Social Injustice and Spontaneous Orders.

• Author: Levy, Jacob T.
• Position: F.A. Hayek's understanding - Critical essay

Hayek's Critique and Its Legacy

In The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), the second volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, F. A. Hayek developed an argument against "social justice," describing it as a "mirage," the pursuit of which would be both futile and destructive (see also Hayek 1988). The argument was unfortunately timed. It was published a few years after John Rawls put out A Theory of Justice (1971) but did not engage that book in any serious way. Hayek merely commented that he thought his differences with Rawls were "more verbal than substantial" (1976, xiii). Perhaps this was true, and Hayek's book-length indictment of social justice was therefore largely irrelevant to the debate about justice that came to dominate political philosophy and theory in the English-speaking world after 1971. Perhaps it was false, possibly because Hayek knew Rawls's work from the 1960s better than he knew Theory and did not realize how much Rawls had revised his views. In that case, Hayek might have had arguments that could have blunted the appeal of Rawls's account, but because he did not understand the disagreement and confront it head on, those arguments did not enter mainstream debates.

Apart from the question of what was in Hayek's mind, there are questions here about how to interpret both Rawls and Hayek. The apparent gap between them can be narrowed by noting Hayek's long-standing if understated support for social insurance and basic income maintenance provided according to impersonal rules and by emphasizing the continuous elements in Rawls's thought from the 1960s on--namely, the identification of justice with impersonal rules identified ex ante rather than with individual outcomes ex post. But the substantive political commitments that both thought were informed by their theories remained distant.

In any case, Hayek's arguments on this question have generally been ignored in theoretical debates about justice, and when they have been subject to serious scrutiny, they have mainly been found wanting (Johnston 1997; Lukes 1997; and, in less depth, Fleischacker 2004). Hayek seems to have thought that the pursuit of social justice required, indeed consisted of, ex post redistribution to particular persons or interest groups, a distributive scramble of all against all. Because this appears not to be true of universal social insurance or state welfare provided according to impersonal rules of means testing and is certainly not true of Rawls's theory of "property-owning democracy" and rules of justice applied at the level of an overall institutional order, Hayek's argument has been taken to fall flat.

And, indeed, in the past decade or so classical liberal scholars self-consciously inspired by Hayek have moved toward an open embrace of social justice in Rawls's sense. John Tomasi (2012) pathologizes the rejection of social justice as akin to an allergic overreaction: "social justicitis." In his search for a reconciliation between Rawls and Hayek, the objection to social justice is an obstacle that must be removed. Jason Brennan and Tomasi identify an emerging school of thought, "neoclassical liberalism," as the view that encompasses "classical liberalism's commitment to robust economic liberties and property rights as well as modern or 'high' liberalism's commitment to social justice" (2012, 115). (1)

The phrase social justice was not in particularly widespread use during the long era of Rawlsian dominance in political philosophy, although Rawls himself occasionally used it. The terms distributive justice and simply justice were more common, which only aggravates the sense that Hayek's critique was marginal to the prominent debates. Around the same time that these Hayek-influenced scholars were embracing Rawlsian "social justice," (2) the phrase began to find a great deal more uptake, mainly outside of political philosophy circles. "Social justice" in this sense addresses a range of topics, some of which political philosophy tends to treat under concepts such as "identity," "recognition," and "oppression" (Young 1989; Taylor 1993; see Fraser 1996 for an important work that helped develop the idea that social justice encompasses both redistribution and recognition). Social justice in this sense remedies not poverty or maldistribution but racism, sexism, and similar phenomena that are understood as partly political, pardy economic, and partly cultural. This understanding seems to leave behind not only Hayek's critique but even the latter-day Hayekians' rejection of it in favor of a more Rawlsian view. Hayek's theory thus comes to look doubly marginal, a dead end on the way to a destination that is not there anymore anyway.

I think this conclusion is the wrong one to draw, however. In this article, I suggest that there is something importantly true in Hayek's understanding of justice. The traditional understanding on which Hayek built is the conceptual core of the idea of justice that is easily lost sight of in contemporary political philosophy. Hayek can help us keep the rules of just conduct in mind and thereby avoid much confusion. But Hayek was wrong (and untrue to the tradition) to try to restrict the concept of justice entirely to the rules of just conduct. Indeed, his own contributions to social theory make it more difficult to rule out social justice in the way he aimed to do. The understanding of spontaneous or emergent social orders that forms such a crucial part of Hayek's intellectual legacy helps us make sense of the idea of social justice and of why the rules of just conduct have never wholly exhausted that idea. I also suggest that this understanding of social justice can capture both the Rawlsian sense of distributive justice that has lately been adopted by some scholars in the classical liberal tradition and the widespread vernacular sense of attention to the oppression and misrecognition. The relationship between the microlevel rules of just conduct and social justice as a normative evaluation of emergent orders unifies the two senses of the concept. I conclude with some remarks on Hayek's account of the dangers of pursuing social justice and on a possible theoretical remedy for them.

Ius and the Rules of Just Conduct

Hayek argued that justice is an inappropriate standard of evaluation for outcomes that are not planned and that the results of spontaneous or emergent processes are not in themselves either just or unjust. Justice and injustice are attributes of deliberate actions; justice consists of individual actors' observance of rules of just conduct. In Hayek's view, the use of this normative category, justice, to describe large-scale social outcomes is a superstitious anthropomorphication: imagining a blameworthy actor where there is none. The classical liberal theorist Anthony de Jasay turned the same basic idea into a more full-throated critique of Rawls and his followers, characterizing theories that view "justice as a matter of social choice rather than, as in the traditional approach, a quality of individual acts" as a category mistake, erroneously treating "justice as something else" (1996, 162)--fairness or universalizability or impartiality.

This view has its roots in the oldest and most widespread understanding of justice in the Western tradition: rendering unto each what is due him. In Plato's Republic, Cephalus defines justice as telling the truth and paying one's debts. The paying of debts in particular is probably the paradigmatic case of a rule of just conduct, the obvious example of rendering to someone else what is due to him. It moreover has the double moral and juridical sense that characterizes justice: repayment is an obligation under the positive law, and it is so because the law recognizes the underlying duty. The honoring of contracts is a broader way to think about this concept of justice. Note that contracts combine truth telling with the discharge of a debtlike obligation; a breach of contract means that the promise the contract codified has turned out to be a lie.

Aristotle subsequently saw the value in joining the justice of honoring voluntary obligations under private law to the justice of respecting the prohibitions of the criminal law. (3) It is unjust to steal or kill and unjust to break a contract or repudiate a debt, and in either case the legal system will try to do justice by restoring the disrupted equilibrium through restitution, compensation, and punishment.

In the Roman tradition that came to dominate European thinking on justice, iusis "law" and "lawfulness," "right" and "rightfulness." Justice is a juridical and judicial virtue (and the terms are, obviously, etymologically related, as is jurisdiction). Just verdicts from a judge render unto each party what is rightfully due to each. To act unjustly is to commit an injury--iniuria, "injustice"--which calls for a judicial remedy. And when Thomas Aquinas...