Universidad Francisco Marroquin recently made available both the video and transcripts of a series of interviews with F.A. Hayek from the mid-1970′s. Not only do they furnish an in depth look into the ideas of one of the past century’s most influential thinkers, and pair him with some of the other great economists of the past half-century, they do so with a level of style that only the 1970′s could provide.
Can you dig it?
Aid Watch readers might find this part* worth listening to. Hayek lambasts the “intellectuals” for their susceptibility to fads. By “intellectuals” he does not mean primarily academics, but rather “secondhand dealers in ideas” who specialize in conveying ideas to the general public: reporters, teachers, writers, artists, etc. Even though the ideas they propagate are frequently more trendy than well-founded, Hayek claims they end up serving as the public rationale for potentially grave policy decisions, such as interference in the internal governance of other nations.
And in this case, the example Hayek uses as a trendy idea has stuck around, especially in the development and aid world. Is Hayek ahead of the curve or behind the times in his prognosis?
*Those unable to view the video can read the transcript under the fold.
You see, my problem with all this is the whole role of what I commonly call the intellectuals, which I have long ago defined as the secondhand dealers in ideas. For some reason or other, they are probably more subject to waves of fashion in ideas and more influential in the United States than they are elsewhere. Certain main concerns can spread here with an incredible speed. Take the conception of human rights. I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it. He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd. The United States discovered human rights two years ago or five years ago. Suddenly it’s the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don’t think it’s in the least justified. People in South Africa have to deal with their own problems, and the idea that you can use external pressure to change people, who after all have built up a civilization of a kind, seems to me morally a very doubtful belief. But it’s a dominating belief in the United States now.
7 Comments
In this case, it seems that Hayek has it wrong. One of the earliest and most complete political statements of human rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was published in France in 1789. Similar sentiments are incorporated in the US constitution, which also saw rights as universal. Such sentiments drove the anti-slavery movements in Britain and the US. Similarly universal suffrage. So yes: the idea of universal human rights is more than 200 years old, and has driven significant social movements and change within the United States for at least that long.
Hayek was right to raise the moral question of interfering in another civilisation, but the answer is not simple. Should the civilisation of the industrial North in the US have hesitated before pressuring the civilisation of the rural South in either the 1850s or the 1960s?
Hayek supporting non-intervention against the viciously racist apartheid regime in South Africa. What a moral giant he was. I think Hayek had a lot of interesting policy and economic insights but quite frankly this is not one of them.
Well he was right that America suffers (or maybe benefits) from cultural amnesia and severe depth perception issues when it comes to history and the historical evolution of ideas.
Wow – secondhand dealers in ideas, I must admit I am a little disappointed in Hayek’s thoughts here. To be sure I am not going to agree with every “secondhand idea” that comes down the pike, but the fact that the public gets a voice in the debate through them is enormously significant. And I might add, even when Hayek was no longer teaching economics, people still took his economic ideas quite seriously, and so kept on repeating them. Why would we discriminate on whether an idea is voiced for the first or umpteenth time, if someone has not heard it before who needs it now.
Just a couple quick clarifications:
To David’s point:
When he says “human rights,” I’m confident that Hayek means it in the technical sense of the philosophy or international affairs literatures. These are distinct from the classic sense of “individual rights,” which Hayek would defend as means to both wealth and human flourishing (though he would not call them “natural”). Individual rights are claims about how individuals should treat one another, while human rights are claims about how governments should act to produce particular patterns of outcomes. The two approaches would have certain moral judgments in common (“slavery is bad”) but for different reasons, and would disagree on other issues (i.e., “does poverty qua poverty violate rights?”). The human rights idea really is much more recent. Here’s a good overview from someone sympathetic:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
To Rebecca:
I don’t think Hayek was using “secondhand” in a pejorative sense, but just a descriptive one. He simply means that people in the media, writers, etc. get their mental models from academics, and its their writings that influence public opinion rather than the academics themselves. I read him as making as much as anything an admonition to other academics against thinking that they have more influence than they do.
On Adam’s point to Rebecca:
A good example of this is Malcolm Gladwell. I love him, but no one knows the countless academics that he draws from – they assume his ideas are original and they are not at all – just packaged for intello-popular consumption.
On Adam to David:
Exactly.
This was the worst example that you could have used to illustrate your point. The “fad” of human rights changed the US outlook on apartheid and it was eventually such external pressure that ended the racist system. I agree with Tom above, Hayek defending the South African government under the notion that a “fad” is the driving factor severely misses the point.
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