Hayek's ‘Great Society’: on civilization and its savages

Abstract

Friedrich Hayek is widely viewed as a key intellectual source of neo-liberalism. Taking issue with the conventional view that Hayek's philosophy is, above all, concerned with individual freedom, this article argues that his foundational category is civility. Civility encompasses sensibilities and structures that restrict the liberties we take in our interpersonal relations and channel individual efforts to building what Hayek calls the ‘Great Society’. For instance, Hayek endorses subordinating persons to price signals on the assumption that the market efficiently maximizes individual and social returns. However, Hayek's claim about the wisdom of market prices is contradicted by his own arguments about the limitations of human knowledge, individual or aggregate. Overall, I claim that the individual freedom Hayek's philosophy grants is quite limited and that the continued activism of neo-liberal governments is not an ideological contradiction, but actualizes the ‘civilizing mission’ demanded by one of its most important intellectual figures. Consequently, Hayek's philosophy invites broader reflection about the primacy of individual freedom in political thought and suggests civility as an alternative starting point. The way Hayek shifts the philosophical conversation, from theorizing conditions for the autonomy of individuals to the ideal qualities of relations adhering between them, may also explain his increasing attractiveness to thinkers on the Left.