Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
‘This book convincingly demonstrated what was already intuitive to me: namely, the utter futility, the illusion of government planning as a mechanism for uplifting those less fortunate. The way he dissected and depicted the inexorable tendencies in statism to self-perpetuation of bureaucracies, matched what I thought was the evidence I saw around me.’
Two of the books you’ve chosen are about freedom and two are about social dynamism. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I would say, is about both. It’s also the first of these books to be published, in 1944. Do you want to start with that one?
Hayek, when I thumb back through it and look at what I marked when I first read it, was the book that, to me, convincingly demonstrated what was already intuitive: namely, the utter futility, the illusion of government planning as a mechanism for uplifting those less fortunate. I read it together with dozens of other books, but the way he dissected and depicted the inexorable tendencies in statism to self-perpetuation of bureaucracies, matched what I thought was the evidence I saw around me.
What stage were you in life when you first encountered The Road to Serfdom?
Well, post-college. In my mid 20s, probably.
Did you recall it having a fairly profound effect on you at the time?
I think it did. That could be said of one or two of these others as well, especially the Friedman: something that clarifies and confirms an intuition or a tentative empirical judgment you’ve come to. At the time, in the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to look at the wreckage, and say, ‘This isn’t working – and the more government tries to do, the more bureaucracies it piles up, the more regulations it writes, the less well off people at large seem to be…’
You’re a sitting governor [of Indiana], you’ve been an OMB [US Office of Management and Budget] director and you deal day to day with people who want to plan stuff – everything from zoning commissions to the legislature. How does this book inflect how you deal with that?
With humility and caution. I think I would say that this is something you’ll see in the Postrel book as well, probably in several of these books. They led me to a view that government clearly has to establish rails around certain behaviour and economic activity. But simplicity, clarity of the rules, a caution about over-prescriptiveness in how to achieve a certain outcome or prevent a certain externality from happening – I think I probably first saw a lot of that in Hayek.
For instance, I remember my first day on this job. We did a ton of things, we wanted to emphasise that a lot of change was afoot. But I went over to see our biggest regulatory agency – we had hundreds of people in the room or on the phone. It was an environmental management agency and I told them then, and I’ve told them since, that we did not intend to weaken or moderate a single rule that I knew of, in terms of environmental standards. But I said that what we were determined to do was to make regulation consistent, predictable and quick. We worked very hard on that. We measured to see if we were getting there. So I guess that, if you say, correctly, that this job involves overseeing necessary regulatory activity, that mentality came in some part from books like Hayek’s.
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Mitch Daniels is Governor of Indiana. He was director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W Bush, and former head of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. He is often spoken of as a possible 2012 Presidential contender.
I think of them as people who are on the one hand deeply committed to liberty, but on the other hand deeply committed to the notion that we don’t choose where we are. We behave with respect to both political institutions, which we should never take for granted, and whatever the course is that brought us to where we are. It’s a very anti-revolutionary sentiment. That brings us actually to Hayek, who combines in some ways both of these threads. Tell us a bit about The Road to Serfdom, and its implicit critique of libertarianism as well as of the state…
The Road to Serfdom is a very polemical book. It was published in 1944. It’s a warning not exactly about Communism, but about the coming of statism in the West, about the ways that some of the governing élites that Hayek saw, especially in Britain, thought about governing. The book is really mostly about Britain. He talks about the dangers of central planning, of the attempt to take over the economic life of a society and to try and control it from the centre. It’s a book that is properly understood as a libertarian book, but it’s not libertarian in the way that a lot of contemporary libertarians would define themselves. It is a very, very sceptical book, and a very modest book. In a way, Hayek argues for limited government because he has a very limited view of human nature and human knowledge. I think he would call himself a Whig. I think he actually did call himself a Whig, when he was asked whether he was a libertarian or a conservative. It’s a book that shows that at its best, the libertarian strain of conservatism is a form of scepticism rather than of utopianism.
Freedom doesn’t solve all our problems, it’s just a recognition of the limits of our knowledge and powers.
It’s the least worst response to human limitations.
How does that distinguish from the libertarianism of a Jeffersonian or his modern equivalent?
Jefferson was a very different kind of libertarian because he believed in the power of reason, and the power of freedom, to lead, in the end, to a perfectly organised society. Jefferson was a libertarian in the sense that he didn’t want big government, and was very worried about government power, but he was also a radical individualist. He believed that if we left people to themselves, and if we allowed reason to flourish and govern, our problems really would be solved. Jefferson was incredibly utopian. Hayek is quite different from that. He worries about the notion that unimpeded reason ought to govern, he simply doesn’t think that’s possible, he doesn’t think we can know enough, he doesn’t think we can contain the dark side of human nature. So his libertarianism is very realistic and very prudent and very modest.
He’s also an incrementalist. At least in this book, he’s against central planning, but he’s not against all regulation of the economy…
He’s not really against all of the welfare state. He thinks we have to have a lot of respect for institutions that exist, because they will inherently contain knowledge that is greater than anything we can articulate explicitly. And in this sense he’s very much a Burkean. He believes in the kind of knowledge implicit in institutions rather than knowledge made explicit in constitutions.
So what do Hayekans do, or Burkeans do, when they reach 2010. You’ve got big government, bigger than they’ve ever liked, but big government itself has become embedded in mores and traditions. Are you stuck between a revolutionary fervour to overthrow it all, and a shrugging acceptance that we’re stuck with it? Or is there some third path?
I think you look for ways to roll it back gradually. Burke in the Appeal draws a distinction between change and reform in politics. Reform is a way of building on what works about your society and fixing what doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean you leave things as they are; it means that in calling for change and in setting out change, you begin from where people live, you begin from what works in people’s lives. And today certainly some of that is the welfare state. But that doesn’t mean that’s where you end up. And I think it actually means resistance to radical expansions of the welfare state, to things that aren’t well-established, or that aren’t ancient. I think that in that mix there is a place for modern conservatism to make its case for a different kind of society, but not fundamentally different, not radically different.
When you told me that The Road to Serfdom is relevant in our era of justified populist fervour, what did you mean?
I think that inherent in The Road to Serfdom is a defensive populism, a defence of both the wisdom of the individual and the wisdom of society. What I mean by justified populist fervour is that what we’re seeing is a reaction to an extension and growth of the welfare state, that to my mind is justified. The question is what form will it take in response, what alternatives can it offer? That’s a place where conservatives can look to Burke, and Hayek to some extent. The answer is not obvious. It’s not clear what opposition to Obama’s policies has to amount to. I do think there is a place for resistance, a place for standing against the expansion of the welfare state and making a case for moving in a different direction.
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Yuval Levin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC, and is founder and editor of National Affairs, a new conservative journal.
