BOOKS IN REVIEW
Last of the Whigs learned in its commentary, and usefully pro-
THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY. By F. A.
HAYEs. University of Chicago Press. 570
pp. $7.50.
Reviewed by IRVING KRISTOL
IT IS generally forgotten that Edmund
Burke and Adam Smith were both Whigs.
In our textbooks of political theory, they
are segregated from, and opposed to, one
another: the romantic exponent of tradi-
tion, authority, and the organic community,
as against the individualist liberal who be-
lieved in laisser-faire. The antithesis is ana-
chronistic: it reflects the later dissolution of
Whiggery into "conservative" and "liberal"
ideologies. In their own day, despite their
markedly different casts of mind, Burke and
Smith were united in affirming the two ma-
jor propositions of the original Whig syn-
thesis: (1) liberty is the most precious of
political goods, and (2) civilization is the
result of human action but not of human
design. Burke never called himself a "con-
servative," and Smith never used the phrase
laisser-faire.
Professor Friederich Hayek, who is usu-
ally thought of as a conservative and laisser-
fairist, can be more accurately regarded
(and clearly defines himself) as the last sur-
viving Whig. As is generally the case, the last
of the line is not its most perfect or most
vigorous representative. Professor Hayek's
Whiggery has too much the shrillness of
doctrine, too little the calm assuredness of a
living faith. In political theory, it is much
easier to be right than to be relevant; and
the greatest temptation for the critic is to
rest in self-righteousness. This temptation
Professor Hayek is not immune to; he too
often gives the impression that he considers
reality to be one immense deviation from
true doctrine. Nevertheless, The Constitu-
tion of Liberty is a book that is noble in its
proportions, often profound in its insight,
353
vocative in its argument.
Professor Hayek may be doctrinaire, but
he is not a dogmatist. The particular charm
of this volume is not that he attempts to an-
swer the objections of his critics (he doesn't,
really), but that he takes it upon himself to
state the limitations inherent in his own
position. It is, intellectually, that rare thing:
a modest book. Unlike certain other think-
ers, Professor Hayek does not claim that a
reliance on free enterprise will deliver unto
us all the goods of this world and the next.
He does not assert that, if we all submit our-
selves to the rigors of a free market economy,
we shall in the end get our just desserts. In-
deed he specifically denies it:
"There is perhaps no more poignant
grief than that arising from a sense of how
useful one might have been to one's fellow
men and of one's gifts having been wasted.
That in a free society nobody has a claim
to an opportunity to use his special gifts,
and that, unless he himself finds such op-
portunity, they are likely to be wasted, is
perhaps the gravest reproach directed
against a free system and the source of
the bitterest resentment."
To this reproach, Professor Hayek makes
a twin rejoinder. First, it is by no means
certain that people would be happier if
they knew their condition in life to corre-
spond to their true capacities-life might be
intolerable if one had to assume full respon-
sibility (and blame) for one's fate. Second,
no human being, or class of human beings,
has the ability to make a fair or compre-
hensive judgment of a man's potentialities
-or even to define them.
THIS last point is the crucial one. The Con-
stitution of Liberty is one long (570 pages)
argument from ignorance. "Human reason,"
Professor Hayek insists, "can neither predict
nor deliberately shape its own future. Its
advances consist in finding out where it has
 354 COMMENTARY
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been wrong." Here, too, the influence of
Professor Hayek's vocation as an economist
is visible. For the single premise of all mod-
em economic thought is that philosophical
wisdom (or what used to be considered as
such) is impossible: no one can know better
than a man himself what he most truly
wants, and therefore a market economy is
the most reasonable of economic arrange-
ments. (It is interesting to observe that Pro-
fessor Hayek's "liberal" critics do not openly
reject this premise; they simply deny that the
free market any longer exists, or that it can
be reconstituted.)
Again and again, the book reiterates the
thesis that our ignorance is far greater than
our knowledge; that the more we know,
the more we know we do not know; that
all our actions have unforeseeable conse-
quences; that the senselessness of coercing
men to "build a better world" lies in the
certainty that our children will detest this
world. Professor Hayek no longer insists (as
he once did) that economic planning is im-
possible. He now insists only that it is incom-
patible with a progressive society. We can, by
organizing knowledge and mobilizing men,
achieve fixed goals more effectively than by
encouraging individual initiative and liberty.
But we shall then have made it far more
difficult to discover new goals, new wants,
new knowledge of goals and wants. If we
attempt to make society adequate to our
present knowledge of it, we run the risk of
freezing our knowledge at the point where
it is merely adequate to the present state
of our society.
THIS kind of reasoning will have little ap-
peal to those who are so passionately indig-
nant at the specific inequities (and iniqui-
ties) of the world we live in that they
blindly identify liberty with power-the
power to dominate and revise the status quo.
It is not intended to. Professor Hayek is con-
cerned to establish so firmly the rule of law,
of the self-limiting State as this has been de-
fined by traditional liberalism (and in this
he is liberal rather than Whig), as to render
all government action is guided by prin-
ciples, but it is an ideal that will not be
preserved unless it is itself accepted as an
overriding principle governing all particu-
lar acts of legislation. Where no such
fundamental rule is stubbornly adhered to
as an ultimate ideal about which there
must be no compromise for the sake of
material advantages-as an ideal which,
even though it may have to be tempo-
rarily infringed during a passing emer-
gency, must form the basis of all perma-
nent arrangements-freedom is almost
certain to be destroyed by piecemeal en-
croachments. For in each particular in-
stance it will be possible to promise con-
crete and tangible advantages as the
result of a curtailment of freedom, while
the benefits sacrificed will in their nature
always be unknown and uncertain. If
freedom were not treated as the supreme
principle, the fact that the promises which
a free society has to offer can always be
only chances and not certainties, only op-
portunities and not definite gifts to par-
ticular individuals, would inevitably prove
a fatal weakness and lead to its slow
erosion."
Even for those of us who do believe that
there is much in American life that stands
in need of reformation, who are not per-
suaded that traditional liberalism is the very
epitome of civilization itself, who are as
much worried by the present impact of sci-
entific knowledge as by its hypothetical fu-
ture sterility, such a warning may yet be
worth listening to. Moreover, in his shrewd
analyses of taxation, education, social
security, city planning, and the administra-
tive bureaucracy of the welfare state, Pro-
fessor Hayek makes us realize how thought-
less (literally thoughtless) has been much of
our activity in these fields; how grossly in-
sensitive we have been, in our haste and
enthusiasm, to possibilities excluded and op-
portunities foreclosed. Above all, his book
encourages us to take another look at our
welfare state, which-lacking any general
idea of "welfare"-is coming more and
more to resemble a monstrous pork-barrel.