Alasdair MacIntyre and F. A. Hayek on the abuse of reason.

• Author: Harnish, Brandon
• Position: Essay

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be.... If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.... If you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road.

--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2007), Alasdair MacIntyre offers a "disquieting suggestion." He asks the reader to imagine that a catastrophe has beset the natural sciences. All scientists, all science books, and all laboratories have been destroyed. Whatever bits of knowledge are left must be pieced together in fragments. Scientific discourse continues, but only as a shell of its previous state. There is no context or coherence to any of it, and no one quite recognizes the disorder because the philosophies of the day cannot spot it. What purpose does this parable serve? To MacIntyre, the chaotic state of science in this imaginary world is analogous to the state of moral discourse in the actual world. He sees the history of moral discourse in the same way that the history of science appears in the analogy: first, a state of order; second, a catastrophe; and third, a continuing state of disorder.

The catastrophe to which MacIntyre points is the failure of what he calls the "Enlightenment Project." He tries to establish the source of the breakdown in the language of moral discourse and to trace the effects of the Enlightenment on modern society. He connects the abuse of reason, or what might be called "rationalism run amok," to any number of modern bureaucracies, organizations, institutions, disciplines, and schools of thought as well as to some mistaken views of the study of human action.

MacIntyre's narrative in After Virtue and in an assortment of articles (1) is intriguingly paralleled by F. A. Hayek's "abuse of reason" project, spelled out in The Counter-revolution of Science (1979a), The Road to Serfdom (2007), and various other works. (2) Hayek connects an exaggerated faith in the ability of human reason and science, originating with certain Enlightenment thinkers, to a variety of modern problems ranging from behaviorism in psychology to positivism in economics to bureaucratic planning in government. The root of the problem, Hayek emphasizes, is the misguided and prejudiced application of the methods of natural science to problems of social science--that is, what Hayek (1979a) calls scientism. Though not meant to be complimentary, MacIntyre and Hayek's efforts in many ways build a dual case against the rationalist Enlightenment vision and the philosophy of the micromanaging bureaucrat. Both men are arguing that we are on the wrong road: MacIntyre that we are on an emotivist road to nihilism, Hayek that we are on a totalitarian road to serfdom.

This claim is not meant to suggest that MacIntyre and Hayek see eye to eye. The coincidence of their analyses seems all the more interesting because they come from very different backgrounds and have very different points of view. Hayek was a classical liberal, an individualist, and a religious agnostic. Maclntyre was a Trotskyite and a Marxist who eventually converted to Catholicism, and he remains suspicious of capitalism. Their differences create a fascinating and controversial dialogue, though space limitations here preclude a full examination of the interplay between Hayek's liberalism and MacIntyre's "revolutionary Aristotelianism." (3)

In this article, I explore the similarities between MacIntyre and Hayek in regard to the Enlightenment's failure and the abuse of reason. I move specifically through those chapters of After Virtue in which MacIntyre mounts his attack on the Enlightenment and compare the arguments there with similar arguments from Hayek's corpus of work. In doing so, I consider how MacIntyre and Hayek conceptualize the Enlightenment Project, the consequences of its failure, the nature of human action, the nature of scientific inquiry, and the connection between all of these things and modern bureaucracy and social planning. A broad sketch of the two men's criticisms reveals a four-step downfall from the Enlightenment to emotivism to scientism to socialist planning.

It is worthwhile at this stage to note some general similarities between MacIntyre and Hayek. First, both authors paint with a broad brush and criticize many different thinkers and movements. The nature of their projects demands this approach. MacIntyre is trying to demonstrate how a change in the nature of reason and a move toward "rationalism" in ethics unavoidably leads to nihilism. This demonstration necessarily indicts all thinkers who have attempted to ground morality in rationality, even those who may differ drastically from each other in their rationalist approach (MacIntyre 2007). Hayek is trying to show how the abuse of reason, in a variety of forms, led to socialist planning and the collectivist governments of the twentieth century. This argument necessarily condemns all of the thinkers who fall in the "constructivist rationalist" category, even those who in some respects may be utterly opposite, such as Marx and Hegel (Hayek 1979a).

The Failure of the Enlightenment Project

Both MacIntyre and Hayek see the root failure of the Enlightenment Project as owing to a general overestimation of the authority and power of human reason or, in the reverse, a failure to acknowledge its limits and nature. For MacIntyre, the problem began when "the thinkers of the Enlightenment set out to replace what they took to be discredited traditional and superstitious forms of morality by a kind of secular morality that would be entitled to secure the assent of any rational person" (2007, 70). Such thinkers include Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume, and Smith, who, though often differing in their conclusions, pursued the same rationalist construction of ethics (51). The failure of this effort set the stage for a series of rival but logically apodictic moral positions that characterize modern disagreements over ethics. The consequence, MacIntyre explains, was the "releasing into the culture at large a set of moral concepts which derive from their philosophical ancestry an appearance of rational determinateness and justification which they do not in fact possess" (70). Appeals to these moral concepts, despite their lack of the latter qualities, create an aura of objectivity that lends legitimacy and credibility to those who exercise social control.

For Hayek, the problem began with the Cartesian assertion that "the complex order of our modern society is exclusively due to the circumstances that men have been guided in their actions by foresight--an insight into the connection between cause and effect--or at least that it could have arisen through design" (Hayek 1970, 6). The meaning of reason changed from "the capacity of the mind to distinguish between good and evil, that is, between what was and what was not in accordance with established rules," to the "capacity to construct such rules by deduction from explicit premises" (Hayek 1973, 21) Natural law became merely another term for "the rule of reason" and thereby lost the meaning it had found in the Scholastic tradition, in Aquinas, and in Aristotle. In this way, the entirety of civilization came to be seen as a product of conscious human ingenuity. What better way, then, to ensure the continual progress of human life and to discover new methods for its advancement than to hire and elect legions of new social planners whose main task it would be to control social phenomena consciously and to scientifically engineer society (Hayek 1973, 21)?

An important caveat at this point is Hayek's distinction between two types of rationalism: "evolutionary or critical rationalism" and "constructivist rationalism," which he also calls "individualism true" and "individualism false" (Hayek 1946, 1, 1948, 1, and 1964, 82; see also Diamond 1980 and Gamble 1996, 32). This distinction is vital in understanding why Hayek extols some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Smith, Ferguson, Tucker, and Constant, yet condemns others, such as Descartes, Mill, Comte, and Bentham. It is important further in that it allows Hayek to embrace some Enlightenment thinkers without embracing totalitarian impulses or emotivism.

Hayek describes evolutionary rationalism as an "older natural law theory" in which "reason had meant mainly a capacity to recognize truth, especially moral truth, when they met it, rather than a capacity of deductive reasoning from explicit premises" (1964, 84). MacIntyre's description of the moral system that preceded the Enlightenment, the moral system of the Middle Ages, in which reason was understood only within a three-part relationship that includes "human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be" and "human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos," is very much like Hayek's evolutionary rationalism (MacIntyre 2007, 53-54). All in all, evolutionary rationalism appreciated and understood that much of human civilization came about not through deliberate design, but through a gradual, unplanned, spontaneous process.

Constructivist rationalism, in contrast, rejected this tradition and "contended that all useful human institutions were and ought to be deliberate creation of conscious reason" (Hayek 1964, 85). This contention applied to, among other things, written language, spoken language, laws, and ethics (85). Edward Feser has noted the connection of Hayek's rejection of critical rationalism and embrace of evolutionary rationalism to MacIntyre's notion of rationality as tradition based:

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre seems also to have something like this in mind in his appeal to the notion of tradition as a key to understanding the nature of rationality: A rational belief system or moral outlook is, in his view, one which belongs to a tradition of thought within which the basic...