In an interview on Women and Islam

Interview Extract:

Let’s go on to Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Can you tell me a bit what it’s about?

It’s about why democracy is not just about elections. The meaning of freedom, Hayek says, is negative: his is a negative concept of freedom, not a positive one. It’s not about what government or others should do, it is about freedom from coercion. And that gets complicated when more than one individual, when a multiplicity of individuals, share a society. Who should lead? Who is to govern? What are the criteria? And obviously in Western society there are different ideas about who is to govern and in what way – but the basic themes are liberty, the rule of law, a government that is elected by the people and is for the people. You have the right to have an election and say we don’t want a leader if they screw up. There is a police, a military that is under the constitution. Everything, the whole arrangement, the infrastructure of government, is all about respecting, preserving and probably expanding the freedom of individuals as much as possible.

One of the things that I found really shocking reading Infidel was the chapter about how you came to be circumcised. It wasn’t some horrible stranger who came in and forced you to do it. It was your grandmother who did it, someone in your family who really loved you and cared about you. So what does freedom mean here?

That’s what government should be doing. In this case, its role should be to compel my grandmother to give this tradition up on threat of punishment, to make it unlawful. Just as child labour was made unlawful and so on. All forms of coercion were, in Western society, slowly made unlawful. So this is a step the government has to do where they have to intervene between a child and his parents or grandparents. That’s what Western governments have been doing – but now they are confronted with this new problem of immigrants from Muslim countries, where, within the intimate circle, things are really different because they haven’t been educated in Western society. So in these cases the government is being negligent.

Even in Holland you would say the government is being negligent?

In Holland, in the US, in all Western countries.

They turn a blind eye to what’s going on?

In all of these countries all of these atrocities are illegal, they are banned, and you have several different punishments for them. For instance, for causing bodily harm (because female genital mutilation falls under bodily harm) in the Netherlands, to a child, an individual, you could get a maximum sentence of 15 years. I’m sure you get more than that in the US. But the problem is that it is not enforced, so government is negligent in failing to devise a control system to counter that, to protect children. And the same applies to forced marriages, and honour beatings. For an honour killing the government will say that’s murder and the law will go after the murderer, and the murderer will be put in jail. But the government is again negligent in pursuing all the individuals that are involved in that murder.

But aren’t all these American right-wing books like Hayek’s about weakening government and not having it interfere in private matters?

Hayek later became an American. But he was born in Austria and lived in the UK and then finally came here. It’s quite the opposite. There are two kinds of human rights, classical human rights and the social rights. The disagreement is always on the social and not on the classical. So bodily harm is part of the classical – and there it is the government’s first and foremost task to protect her own citizens from internal and external harm. That’s why you have the police and the military – Hayek is very strong on that. But when it comes to such things as pensions and unemployment, and how much should the government then give, that’s where there is disagreement. If you look at the list of harmful practices against women, it’s all bodily harm and it’s about primary freedom. And then it becomes about secondary freedom, because girls are pulled out of school, they don’t get educated, that sort of thing. In the West there is no disagreement between conservatives and liberals on the primary tasks.

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In an interview on Traditional and Liberal Conservatism

Interview Extract:

Let’s move on to Hayek. You put The Constitution of Liberty on here. I’d be interested as to why you chose this book, with its famous postscript, ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative’.

So modern postwar conservatism is about more than just traditionalist social values. It’s also about economic libertarianism and limited government, free markets, a more sceptical view of the extent to which government can improve life. This kind of strange, unlikely marriage between classical liberalism’s economic views and social conservatism was put together as much as anybody by Bill Buckley and the National Review. It was dubbed ‘fusionism’ by one of the National Review’s early writers, Frank Meyer. The idea was that liberty and tradition went together. Instead of the state providing order, tradition did. You needed liberty for virtue to be able to assert itself because virtue is not really virtue unless it is freely chosen. So you have this idea of libertarian means for conservative ends. Certainly you see contemporary libertarians thinking of politicians like Goldwater and Reagan as a lot better than what’s on offer today, as the kind of politicians that they can summon up enthusiasm for. And you have libertarian heroes like Milton Friedman and Hayek having their influence over the world by being adopted by conservative politicians like Reagan and Thatcher. 

Which Hayek might have perceived as a bit ironic given that he planted himself firmly in the direction of an open-ended, change-oriented, dynamic kind of system and very much against anything that relied on authority. 

What I wanted to focus on was not so much the libertarian stamp that has been put on conservatism as the conservative stamp that has been put on libertarianism by this alliance. I think this conservative alliance arose because of 20th-century liberalism’s infatuation with, and seduction by, the promises and offers made by socialism. The idea that there were radical alternatives to markets, competition and money as the organising principles of society, that there was a more scientific and more rational way of organising things and also a fairer and more equitable way of organising things very much captured the imagination of people, of intellectuals, who saw themselves as the friends of progress. Classical liberals regarded this with utter horror. They saw the march towards more socialistic policies at home and the rise of totalitarian socialism abroad as not the continuation of liberalist promise but as a complete negation of it. 

Hayek being exhibit A here. 

Yes. And so, by necessity, they fell in with the anti-progressive right. It was an anti-socialist alliance and there was a logic to that – but there are obviously deep philosophical tensions between classical liberalism and libertarianism on the one hand and traditionalist conservatism on the other. 

How does Hayek’s book, The Constitution of Liberty, fit into the picture?

It fits in in a couple of ways. First, in a postscript to the book, Hayek takes pains to distinguish himself from the conservatives who are, at that very time, making him into an intellectual hero. He had written The Road to Serfdom back in 1944 in England for an English audience, it was excerpted by Reader’s Digest and sold millions in the United States and made him into a hero of the modern American right. So, by the time he was writing The Constitution of Liberty in 1960 he was already very much identified as one of American conservatism’s leading intellectual lights and he was rather uncomfortable with that. So he wrote this essay ‘Why I am Not a Conservative’ and, as you mentioned, he said that classical liberalism, libertarianism, was all about ongoing experimentation and change and openness and individualism…

Here’s a quotation: ‘The main point about liberalism is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still.’

Yes, and yet Hayek’s case for free society is one that resonates very well with the conservative imagination and easily lapses into a conservative sensibility. His main case for liberty rests on our ignorance. The fact that any one of us knows only a tiny fraction of the things that affect our life, that we are all dependent on the actions of millions of other people whom we don’t know, whom we’ll never know, that we live under social rules that we didn’t create and that we don’t understand. So, for anyone to presume that he has the knowledge to plan everything rationally from the centre is engaged in a massive act of hubris that Hayek later called the ‘fatal conceit.’ In making this point, Hayek stresses the importance of traditional ways of doing things and the fact that many of the rules under which we live and that have allowed us to achieve this wonderful prosperity and all the opportunities of modern life are rules that no one planned or designed. They are products of human action but not design – the archetypal examples being language, money and law. These are things that no one sat down and hammered out in a rationalistic kind of way but evolved over time in a blind, unconscious way.

Even if Hayek was not a fusionist, the elements of fusionism are here. 

Yes. Intellectually Hayek says all the right liberal things, ultimately – about how tradition can’t bind us going into the future. He was not at all satisfied with the status quo – he had a whole platform of rationally thought-through reforms that he wanted to institute. And yet the gestalt of his writing gives off this veneration for tradition that is lapped up by conservatives. 

One wonders if that will last. In 100 years will this prove to have been a temporary coalition or will it be a permanent one?

I think there is a real tension, even incoherence, in Hayek’s thought between this appreciation for the unplanned and spontaneous blind workings of cultural evolution on the one hand versus his being an economist, and a rational social planner who has ideas for reforms that will make a better world on the other. And he can’t quite figure out where he sits on that divide. As a result, he gives aid and comfort in ways he didn’t really want to, to the kind of moss-backed traditionalism that he himself wasn’t sympathetic to. You hear it today in arguments about gay marriage: you hear Hayekian arguments against gay marriage, people saying, ‘Well we can’t really see any harm that would be caused by letting people love each other, or pledge themselves in legally binding ways’ – but, as Hayek said, there are all kinds of rules that we don’t understand the function of. The fact that they have evolved and they’ve been here a long time suggest that they’re pretty important so we shouldn’t monkey with them.’

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