From the perspective of 2007 it is hard to put oneself in the frame of mind which dominated intellectual life in Britain and much of Europe sixty years ago, particularly over the question of socialism and state planning. Most intellectuals seemed to take socialism for granted. Many were or had been communists; many others were fellow travelers, and many of those who were not were, in Lenin's odious terms, “useful idiots.” We in the west were, after all, allies of Soviet communism in the fight against Nazism and fascism, Stalin was familiarly known as “Uncle Joe,” and in the British armed forces education officers were vigorously promoting the virtues of leftist approaches to postwar reconstruction. The Spanish Civil War, only a few years earlier, had rallied many European intellectuals to the republican cause, and in Britain at least one would have been hard put to find a voice favoring the nationalists outside the small and supposedly benighted ranks of right-wing Catholicism.

We will leave aside the intriguing question as to what might have been the future of postwar Europe had the communists won in Spain. (With the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1938, had Spain gone communist, would there even have been a postwar Europe remotely analogous to the one which actually arose? And even if there had been, would a communist regime in Spain have confined its influence and activity to the Iberian peninsula?) In 1945, such questions could hardly have been raised at all, and even in 2007, this chapter of counterfactual history might be too hot a potato to handle, and would in any case take us too far from our theme.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I provide a constructive account of F.A. Hayek's views on justice. Hayek does not have a thoroughly developed and persuasive theory of justice. (Who does?) Nevertheless, I hope to show that Hayek has interesting and illuminating things to say about justice - especially about the justification of the rules of just conduct - and that his views about justice play a more central role in his evolved teaching than has generally been recognized. The rules of just conduct are essentially the fundamental norms compliance with which generates peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial coordination in large-scale pluralistic societies in which (almost) every individual comes into contact with and interacts with many individuals who are unlike himself in circumstances, knowledge, skills, preferences, and personal codes of value. Although the particular articulation of these norms will vary with time and place, they are essentially general prohibitions against trespass on persons and their liberty and property and against violations of persons' contractual rights. I shall maintain that Hayek rejects anything that can appropriately be called a utilitarian vindication of these norms and proposes an alternative teleological (but non-utilitarian) justification for rules of just conduct. I do not claim that everything that Hayek says about justice and the rules of just conduct fits into the specific account that I shall offer.

F. A. Hayek is perhaps best known for his opposition to socialism. His most famous work is undoubtedly The Road to Serfdom ([1944] 1962) and the last work he published, The Fatal Conceit (1988), was actually conceived of in the context of attempting to arrange a worldwide debate between advocates of socialism and advocates of capitalism. His founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 was an attempt to align the opponents of socialism in the intellectual, political, and business worlds so they could form an effective intellectual bulwark against the rising tide of socialism in the democratic west. He directed his argument against the “hot” socialism of Marxism as well as the “cold” socialism of the social democratic welfare state in the post-Second World War era.

The fact that Hayek was a critic of government command and control over the economy is well known among scholars and intellectuals. Socialism lacked incentives and presented the central planning authority with too complicated a task. As a result socialism was too bureaucratic and cumbersome to operate in an economically efficient manner. Moreover, it is also known that Hayek postulated that the very worst elements within government will tend to take advantage of the situation to rise to power, and thus not only would socialism suffer from a “knowledge problem” but also from an “abuse of power problem.”

Since The Road to Serfdom Hayek has been known primarily as a philosopher of freedom. He published ideas about money and macroeconomic policy (for example, his advocacy of the “denationalization” of money) but, though this work may have influenced politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it was never taken seriously by economists. By the 1970s he was, in the minds of most economists, at best a political philosopher in a world where economics had become highly technical, and at worst an ideologue. Either way, economists did not consider him someone to be taken seriously. Before the Second World War, on the other hand, Hayek was generally accepted, even by those who did not agree with him, as an economist of the first rank, undertaking research in business-cycle theory that demanded their attention. In his controversy with Keynes in 1930-31, Hayek, in a sense, stood on a par with Keynes (in so far as the newly arrived enfant terrible could be on a par with an established authority): they offered visions of capitalism and how to remedy its macroeconomic problems that vied for attention at a time when these were more pressing than at almost any other time in history.

There are two elements of Hayek's background that justify our considering him an Austrian economist: first, that he was raised and went to university in Vienna in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and second, that when he finally decided on economics as his field of study, he was trained within the Austrian tradition in economics.

Hayek spent about a third of his life in Austria, mostly in his early days. When he was thirty-two he moved to England, where he would live for nearly twenty years. (He would later say that it was the place he felt most at home, both intellectually and emotionally.) From 1950 through 1962 he lived in the United States, and then moved to Freiburg, Germany, where (aside from a five-year period in Salzburg, Austria - an altogether depressing time for him, both emotionally and intellectually) he would spend the rest of his life. So the first place to look for Hayek as a distinctly Austrian figure is at the formative early period. Accordingly, I will discuss his family background, his early schooling, and his university days in Vienna. Within economics, of course, the adjective “Austrian” also signifies a specific school of thought. Once he had decided that he would become an economist, Hayek received training that would make him very much a product of that school. So a second part of the story is to examine what being trained as an Austrian economist might mean.

Although Friedrich Hayek received the greatest recognition for his work in economics, he wrote several books on political theory and jurisprudence (as well as other philosophical areas). His writings on law and the philosophy of law have been widely discussed in the last decade or so, and represent a crucial contribution to this area of philosophy. Although Hayek's degree was not in philosophy, his writings are clearly philosophical. Inasmuch as he writes about the law in a philosophical way, asking justificatory, methodological, and normative questions about the nature and practice of law and legal systems, he is writing as a philosopher of law.

THESIS VERSUS NOMOS

In his three-volume study Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973, 1976b, 1979), Hayek makes a key distinction between what he calls thesis, the law of legislation, and nomos, the law of liberty. The former is imposed by the sovereign, in what Hayek describes as a top-down, coercive process; the latter is evolved, a spontaneously-emerging (or bottom-up) process. While thesis reflects primarily the interests of the sovereign (or ruling class generally), nomos arises out of human interaction – the many iterations of people seeking more effectively to coordinate their actions and to resolve disputes peaceably. (Some legal historians have argued that Hayek conflates common law and customary law, but this doesn’t undermine the thesis/nomos distinction.) As we shall see, Hayek argues that it is nomos that is critical for liberal political and economic theory.

F. A. Hayek's long-neglected monograph The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952b) has in recent years begun to garner some attention, most of it from economists or political scientists curious to see what bearing that work has on the foundations of Hayek's economics and social and political thought. Some commentators have also noted the book's relevance to contemporary cognitive science, in particular its foreshadowing of connectionism. Yet few have considered its distinctly philosophical significance - either its place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy or the light it might shed on current controversies in the philosophy of mind.

This is by no means surprising, given that Hayek was not a philosopher by trade. He does not frame the issues he discusses in primarily philosophical terms, and he does not apply to those issues the methods a philosopher would. Notwithstanding his being Wittgenstein's cousin (Hayek [1977] 1992) and his friendship with Karl Popper, he appears not to have sought, nor (except from Popper) was he given, the attention of the mainstream analytic philosophical tradition that dominated the three countries - Austria, England, and the United States - in which he did the bulk of his teaching and writing.

Hayek is recognized as the philosopher/economist who championed liberty and opposed socialism. Marx, especially after the experience of bolshevism, is seen as the high priest, if not the god, of socialism and the enemy of liberty. Hayek is thus anti-Marx as he is also anti-Keynes. Yet there are few direct references to Marx in Hayek's writings; and Marxists, for most of the period when Hayek was writing and beyond, have ignored him. (Gamble 1996 is a notable exception.) Democratic socialists or social democrats engaged in the debates about socialist calculation with Hayek much more in the 1930s (Hayek 1935b; Durbin 1985). By the time Hayek wrote his final book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), the Soviet Union was close to collapse and socialism as a doctrine had become beleaguered. Hayek was celebrated as the philosopher who inspired those who subverted the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. But it could be argued that by then Marx had little to do with Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union (Desai 2002).

In the well-known postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek states what he calls “the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such,” which is “that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving . . . The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.” He adds that while the conservative “generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.”

At the time when those words were published - 1960 - they expressed an understandable distrust of European conservative parties, which seemed unable to offer an alternative vision to the collectivism that had prevailed in Europe since the Second World War. Hayek dedicated his book to “the unknown civilisation that is growing in America,” and he showed his impatience with the old elites of Europe, whose principal concern, in Hayek's eyes, was to rescue from the jaws of the socialist machine as many of their privileges as they could, but who had no adequate rival notion as to how we should be governed. It is true that The Road to Serfdom, published toward the end of the war as a warning against the collectivism that had caused it, had been excitedly endorsed by conservatives and proposed as their bible by Winston Churchill.

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) was almost certainly the most consequential thinker of the mainstream political right in the twentieth century. It is just possible that he was the most consequential twentieth-century political thinker, right or left, period. The apparent triumph of global capitalism at the dawn of the twenty-first century owes as much to his influence on policymakers and shapers of public opinion as it does to that of any other intellectual figure. Hayek's semi-popular book The Road to Serfdom (1944) was a key text of the emerging New Right, a movement whose influence ultimately made possible the elections of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Reagan claimed that his thinking on economics was directly influenced by Hayek's writings. Thatcher famously tried once to end debate on Conservative Party policy by slamming a copy of Hayek's more dryly academic tome The Constitution of Liberty (1960) down on the table and exclaiming, “This is what we believe!” Even Winston Churchill, long before the New Right's ascendancy, was moved by an (apparently superficial) reading of The Road to Serfdom to warn that the election of his opponent Clement Attlee in 1945 might result in the institution of a “Gestapo” to enforce Attlee's socialist economic policy. (Many suggested at the time that this rash charge might have cost Churchill the election; Hayek's influence on politicians did not always entail their political success.) A John Rawls or Isaiah Berlin, however much greater was the esteem with which such thinkers were regarded by most of their academic peers, could only envy such direct impact on practical politics.

For Muslims, the Qur'ān is not only a much-recited sacred text; it is 'the reciting' (al-Qur'ān). Specifically, it is God's 'reciting', his verbatim speech, his eternal, uncreated word. As such, it has been the medium par excellence of divine-human encounter for Muslims of all times, places and persuasions. It mediates the presence of God, just as it does his will and blessing. The revelations to Muhammad were from the outset intended to be rehearsed and recited - first by the Prophet who received them, then by his followers. They were given as an audible text, not as 'a writing on parchment' (Q 6:7). The Qur'ān has always been primarily recited, oral scripture and secondarily inscribed, written scripture, and thus its spiritual and aesthetic reception as the most beautiful of all texts has been linked with its orality. Tradition ascribes to the Prophet the dictum: 'You can return to God nothing better than that which came from him, namely the recitation (al-Qur'ān).' Accordingly, every generation of Muslims has scrupulously memorised, recited and transmitted the Qur'ān as scripture, psalter, prayerbook and liturgical text all in one. How Qur'ān recitation has been cultivated and used and what its corresponding aesthetic impact on and among Muslims has been are the central themes of what follows.

In the early spring of 1856, Wilkie Collins completed the novella A Rogue's Life in a pavilion in the grounds of a house in the Champs Elysées in Paris rented by Charles Dickens. At thirty-two he could look back on twelve years of writing which demonstrated an extraordinary range in genre, including four novels (one unpublished), many short fictions, some just republished in his first story collection, After Dark (1856), a drama, a biography, a travel book and assorted journalism. A Rogue's Life, a satirical narrative, written on a sickbed, parodies his own search for a secure niche in the literary world. The Rogue, son of a fashionable doctor, quits medical studies to become 'one of the young buccaneers of British Caricature; cruising about here, there and everywhere, at all my intervals of spare time, for any prize in the shape of a subject which it was possible to pick up' (ch. 2). Confined to a debtors' prison, he produces prints of prison life. Released, he becomes an unsuccessful fashionable portrait painter, until an experienced friend introduces him to the market for forging Old Masters, where demand exceeds supply, and the recent demise of the Rembrandt specialist has left a gap in the market. Evading the legal consequences of his foray into forging Rembrandts, he is briefly the secretary to a provincial literary institution, before descending, again under the guidance of a senior partner, to the forging of currency. Transported to Australia, he finally reinvents himself as a wealthy ex-convict landowner.