Dewey and Hayek on Democratic Experimentalism

Abstract

Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel invoke John Dewey's pragmatist account of thought and as the backdrop for their theory of democratic experimentalism, an approach to governance emphasizing judicially monitored local decision making within a system of decentralized administrative authority. Little credit for influence is given to the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his classic liberal ideas. Indeed, Sabel has been highly critical of Hayek's ideas. Yet, an argument can be made that (i) democratic experimentalism is at least loosely Hayekian and (ii) a combined Deweyan-Hayekian analysis of Dorf and Sabel's theory reveals some critical mistakes. Dewey and Hayek's ideas are more compatible than most democratic theorists and political philosophers will admit, allowing the creation and evaluation of democratic experiments within a DeweyanHayekian theoretical framework, as well as extending the framework to other areas of political inquiry....for Dewey, it [democracy] was a method for identifying and correcting through public debate and action the unintended consequences of coordination among private actors. He was concerned to know what democracy, so understood, could leam from the methods of public scrutiny and experimentation by which science discerned and adjusted unworkable ideas about the natural world. -Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel (1998,286)Spontaneous orders are not necessarily complex, but unlike deliberate human arrangements, they may achieve any degree of complexity. One of our main contentions will be that very complex orders, comprising more particular facts than any brain could ascertain or manipulate, can be brought about only through forces inducing the formation of spontaneous orders. - Friedrich Hayek (1973, 38)Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel (1998) invoke John Dewey's pragmatist account of thought and as the backdrop for their theory of democratic experimentalism, an approach to governance emphasizing judicially monitored local decision making within a system of decentralized administrative authority (284).1 Little credit for influence is given to the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his classic liberal ideas. Indeed, Sabel has been highly critical of Hayek's ideas. Yet an argument can be made that democratic experimentalism is at least loosely Hayekian. Hayek's notion of a spontaneous order bears some resemblance to what Dorf, Sabel and others call a democratic experiment. Minimizing democratic experimentalism's debt to Hayek may seem unsurprising given the tendency among democratic theorists to bifurcate the forum and the market, preferring deliberation to catallaxy.2 However, Dorf and Sabel gladly embrace the model of flexible economic entrepreneurship in their theory of democratic experimentalism. By preferring Dewey to Hayek, they make two mistakes though. First, they ignore a key lesson of Hayek's epistemology, namely, that implicit knowledge lends invaluable support to the efficacy of decentralized information systems. Second, they underestimate the threat of strategic action to the dialogic process of rule-making. Institutions other than markets can spontaneously evolve once a legal framework is in place, thereafter structuring experimental problem solving and democratic decision making in a Deweyan-Hayekian spirit, that is, by choosing means in the absence of predetermined ends or preferred end-states. One implication of my analysis is that Dewey's and Hayek's ideas are more compatible than most democratic theorists and political philosophers will admit. Evidence of this compatibility opens the door for creating and evaluating democratic experiments within a Deweyan-Hayekian theoretical framework, as well as extending the framework to other areas of political inquiry.The article is organized into five sections. In the next section, I examine the few sympathetic treatments of Hayek's work by liberal political theorists as well as the sparse literature comparing Dewey and Hayek's ideas. …