfortunate precedent in 1993 by claiming that Hayek “wanted to replace metaphysics with neurophysiology.”Footnote ²⁰ My argument is diametrically opposed to that view. A presentist literature distorts Hayek's view in an attempt to situate him on the frontier of twentieth-century science.Footnote ²¹ Scholars in Streit's wake see Hayek's psychological works as attempts to shore up empiricism. Mistaken claims such as that the young Hayek was “a rigorous follower of what became the ideas of the Vienna Circle” result from a failure to grasp the nineteenth-century German philosophical-psychological debates that Hayek was intervening in, as I show in section II.Footnote ²²

Often focusing on the psychological and cybernetic aspects of his work, a number of scholars consider Hayek to present a mechanistic philosophy (also described as physicalist or monist), or at the very least a naturalism that permits “emergent” relationships, denoting a situation in which purely physical interactions give rise to an entity with properties that are not reducible to its constituent parts.Footnote ²³ However, section III shows that, for Hayek, the “emergent” processes behind the spontaneous orders of mind and economy are distinct and operatively separate from their constituent elements. Mind and economy have lives of their own.

Criticisms of Hayek as mechanistic include conservative thinkers Roger Scruton and Ed Feser. Scruton believed that Hayek places market rationalities above all other spheres and traditions.Footnote ²⁴ Feser, a Catholic apologist, has a deeper understanding of Hayek and argues that he showed great promise as a Catholic metaphysician until he recoiled from affirming the Aristotelian–Scholastic notion of goal-directedness as built into matter, meaning that “his own escape from scientistic prejudice was arguably less than complete.”Footnote ²⁵ This article presents evidence that should redeem Hayek in Feser's eyes, perhaps helping to explain the unholy alliance between “neoliberal” and religious conservative thought.

Mechanistic interpretations of Hayek are also offered by his opponents. For instance, placing him in the context of his ideological–political project, Daniel Stedman Jones stated that Hayek's thought was “based in dry economic processes.”Footnote ²⁶ Most prominently, Philip Mirowski deems Hayek to have been an orthodox economist in his younger years, then as “relatively Mysterian” from the mid-1930s to “sometime after 1945,” but ultimately a peddler of a doctrine of “double truth,” filtering mechanistic themes into economics in his mature writings in order to disguise ideology as science.Footnote ²⁷ Reading Hayek as disingenuous in his extensive use of spiritualistic ideas both before and after the “anti-scientism” writings that characterize the so-called “Mysterian” phase is implausible to my mind, and, considering the consistent infusion of the spiritualistic and the metaphysical throughout his work, the division of his thought into phases is also unhelpful. This article argues that phases help us understand certain shifts in content and approach, but that, with the exception of Hayek's “conventional” economic period spanning the early 1920s to 1936, his works exhibit remarkable continuity with regard to their epistemological cores.

The difficulties faced by those who see Hayek as scientific have been exacerbated by a small but prominent recent literature that highlights the moral and religious dimensions of Hayek's work, thereby deeming him “unscientific.” This interpretation is not entirely new, with an early proponent being James M. Buchanan—friend of Hayek and president of the Mont Pelèrin Society from 1984 to 1986.Footnote ²⁸ Hayek realized, according to Buchanan, that “scientific truth, as such, has little going for it.”Footnote ²⁹ Buchanan saw spirituality as part of the “soul of classical liberalism.” Still, he thought it “useful to separate two persons here, Hayek the social scientist, and Hayek the classical liberal, legal–political–social philosopher.”Footnote ³⁰ In such fashion, interpreters are unable or unwilling to consider Hayek's thought a coherent project.Footnote ³¹

The literature in the “Hayek-is-unscientific” camp is usually presented as a response to Foucault's notion that “economics is a discipline without God.”Footnote ³² From the “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures, it appears that Foucault believed that Hayek and the ordoliberals, rather than focusing on the limits of human rationality, based their arguments on “the rationality of the atomistic behavior of homo œconomicus.”Footnote ³³ In 2019, Jessica Whyte argued that Hayek and other neoliberals put cultural values and the “morals of the market” above economic rationality. Her attention is on human rights discourse, however, and although Hayek's defenses of Catholic institutions are mentioned briefly in the context of Chile, they are described as merely “supports for a liberal market.”Footnote ³⁴ This underplays the extent to which, from at least 1947, Hayek thought science should ally itself with religion, and specifically the Catholic Church. I return to this in the final section. Nonetheless, the persuasiveness of Whyte's argument concerning neoliberal moralism in general, combined with Melinda Cooper's work on neoliberal social conservativism, recently led Wendy Brown to revise her previous “characterization of neoliberalism's world-making rationality focused exclusively on its drive to economize all features of existence.”Footnote ³⁵ But Brown still considers Hayek's “theological critique” to be mounted against “sovereignty” as manifested in “God, the king, or the state.”Footnote ³⁶ This article questions that view.

Hayek's project was not about removing sovereignty from God, the king, or the state, but rather about making God (as the incomprehensible supersystem) sovereign of the universe, humans, and the products of their actions (such as the market), while reinstating the king or the state as the earthly sovereign authority ordained by God. The earthly sovereign's role is to uphold tradition, which, as we will see, is the means through which the supersystem's rules can be glimpsed, and to enforce the “Constitution of Liberty,” which limits the power of its members to interfere with the work of the supersystem.Footnote ³⁷ For reasons of space, this article focuses on the former aspect of the project—making God (the supersystem) sovereign—which, I propose, constitutes the epistemological and ontological foundation of Hayek's project. We must bear in mind that this was closely intertwined with the political–economic aspect of Hayek's work, though this article can only endeavor to briefly illustrate the main areas of overlap and influence in that regard.

The question that is most often asked of Hayek's intertwining of his political–economic and epistemological ideas is to what extent the former occasioned the latter. Naomi Beck explores Hayek's psychological works but concludes that his scientific forays are ultimately a “veneer covering a deeply ideological argument in favor of free market capitalism.”Footnote ³⁸ Hayek's science is attacked as “outdated” and inconsistent with the evolutionary tradition he placed himself in.Footnote ³⁹ Beck's work is typical of successful attempts to question the objective scientific standing of some of the core foundations of “neoliberal” thought by illustrating the highly politicized nature of “neoliberal” economics.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, I contend that critiques that focus on Hayek's moral and theological aspects are more successful when they point to his political activities, reactionary conservativism, problematic political–economic thought, and often repugnant moral views, than when they claim to expose him as unscientific. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that Hayek's main epistemological views underpinning his science were worked out long before his political project. Indeed, Hayek identified himself as a “Fabian socialist” at the time that he wrote his first academic essay—a key psychological and methodological work.Footnote ⁴¹ The second is that the “unscientific” critique overlooks just how idiosyncratic Hayek's notion of “science” was. Once this is explicated, accusing Hayek of being “unscientific” has little bite, because we see that he spent a lifetime opposing “science” in the contemporaneous, “modern” sense. Of course, this does not detract from the fact that there are inconsistencies within Hayek's arguments themselves.Footnote ⁴² My point is that critiquing those arguments for being unscientific upon the then predominant definition of science (at least in the West) does not achieve a great deal. To the contrary, the persuasiveness of Hayek's arguments, to many, may lie precisely in the fact that they were unscientific by prevailing standards, as discussed in the conclusion.

II

Hayek said his studies in psychology as a young man “taught [him] a great deal on the methodology of science,” and that “the basic idea” behind his epistemology had been achieved “in 1920.”Footnote ⁴³ His later “theory of complex phenomena” was a product of his “experience gained in economics applied to [his] original problem.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It is this “basic idea” and “original problem” of his epistemology that concerns us in this section. I offer an alternative history of Hayek's Vienna days, focusing on his noneconomic studies, which are critical in understanding the spiritual and metaphysical features of his science. I show that his epistemological views were strongly opposed to physicalist explanations of consciousness and the empiricism of Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and others who “dominated discussion in Vienna,” with whom Hayek is incorrectly aligned.Footnote ⁴⁵ In fact, whenever Hayek touched upon epistemological issues, he sided with non-positivist neo-Kantians, vitalism, Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, and other schools broadly situated within the Naturphilosophie tradition, opposing the “dogmatic–atomistic” views that he associated with Mach and which strongly informed the logical positivism—especially of proponents of planning in the socialist calculation debates like Otto Neurath—that he so reviled.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Hayek, epistemology should seek answers to the same questions explored by Kant and those in his shadow, hence his statement: “so as far as psychology is concerned, I am really a ghost from the 19th century.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Having traced cerebral nerve fibers for an anatomist in Zurich in 1919–20, Hayek wrote his first academic essay in 1920, Beiträge zur Theorie der Entwicklung des Bewußtseins (Contributions to the Theory of the Development of Consciousness), which ambitiously tackled the mind–body problem. The young Hayek's interest in natural science is well documented. Caldwell's claim that, for Hayek, the “scientific worldview was a bulwark against much that seemed archaic” epitomizes the typical narrative of his formative years.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hayek's psychological treatise was in fact directed against Vienna's “scientific worldview.” In Beiträge, alongside two later elaborations—the lecture “Das Wesen des Geistigen” (The Nature of Mind or The Essence of the Mind/Spirit) (1949), and The Sensory Order (1952, henceforth TSO)—Hayek argued that “one of the basic problems of psychology” was really a philosophical question: “what is the place of mind in the realm of nature?”Footnote ⁴⁹ The other, related question driving his psychological work was more narrowly epistemological: “how do we know when our experiences are true perceptions and when they are mere images?”Footnote ⁵⁰ Even asking the question in that form was a critique of the “all too exclusively empirical approach and of an excessive contempt for ‘speculation’” in psychology.Footnote ⁵¹

In his two later psychological works, Hayek retained the 1920 essay's focus on the Kant- and Naturphilosophie-influenced natural scientists Johannes Müller (1801–58), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), the emergentist (proto-gestalt) psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), William James, and, less favorably, positivist-empiricist physicist and psychologist Ernst Mach.Footnote ⁵² Hayek's debt to Mach has led some interpreters to conclude that he exhibits a “physicist's understanding of the nervous system.”Footnote ⁵³ Mach's psychological discoveries were important to Hayek's notion of the “system of connections,” but agreement with Mach ended there.Footnote ⁵⁴ Beiträge was a critique of Mach's view that psychology was an empirical science studying what it falsely considered to be isolated “simple or pure sensations” that “serve as the building blocks for all consciousness phenomena.”Footnote ⁵⁵ On the first page of Beiträge, Hayek stated—with Mach in the crosshairs—that the work was “in the sharpest opposition to the prevalent ‘dogmatic–atomistic concept of sensations’ and to any concept relying on a primal, clear-cut association of consciousness event and brain process.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Mach's physicalism and monism were “unjustified reductionism.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Hayek did state that Beiträge offered a “general physiological explanation,” but he was clear that it was an explanation that was physiological only because he wanted to build a “speculative” theory from what we know about relatively simple cognitive events.Footnote ⁵⁸ Equating “psychic and physiological phenomena” must be avoided because “science has gone too far in simplifying and isolating phenomena, in the belief that it could safely disregard the multiplicity of ongoing processes and deduce consciousness processes from simple chains of physiological processes.”Footnote ⁵⁹ It is difficult to confirm the extent to which Hayek was also attributing blame to logical positivism, as it was still in its early years in 1920, but he was certainly anticipating logical positivism's use of Mach. Moreover, while in Zurich, Hayek had attended a lecture where the Vienna circle's founder, Moritz Schlick, presented his book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918).Footnote ⁶⁰ Discussing Mach and Schlick, Hayek recalled that “it was actually through them that I became aware positivism was just misleading in the social sciences.”Footnote ⁶¹ In TSO, Hayek traced a line leading from Mach to the Vienna circle, whom he mocked for holding a “metaphysical belief in the ultimate ‘reality’ and constancy of the phenomenal world for which there is little justification.”Footnote ⁶² This was not an indictment of metaphysics, but a comment on the hypocrisy of the Viennese empiricists, whose crusade against metaphysics had the opposite effect. This also explains the meaning of the final sentence of Beiträge, in which Hayek said that Mach “overturned” Kant's “a priori structures of apperception,” but his own work means that “Mach's elements, sensations, may have suffered the same fate.”Footnote ⁶³ If one overturns Kant, and then overturns the overturning of Kant, one may well be back with Kant. I believe this was Hayek's intended meaning. In the printed version of “The Primacy of the Abstract” (1969), which discussed the same psychological issues as Beiträge and TSO, Hayek added a footnote to say that he “did not mention in [his] oral exposition … the obvious relation of all this to Kant's conception of the categories that govern our thinking—which I took rather for granted.”Footnote ⁶⁴ To the extent that Hayek critiqued Kant, it was for putting too much faith in human reason, meaning he was “tinged” with “constructivist rationalism.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Influenced by Gestalt psychology, neo-Kantians, and Bergson, Hayek held that science had forgotten the truth that “the act of becoming conscious includes more, namely a connection with the apprehending subject's entire being.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Since at least the early nineteenth century, Naturphilosophie's Aristotle- and Kant-inspired view of nature as containing an immanent purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) or vis viva (living force) had been contested by those seeking to discredit vital forces as metaphysical speculation and/or to explain them as physical forces. In Beiträge, Hayek made vitalist claims such as that sensory “impressions” only occur “together with impulses stemming from other sources (including the organism's vital processes).”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, Hayek emphasized “that Henri Bergson reached very similar conclusions” to his own, also being a “firm opponent of this atomistic conception.”Footnote ⁶⁸

These views came from Hayek's student group at Vienna, the Geistkreis (Mind Circle).Footnote ⁶⁹ He reminisced, “methodological interests” were “brought by some of my colleagues who went elsewhere for a semester—when people like [Alfred] Schutz and [Felix] Kaufmann went to Freiburg to study under Husserl, while [Herbert] Furth and [Max] Mintz went to Heidelberg for a semester, they brought back philosophical ideas.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Hayek was referring not only to phenomenology but also to the legacies of southwestern neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936).Footnote ⁷¹ It was to these neo-Kantian-inspired friends that Hayek “spoke on psychology” and “at that time expounded to them what became [his] Sensory Order book.”Footnote ⁷² His friend Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) had a strong interest in Bergson's vitalism, and presented his phenomenological sociology to the Geistkreis and Mises Kreis throughout Hayek's years in Vienna.Footnote ⁷³ The importance of the Hayek–Schutz relationship is expanded upon in section IV, but it suffices to note here that Hayek's mind was steeped in the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, and not simply positivist psychology or Austrian-school economics.

In Beiträge, then, we see the psychological and philosophical roots of Hayek's methodological individualism in his secondhand (later firsthand) knowledge of phenomenology, and his readings of Bergson and neo-Kantians. We also see the roots of his belief in a supersystem determining the basic structure of the universe and our cognitive functioning in his in-depth engagement with post-Kantian philosophical psychology. The latter seems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed in the literature, and understanding it requires explaining how and why Hayek intervened in the nativistisch–empiristisch debate, which rumbled through mid-nineteenth-century post-Kantian life sciences into early twentieth-century psychology.Footnote ⁷⁴

It is understandable that scholars have not dived into the nativistisch–empiristisch debate, as it involved a dense discussion of physiological optics. The real stakes, however, were how we should understand the origins and role of innate brain structures. Helmholtz's empiristisch position stated that little is “given” to humans except a brain functioning according to general principles by which each human interacts with the world and constructs their vision of it.Footnote ⁷⁵ Leaving aside considerable debate, this view was similar to Kant's “form” of space. The nativistisch position, first attributed to Ewald Hering (1834–1918), held that everything in our brains ultimately arose from sensations, and that the capacity to locate objects in space was “native” in the sense that it was acquired phylogenetically from the experience of our ancestors.Footnote ⁷⁶

Hayek sided with Helmholtz—the “greatest of them all”—claiming that his position in the nativistisch–empiristisch debate was “very close to the theory developed here,” and that Hering held an “illegitimate interpretation.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hayek concurred with Helmholtz's notion of “unconscious inference,” but criticized him for eventually supporting the Hering–Mach “conception of a pure core of sensation.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Helmholtz was right to emphasize the brain's unconscious processing but failed to commit fully to the view that such automatic processes were “the sole factors” that determine consciousness.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Hayek, the inexplicability of cognitive processes, and the specific rules by which they operate, meant that there could never be such a thing as a “sensation” that could be isolated and analysed, and therefore that empiricism was a chimera. One reason for scholars failing to see the extent of Hayek's attack on empiricism may be that empiristisch is taken to mean empiricist, though the former refers exclusively to a theory of the psychogenesis of sensory perceptions and the latter is a separate methodological position. Scholars of the debate usually translate empiristisch as “empirist” to distinguish it from methodological empiricism.Footnote ⁸⁰

In fact, Hayek rejected Mach's empiricism along with the Hering–Mach theory that experiential knowledge is transmitted to subsequent generations.Footnote ⁸¹ Hayek denied that “morphological structure is transmitted by the germ cell from generation to generation,” but rather held that our mind's “fundamental ever reasserted makeup is a function of the regularities of nature,” while each “specific elaboration in individual beings results from the kind of experiences encountered” by them.Footnote ⁸² Arguing that we construct our own sensations within the regularities of nature, Hayek cited Hans Henning, famous for having introduced a classification of odors.Footnote ⁸³ He thought that Henning's work suggested that his own theoretical psychology might be supported by empirical studies. One might be able to employ “professional tasters and samplers of wine, spirits, tobacco,” and see if intensive training of their olfactory abilities might unleash the “human sense of smell,” which in “an earlier state of development” was “probably much greater than that which we use.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Hayek apparently took it upon himself to personally conduct such experiments, admitting in 1978 to having “tried thirty-six different snuffs.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The structure of our sensory organs, for Hayek, was the blueprint upon which each individual could develop what and how they perceived.

Because of the regularities of nature, of which our mind is part, there is no “unorganized sensory data,” no Jamesian “blooming buzzing confusion.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Our minds are purposive wholes that result from and operate within natural laws. This was, I hold, the core of Hayek's later theory of a complex supersystem that determines the rules by which our minds operate but that also makes free will possible. This theory would come to inform Hayek's views on political economy because, in both the mind and the economy, freedom came from structure, and not vice versa.

III

Almost exactly a year after the publication of The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek was trying to “elaborate the psychological implications of [his] Scientism articles,” referring to the 1942–4 works that began by stating that “we spontaneously perceive” through “pre-conscious learning,” and concluded with a discussion of “spontaneous social formations.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The “psychological implications” of the articles seem to refer to Hayek's criticism of the “materialist interpretation of history” on the ground that “if we knew how our present knowledge is conditioned or determined, it would no longer be our present knowledge.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Minds and society are both spontaneous orders that we are incapable of directing to desired ends because we can never be conscious of the processes that determine their functioning.

Nonetheless, Hayek admits that “there may, perhaps, be sense in the statement that to a greatly superior mind our present knowledge would appear as ‘relative’ or conditioned in a certain manner by assignable circumstances.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In fact, the notion of a superior mind-like entity determining the rules by which mind and society operate is unproblematic until “collectivists” reach the false conclusion that “some special theory” can identify these rules.Footnote ⁹⁰ Hayek's return to psychology, then, was an attempt to demonstrate that we can never access many of the “regularities of nature” described in Beiträge. Demonstrating this in the case of the functioning of the mind was not simply intended to show, by analogy, that individuals cannot know the laws of society. Rather, it would show that there is something akin to a “greatly superior mind” responsible for determining the regularities underpinning mind and society. This section describes how Hayek developed these arguments in the late 1940s and the 1950s through an application of Gestalt psychology and systems theory to metaphysical questions.

Regarding the complex processes that Hayek's psychological works describe, references to Gestalt (“organization” or “whole”) psychology have attracted the most scholarly attention because of its supposed influence on Hayek's concept of “emergence”: the idea that when certain relations between elements combine to form a whole (or system), the system possesses properties not exhibited by the constituent parts.Footnote ⁹¹ For the founder of Gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), “there are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements,” termed “holism.”Footnote ⁹² The typical example is that when each individual frame of a movie is flashed up, the frames become something more than the sum of their parts—a moving whole. For Wertheimer and Hayek, this meant conscious phenomena are “isomorphous” with the brain's physical matter—they possess the same basic form, and thus motion, for instance, has an ontological status, actually existing in both the physical world and the mind.Footnote ⁹³

What attracted Hayek to Gestalt theory was not merely its holism, but its claim that mental (consciousness) and neural phenomena could have the same form, while being completely distinct and of different complexities. Paul Lewis argues that Hayek's Gestalt-inspired use of “emergence” is always only a “‘practical’ form of methodological dualism,” a result of Hayek “seeking a more thoroughgoing and internally consistent empiricism.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Lewis overlooks that Hayek only mentions or cites the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, and never, to my knowledge, any member of the Austrian Graz Gestalt school. It was the latter school that held something closer to the view that Lewis attributes to Hayek: there are wholes in perception and sensation, but the properties of the former are founded upon (Grundlage) its constituent sensations.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the view of a major multi-author study of the Gestalt tradition, the Berlin school was distinguished in holding that a gestalt was “a whole in itself, not founded on any more elementary objects.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The gestalt, for those Hayek cites, is autonomous and not supervenient on its elements. It makes far more sense for this to have been Hayek's view considering the conclusion of TSO: “to us mind must remain forever a realm of its own which we can know only through directly experiencing it, but which we shall never be able fully to explain or to ‘reduce’ to something else.”Footnote ⁹⁷ We might add that, in “Primacy of the Abstract,” Hayek said that Helmholtz's ideas, “culminating in the Gestalt school,” stressed “that our perception of the external world is made possible by the mind possessing an organizing capacity; and that what used to be called elementary qualities are its product rather than its material.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In other words, the whole makes the parts. This may seem to be at odds with the methodological individualism that Hayek was defending, but his point was that, while the social has properties that are entirely independent of its constituent individuals, those properties are inaccessible, and thus we must limit ourselves to extrapolating speculatively from methodological individualism (the compositive method) when theorizing the social.

Considering the above, we have less trouble reconciling Hayek's statement that there is a “permanent cleavage between our knowledge of the physical world and our knowledge of mental events” with the statement that “ultimately we shall recognize the mental order as part of the physical order.”Footnote ⁹⁹ While there are rules common to both orders, and “even though we may know that mental events of the kind which we experience can be produced by the same forces which operate in the rest of nature,” the crucial point Hayek was making is that the human brain can never explain its own operation, nor the operation of systems more complex than itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This was because “any apparatus of classification must possess a structure of a higher degree of complexity than is possessed by the objects which it classifies.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

It has been noted that Hayek's theory of complex systems was influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory, but not that Hayek's theory was too metaphysical for the latter. Hayek had approached Bertalanffy (1901–72) in 1947 with “kind words” about his Systemlehre and a ten-year correspondence ensued.Footnote ¹⁰² In 1947, Bertalanffy thanked Hayek for his “observation that the mystical ‘holism concept’ [der mystische “Ganzheitsbegriff”]” in sociology “logically corresponds to a ‘vitalism’ [Vitalismus].”Footnote ¹⁰³ The preceding letter is not in the archives, so we cannot know whether Hayek was criticizing holism and vitalism, or extolling their virtues for systems theory. Either way, Hayek was clearly too vitalist and holist for Bertalanffy, who told Hayek, “the essence of your system is a holistic [ganzheitliche] view of a far more radical nature than in Gestalt theory, in that it does not only refer to linking elementary conditions or sensations, but the latter are deleted entirely.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Hayek's view would get more metaphysical still after his friend Popper prompted him to account for the ground upon which minds communicate with each other. Hayek had sent a draft of TSO to Popper, who drastically misunderstood it. Popper wrote to Hayek saying that he thought Hayek had produced a “causal theory of the mind,” and that he would likely see that such a theory was impossible if he read his “paper on the impossibility of a causal theory of the human language.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Popper's paper explored “functions” of language in an attempt to reveal a shared understanding that intentionality underlies communication.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His “machine argument” used various examples to show that machines are able to express, signal, and describe things. A “wall thermometer” expresses its internal state, signals the temperature, and describes something about the world.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, for Popper, “we do not attribute the responsibility for the description to it; we attribute it to its maker.” The ability to argue is a crucial function of language, because in arguing with another human, we “attribute to them intentions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ “We do not argue with a thermometer” even if it is telling us the incorrect temperature.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It cannot be lying, but merely inaccurate. For Popper, humans attribute intentions to other humans and “we are then ‘first movers,’ or creators of a physical ‘causal chain.’”Footnote ¹¹⁰

In his response to Popper's letter, Hayek stated he had been “for months puzzling about what just now seems to me the most general problem of all … what we can say ‘within a system’ and what we can say ‘about a system’.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Prompted by Popper, he formulated this problem in a new way: if we cannot explain our minds, or systems more complex than them, such as abstract ideas, how is it possible that we can communicate them and even argue over them?Footnote ¹¹² Popper's answer was that we create the shared structures that permit communication.Footnote ¹¹³ Hayek's was that the regularities upon which the intentionality behind communication are perceived are inherent in a mind, but those regularities are also shared by other minds, present in the physical world, and determined by a system more complex than all of the above.

Popper's solution to the “communication problem” is found in his “three-worlds” argument. The core tenet was that world three (products of the human mind) provides the basis upon which humans—whose consciousness constitutes world two (mental phenomena, such as thoughts and decisions)—can communicate with each other and explain world one (physical things).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Since at least 1935 (if not in Beiträge), Hayek had also posited an entity “above” the human, and a physical world below the human. In 1935, he stated that the “position of man” was “midway between natural and social phenomena,” and in 1952 he spoke of humans existing in the middle of “the order of things.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Then, Hayek's view was similar to Popper's because humans were “a cause” of the “complex phenomena” of the social.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By the early 1960s, however, Hayek had diverged from Popper on that point.

For Popper, the more complex system (world three) can only have an effect on the material world when constituent individual minds intervene to make that possible.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But for Hayek, the supersystem can have a causal influence on the physical world independent of our minds, and, most importantly, it provides the basic rules by which our minds, other minds and the physical world operate, including the rule that humans are purposive creatures. Hayek supported Popper's theory that our limited ability to observe phenomena was less important than the conceptual framework with which we observe them, but he went further to say that this conceptual framework was also out of our control, determined instead by higher powers. When Popper concluded his “Language” paper, he said that “the fear of obscurantism (or of being judged an obscurantist) has prevented most anti-obscurantists from saying such things as these.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Hayek's views were considerably more obscurantist and metaphysical than Popper's, but in the period from World War II until “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility” in 1962, he used a “scientific” language due partly to his fear of being judged an obscurantist and partly to his desire to be understood by those he sought to convince, namely those under the sway of scientism.

Hayek's most Popperian work to my mind is “Degrees of Explanation” (1955), likely a reference to Popper's chapter “Degrees of Testability” in Logic of Scientific Discovery.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Primarily employing a mathematical approach, “Degrees of Explanation” argued that the scientist must be metaphysical about complex phenomena considering “the existing state of observational technique.”Footnote ¹²⁰ From this, one sees why this paper has contributed to the inaccurate view that Hayek thought the three realms he was describing (less complex, mind, and more complex) were merely distinguished by degree of complexity, rather than by qualitative or ontological differences. However, even in “Degrees of Explanation” Hayek made clear that there was a qualitative divide resulting from our position in the middle of a universe of complex systems. Drawing on Popper's hypothetico-deductive philosophy of science, Hayek claimed that we inevitably reach a point where our “imagination” can tread no further, and that then “no systematic testing will help us.”Footnote ¹²¹ There will always be a “cleavage” between the explicable and the necessarily inexplicable because of our inability to think about complex phenomena other than simply conceiving of their existence. Hayek might have stopped there and employed an Anselm–Descartes ontological argument for the existence of a supersystem. But his purpose was to defend his metaphysical science, not to be a sort of undercover theologian. He found the defense he needed in set theory.

In “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility,” Hayek referred the reader to Georg Cantor (1845–1918) for the “proof” that he did “not feel competent to attempt.”Footnote ¹²² Cantor's proof that Hayek refers to is that of the “actual infinite” (Aktual-Unendliche) or the “absolute,” which Cantor described as “the completely independent, extraworldly [außerweltlichen] existence, in Deo.”Footnote ¹²³ The proof was immensely controversial because he not only believed that it proved the existence of a Christian God (not a “materialist, positivist, or pantheist” one), but that God him-/herself had communicated the theory to him.Footnote ¹²⁴ Hayek went on to cite the Ernest Nagel and James Newman book on the Cantor-influenced incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel, which described how the latter theorem proved that no system can prove its own consistency and any explanation of itself will always remain incomplete.Footnote ¹²⁵ The upshot was that we can never “yield formally all arithmetical truths” and, therefore, there will always be true facts about numbers that any one set of mathematical axioms cannot encompass.Footnote ¹²⁶ There will always be a further, hidden “reality” beyond our best (formal) attempts to understand it. Both Cantor and Gödel were invoked by Hayek in order to show that the rules upon which communication, the mind, and the universe operate cannot be grasped by any single system, let alone our minds.

Hayek could feasibly have held that systems increase in complexity ad infinitum. But if we are nested within an infinite number of systems that increase in complexity forever, then we have no reason to believe that the rules common to our system might not be altered drastically by any number of potential changes occurring in higher systems. The argument may have “worked,” but it left humanity in chaos, which certainly did not fit with Hayek's view that our institutions and religions have “learnt” the consistent general rules that are incomprehensible to individuals. Hayek needed to affirm the existence of a supra-conscious and all-encompassing system, a rule giver that gave humans a “position,” “place,” and “meaning” in the world. We know that Hayek was concerned about these issues because in “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility” he stated that for twenty years he had been thinking about the problem of how “we are not to be led into an infinite regress” by the implications of his idea of ever-higher systems determining the rules upon which events occur within them.Footnote ¹²⁷ Hayek's solution was that there must be “a supra-conscious order which cannot be the object of its own representations.”Footnote ¹²⁸ By this, he meant that there must be a system that does not think about itself—not the physical or natural world but something separate that bestows us with a “distinct place” in the “order of things,” and thereby with a “meaning.”

IV

This article has already shown the way in which purposiveness was a persistent feature of Hayek's work since 1920. This section explains why this was so, offering two primary and related reasons: (1) Hayek was always enthralled by and in agreement with vitalism, phenomenology, and praxeology on the a priori existence of a vital force, and (2) Hayek wanted to improve on Mises's argument for praxeology's core belief in innate human purposiveness.

The interested reader can explore the cavernous debates concerning whether Hayek did or did not accept Mises's axiom of action, but here it is only necessary to briefly state my view that he accepted its core premises, but thought they needed stronger justifications. In 1978, Hayek stated, “I was always influenced by Mises's answers, but not fully satisfied by his arguments—it became very largely a thing to improve the argument which I realised led to correct conclusions … so I became anxious to put it in a more effective form.”Footnote ¹²⁹ What appears to many as a volte-face in Hayek's thought in 1936 can just as well be seen as him applying early psychological ideas expressed in Beiträge, and phenomenological ideas from Freiburg, to economic analysis. It was then clear to Hayek that Mises's apriorism about action—that man's constant interaction with the world is inescapable and imperative—must be a “first step” in social science. In TSO, Hayek wrote that “in the study of human action our starting point will always have to be the … direct (‘introspective’) knowledge of mental events.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Regarding “the science of ‘praxeology,’” Hayek thought that “on the main point Professor Mises's lone voice seems to [him] considerably nearer the truth than the commonly accepted views.”Footnote ¹³¹ Hayek accepted the core tenet of praxeology—that choice of action must be considered an a priori truth—but insisted that it occurred within rules set by the supersystem. He did so in consistent opposition to the empiricism of prevailing sciences, both natural and social.

Sometimes, it seemed as if Hayek avoided the problem of accounting for intentionality by explaining it as something that we project onto the world. We have seen that Hayek thought that maintaining the existence (for all we can possibly know) of free will is unavoidable because we cannot ever interpret another human's decisions or utterances without projecting our innate purposiveness onto them. But Hayek also held that we project purposiveness onto nature. In later life, he recalled rushing home after attending one of his first lectures at Vienna, on Aristotle, to tell his father that he wanted to study ethics.Footnote ¹³² His father dutifully purchased him three volumes of Feuerbach, whose work is largely dominated by the notion of “anthropotheism”—that God is a projection of characteristics or features within humans themselves. In Hayek's final work, The Fatal Conceit, he criticized humanity's tendency to envisage a “human-like divinity,” or an “omniscient God,” rather than a more accurate interpretation of the supersystem, which is “far too complex for any of its parts to form an ‘image’ or ‘picture’ of it.”Footnote ¹³³ Like his friend and Chicago schooler Frank Knight, Hayek was interested in the positions of Buddhism and Shintoism, approving of their “profound respect for the existence of other orderly structures in the world, which they admit they cannot fully understand and interpret.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Indeed, in Fatal Conceit, Hayek drew a line back to his earliest work by reaffirming that social science should not be based on the “rationalist requirements” of “what Ernst Mach called the ‘observable and tangible.’”Footnote ¹³⁵

Projection of our inner states onto nature was considered a crucial proxy through which we can glimpse aspects of what occurs inside the black box of our minds. For Hayek, “expressions such as that a thundercloud leans threateningly over us” do not help us understand nature per se.Footnote ¹³⁶ Rather, “that those patterns we read (or project) into nature are all that we know and all that determines our action makes it an essential datum in our efforts to explain the results of human interaction.”Footnote ¹³⁷ What projections of our inner states do, for Hayek, is help us understand the way in which our mind inherently attributes meaning to all manner of things, crucial to the work of the social scientist, who is likened in this passage to “the poet or painter.”Footnote ¹³⁸ This was both Kant's and Mises's view, the former holding that in order to “conduct research” it is “indispensable for us to subject nature to the concept of an intention,” and the latter that the study of human action is always a “projection into the external world of becoming and change.”Footnote ¹³⁹ In “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility,” Hayek also commended “the vitalists’” opposition to “causal explanations of the phenomena of life” because “such explanations do not account for those features by which we intuitively recognize something as living.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ But projection of human purposiveness alone, however, was insufficient as a foundation for praxeology.

A significant influence on Hayek's thinking here was Schutz. Along with many phenomenologists, Schutz considered meaning behind actions crucial. Schutz was as close to Mises as he was to Hayek, and, as Thomas Eberle puts it, “Schutz agreed with Mises that a basic social theory should search for aprioris,” but he thought a prioris should not be founded on “laws and principles, but are to be found on a much more fundamental level, namely in the constitutive features of the lifeworld.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ This was the same turn away from Mises that Hayek took, as seen when Hayek presented a draft of his crucial “Economics and Knowledge” paper in Vienna in 1936, with Schutz as the discussant.Footnote ¹⁴² Schutz's response bears marked resemblance to Hayek's paper published later that year.Footnote ¹⁴³ Likely responding to a question asked in Hayek's draft, Schutz stated, “To whom are such data given? To me, living in my everyday life, the whole environment, as it were.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In Hayek's published paper, “Datum means, of course, something given, but the question which is left open … is to whom the facts are supposed to be given.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For Hayek, Schutz's ideas accounted for what was unique about humans and their “free” choices—it was not their purposive action alone, but the meaning and significance behind them.

Hayek explored transcendental phenomenology, and then philosophical anthropology, throughout his life.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Hayek quoted Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought (Das mythische Denken) in expressing what he considered the “truth” that “action forms the centre from which man undertakes the spiritual organisation [die geistige Organisation] of reality.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In “Rules, Perception and Intelligibility,” Hayek also praised the Catholic-influenced strand of Lebensphilosophie for their work on “action patterns.” For instance, he read and cited F. J. J. Buytendijk—the phenomenological psychologist and philosophical anthropologist who converted to Catholicism through Max Scheler, himself a convert—especially endorsing his “The First Smile of the Child” (“Die Erste Lächeln des Kindes,” 1947), which explored the “secret alliance between animated corporeality and spiritual existence” in order to reveal how spiritual matters such as “significance and meaning” are just as important for understanding human phenomena as psychology or physiology.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Hayek also cited Helmuth Plessner, who extended Scheler's philosophical anthropological project to seek humanity's “metaphysical position or location within the whole of being, the world and God” (albeit without Scheler's explicit Catholicism).Footnote ¹⁴⁹ These Catholic-influenced Lebensphilosophen accounted for the origin of purposiveness and therefore of understanding as an act of “God,” and Hayek, I propose, assigned the same acts to his supersystem.

In contrast, Francesco Di Iorio claims that Hayek considered the supersystem to be the “cause of itself.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Though Hayek did occasionally refer to the supersystem as “self-organizing,” and even once as “self-generating,” he usually put those terms in scare quotes.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Contra Di Iorio, what strikes the reader is that Hayek never seemed to describe the system as being causa sui, but most of the time referred to the supersystem and order as having a vital force that is forever mysterious. Indeed, for all his habitual expressions of scorn for Descartes's rationalism, Hayek admitted that his resolution to represent “the unfathomable will of God as the creator of all purposive phenomena” was to be preferred to the beliefs of “his successors,” for whom “it certainly became a human will.”Footnote ¹⁵² It was not simply that believing in God was the lesser philosophical evil, but that the idea of a finite system providing humanity with a unique meaning and a fixed position in the order of things was important in explaining why we should believe in free will but also in preordained restrictions on our behavior.

For Hayek, while there are “general principles” that may mean that human actions are “causally determined,” we nonetheless have purposiveness within those bounds.Footnote ¹⁵³ Explicitly aligning his view with Bergson—whose Time and Free Will had caused a stir in the germanophone world after translation in 1911—Hayek concluded all three of his major psychological works by stating that his findings supported the fact that free will must necessarily be considered an a priori truth. The concluding chapter of TSO concerned the “age-old controversy about the ‘freedom of the will.’” Hayek's position was that “even though we may know the general principle by which all human action is causally determined by physical processes … To us human decisions must always appear as the result of the whole of a human personality.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ It was in this way that Bergson helped Hayek formulate arguments to defend the axiom of action as a fundamental epistemological truth.

Hayek's view bore resemblance to Augustine's compatibilism, according to which “wills are themselves included in the order of causes which is certain to God.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Indeed, Hayek looked to Augustine when explaining the history of the concept of “spontaneous order,” citing both an English and a German edition of his dialogue “Ordo.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Moreover, in his biography of his distant cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hayek emphasized that Confessions was Wittgenstein's favorite book, with Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief a close second.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The biography is a fascinating insight into Hayek's own thought, as he tried to claim probably the most famous philosopher in the Western world as a proponent of a more spiritualistic form of science.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ After drawing a parallel between himself and Wittgenstein's “experimental work in the Psychological Laboratory,” as well as describing what a mesmerizing man he was for the logical empiricists and men of science—describing, for instance, Schlick's “pilgrimage” to see Wittgenstein—Hayek offered abundant evidence of Wittgenstein's spirituality.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Overcoming his “spiritual loneliness” once in Cambridge, Wittgenstein was, for Hayek, “not a dogmatic believer, yet, in a sense a prof/o/undly [sic] religious man.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

V

This section briefly outlines why Hayek's belief in his spiritualistic science is an important discovery for scholars of neoliberalism and contemporary Western politics more widely. Despite repudiating characterizations of himself as a proponent of “neoliberalism” or even “capitalism,” Hayek remains perhaps the most influential “neoliberal” thinker.Footnote ¹⁶¹ It is therefore significant that his project was not about removing sovereignty from God, the Church, or the state, as Brown holds, but about reinstating those institutions as the guardian of tradition in the face of any group who claims to offer a vision of a new society.Footnote ¹⁶² Yet the aporia one is led into is that Hayek's Mont Pèlerin Society was an insurgency group whose purpose was to counter the considerably more popular and arguably more “evolutionary” socialist or state socialist traditions.

The way out of this aporia, I propose, is found in the fact that Hayek realized, in the 1940s, that science was ideological in that it was a result of faith in a liberal creed. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote that in a socialist or fascist country there must be “a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants,” but, crucially, the planner must make “everybody believe in those ends.”Footnote ¹⁶³ Hayek soon realized that liberalism could also be criticized because it was a creed, and, worse, it was a creed that people often did not even have to be persuaded to follow, but did so “merely out of tradition.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ He knew he would have to show that liberalism, though an ideology, was nonetheless a prerequisite for more accurate scientific work, that would also serve desirable ends.

This article helps us understand why Hayek saw “a close connection between the ideals of science and the ideals of personal liberty,” and why he established a close friendship with Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), an early Mont Pèlerin member, Catholic convert, and founder of the Society for Freedom in Science.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ For Polanyi, the “problem” of man needing a purpose in science “cannot be attained on secular grounds alone.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Hayek and Polanyi were in frequent correspondence about their projects to reunite science with spiritual concepts of reality and meaning.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Polanyi thought “Christian worship” most profitable for the scientist because of its “assumption that the world has some meaning,” and its “obsession with a problem known to be insolvable, which yet follows, against reason, unswervingly, the heuristic command: ‘Look at the unknown!’”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This corresponds closely to Hayek's science extrapolated above, which stresses that the supersystem provides purposiveness and meaning, as well as an actually existing reality to investigate. To theorize the “supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore,” for Hayek and Polanyi alike, was “our calling.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Hayek returned to his earlier work in psychology and explored “natural”-scientific disciplines after the war not to disguise ideology as science, but to show that science was ideological. One despairs upon reading Hayek's defenders claiming that he thought “positive claims must be kept separate from normative ones.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In fact, in his inaugural lecture for the chair in political economy at Freiburg, Hayek said that Weber went “too far” with the fact/value distinction, which “unfortunately has often produced a fear of expressing any value judgments.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ In truth, “the very selection of our problems for scientific examination implies valuations.” We can now make sense of why Hayek praised Marx and Pigou for their philosophical and theological work.Footnote ¹⁷² Hayek had respect for “socialists” who recognized that ideology was inherent in science, seeing considerably more danger in “disillusioned socialists” who had “been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it.”Footnote ¹⁷³ These socialists “concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one.” Ideology, for Hayek, was often more rational and scientific than the prevailing positivist science. There is thus an irony when his defenders claim to take a neutral, “scientific” approach in their economics, when, to Hayek's own mind, such an approach would be potentially more damaging for society than the work of his socialist critics.

Indeed, in his “Opening Address” to the Mont Pèlerin Society's founding conference, with Polanyi in attendance, Hayek announced that the core topics of discussion would be the design of the “complete programme of a liberal economic policy,” the “interpretation” of history, and what he thought was an equally important project: healing the “breach between true liberal and religious convictions.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Hayek lamented that the “fierce rationalism” of prevailing science had “driven religious people from the liberal movement,” and he was “specially anxious that the subject of the relation between liberalism and Christianity” be discussed.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ He thought that showing liberalism, religion, and tradition were “scientific” would be the greatest contribution he could make to both science and liberalism.

This was not merely rhetoric. In an interview in the Chilean paper El Mercurio, Hayek recounted meeting Pope John Paul II with eleven other Catholic Nobel laureates to discuss “the reconciliation of science and the Church.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Hayek thought that “there was a lot of hope.” While he was a “globalist,” he also believed in the need for robust moral authority and a firm rule of law, so it is not surprising that he saw virtue in the transnational spiritual authority of Pope and Church. Section I showed that explaining how such religious sympathies fitted with his science and economics has posed difficulties for scholars. The answer I have provided is that Hayek did not think science was separate from metaphysical or spiritual concerns.