Hayek's Political Economy: The Socio-economics of Order.

• Author: Barry, Norman

Those who thought that Friedrich A. von Hayek's work has been so well researched that little new can be said about it will get a pleasant surprise, as well as considerable intellectual enlightenment, from reading Hayek's Political Economy. By concentrating on a narrow aspect, Steve Fleetwood manages to say some quite original things about economics and social philosophy and, most important, something new in our understanding of the genealogy of Hayek's ideas. The book, it should be noted, deals only with the purely philosophical aspects of Hayek's economics; the reader will find little here about Hayek the defender of liberty, the opponent of "social justice," the spokesman for the common law, or even the later exponent of evolutionism.

Although it might be true to say that Hayek's abiding concern in social science was to demonstrate that in the social world there is order without design -- that a kind of predictability and regularity is possible in human affairs without the need of a Leviathan state or the invocation of mystical forces beyond the realm of science -- what is remarkable is the variety of explanations he used for such a phenomenon. Fleetwood charts a kind of Hayekian intellectual odyssey by which this conclusion was reached: first, by more or less orthodox positivism, then by a kind of subjective idealism (or hermeneutic foundationalism), and finally by the use of a quasi-transformational realism (the reader will have to get used to the author's use of complex, but by no means dispensable, jargon). Thus there is a Hayek I, which covers Hayek's period as a technical economist from the late 1920s until about 1937 and the publication of Hayek's important paper "Economics and Knowledge" (which Fleetwood strangely dates as 1936); from then on (Hayek II), he became concerned with demonstrating the methodological differences between natural and social science and the apparently irredeemably subjective nature of the latter until about 1960; and onward (Hayek III), when he began to develop a new social theory based on the idea of man as a rule-following animal, a theory that provides the final building block in his explanation of order.

Although in his early years as a monetary and trade-cycle theorist Hayek (and other "Austrians") departed from orthodoxy in technical economics, he was still a positivist in the sense of believing in "laws" (constant conjunctions) of a Humean type that the economist could discover. Most notable of...