In a remarkable exercise of soft censorship, libertarian professors like Don Boudreaux and Steve Horwitz assure their readers that there is not too much harm in omitting perusal of the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty – The Political Order of a Free Society.
Apparently, they are disturbed by the idea that a free society might actually feature a political order. Admittedly, the constitutional arrangement proposed by Hayek in that volume is clearly imperfect not least in that it cannot ensure that a regime of freedom will remain incontestable in perpetuity.
However, why should a liberal regime fare any differently from other regimes? In fact, should one not expect that of all regimes a liberal one - offering scope to pluralistic differences of opinion - ought to be especially contestable and hence transient, that is: prone to development and forced to prove itself vis-à-vis competing political forces and if need be make a comeback from political subordination?
It seems to me that lurking behind the above insinuations is some kind of crypto-anarchism which is all too typical of today’s more radical variants of liberalism (in the European sense of the word, of course). Reluctant to state it expressly, to all intents and purposes the adherents of this view consider politics and the state incompatible with freedom.
In this reading, liberalism is confined to denouncing the state and to decrying politics as a pre-stage of government, the organisation that translates politics into manifest policies.
See also Politically Correct Nourishment - Too Much and Too Little Economics and In the China Shop.
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