F.A. Hayek (r) with Sir Karl Popper (l)
The below excerpt summarises the core findings of Hayek's outstanding research into the conditions of liberty. For a lively personal exposition of these and many other brilliant ideas of the great Austrian libertarian consult The Hayek Interviews - Alive and Influential provided by Guatemala's Universidad Fransisco Marroquín.
Friedrich August Hayek highlights three reasons why the traditional doctrine of liberal constitutionalism has
failed to retain the support of the idealists to whom all the great political movements are due,
and why
the governing beliefs of our time ... have proved irreconcilable with them.
[T]he loss of the belief in a justice independent of personal interest; a consequent use of legislation to authorize coercion, not merely to prevent unjust action but to achieve particular results for specific persons or groups; and the fusion in the same representative assemblies of the task of articulating the rules of just conduct with that of directing government.
Hayek concludes that
the preservation of a society of free men depends on three fundamental insights ...
The first of these is that a self-generating or spontaneous order and an organization are distinct, and that their distinctiveness is related to the two different kinds of rules or laws which prevail in them [i.e. (a) general, abstract rules or laws conforming to the requirements of a spontaneous order, and (b) rules, largely of the type of commands, decrees and specific prescriptions aiming at a directed society, G.T.].
The second is that what today is generally regarded as 'social' or 'distributive' justice has meaning only within the second of these kinds of order, the organization; but that it is meaningless in, and wholly incompatible with, that spontaneous order which Adam Smith called the 'Great Society', and Sir Karl Popper called 'the Open Society'.
The third is that the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions, in which the same representative body lays down the rules of just conduct and directs government, necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system conducted in the service of some coalition of organized interests.
From Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume I, Rules and Order, Chicago, 1983, p. 2
