Boring with a sledgehammer

The great sociologist Max Weber once defined politics as ‘the art of a strong and slow boring through hard boards, requiring both passion and perspective.’ We can only wonder what Weber would have made of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who last weekend ventured into the sphere of political philosophy with a renewed attack on the liberal thinker Friedrich Hayek. While it is hard to deny the passion behind Rudd’s views, the perspective of his critique of the Nobel Prize winning economist is far from clear.

The prime minister claimed that the old dichotomy of left and right was no longer apt in the twenty-first century or, in his own words, that there was no longer a need to choose between Hayek and Leonid Brezhnev. It’s quite a remarkable way to put it—as if the choice between a Soviet leader and a liberal economist should be a tough one for a democratic prime minister. But in any case, if Rudd refuses to make this choice, history has already made it for him. Where Soviet-style communism has failed dismally, Hayekian ideas keep inspiring economists and politicians around the globe.

That aside, posing left against right had not even been appropriate in the twentieth century. Who in his right mind would describe Hitler as the ideological opposite of Stalin, or Mao the counterpart of Mussolini? The real dividing line in political thought has been between collectivists on the one hand and defenders of individual liberty on the other. While Hayek undoubtedly belonged to the latter camp, this did not make him ‘right’ or ‘left.’ Hayek was a liberal in the classical meaning of the word. But the liberal tradition of Locke, Smith, and Hayek never fitted into the politicians’ simplistic left–right view of the world. Perhaps the prime minister’s remarks reveal more about his own thinking than about Hayek’s.

Unfortunately, the prime minister’s errors do not end there. His characterisation of Hayek’s philosophy was equally off the mark. In his view, Hayek was a radical ideologue of the free and unfettered market, blind to everything else but the individual. Yet a cursory reading of Hayek’s numerous books and essays should have prevented him from making such a claim.

Hayek recognised that individualism alone is not enough to understand the world. Nothing in Hayek’s writings suggests that there was no place for friendship, families, or good neighbourhood in his theory. But that is what the prime minister seems to believe. In differentiating himself from Hayek, Rudd explicitly stated that a compassionate society must act through the state. Yet he would probably be surprised that Hayek did not even object to some basic redistribution. In The Road to Serfdom, he wrote, ‘There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing … can be assured to everybody.’ The real difference between Hayek and Rudd, then, is one of emphasis and scope, not of principle.

Rudd also seems to think that his insight that markets can fail makes him stand out from Hayek. Yet Hayek, the great theorist of limited knowledge, would have been the first to concede that markets can and do fail. At the same time, he would have warned that market failure alone does not give the state licence to correct it. There is a possibility that state intervention can make matters worse, and that accepting some market imperfections may be the better option. The possibility of state failure, though, is strangely absent from Rudd’s ideas—as if he thought only markets could fail, and infallible politicians like him were then tasked with curing the disease. Yet it is obvious that an alleged market failure (say, climate change) could lead to an even more severe state failure (a costly emissions trading scheme, for example).

Finally, Rudd’s view of the state as the sole healer of society’s ills is out of touch with political thinking in other parts of the world. One need not even go as far as former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt—a Social Democrat—who once congratulated Hayek by proclaiming ‘We’re all Hayekians now.’ Take the leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron. While Cameron can hardly be called a full-blown free-market radical, he nevertheless understands that the relationship between the individual, society, and the state is more complicated than Rudd likes to see. ‘There is such a thing as society,’ Cameron put it, ‘it’s just not the same as the state.’ Probably without even realising it, he had expressed a very Hayekian view—that through voluntary and charitable institutions the free society can often solve problems much better than the state.

Max Weber was right. Good politics is a strong and slow boring through hard boards. Had the prime minister kept this in mind, he would not have used a sledgehammer of polemics to deal with Hayek’s economic philosophy.

Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich is the chief economist at Policy Exchange (UK), and will be joining the Centre for Independent Studies as a research fellow later this year.