To the Editor:

David Glasner is to be congratulated for his account of F.A. Hayek’s positive influence on American conservatism [“Hayek and the Conservatives,” October 1992]. I wish, however, to dispute three of Mr. Glasner’s claims.

First, although Mr. Glasner is correct to compare Hayek’s “cosmopolitan and humane impulses” with those of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Michael Oakeshott, . . . Hayek’s deepest philosophical affinities are with Hume. Hayek’s skepticism—particularly about rationalistic schemes for wholesale social criticism and reform—is deeply Humean, as are his conceptions of social evolution, spontaneous social “order without design,” the primacy of practical reason, the historical situatedness and social constitution of the human agent, and the possibility of harmony between a respect for tradition and social and political reform.

Second, . . . though Mr. Glasner is right to dispute the widespread perception of Hayek as a libertarian, . . . I disagree with his intimation that libertarians do not realize this. In my experience, most of them do not think that one can derive libertarian conclusions from Hayekian premises alone. Rather, an additional, specifically moral, argument is required: namely, that any political interference with given demands is immoral because it involves coercion, and nothing of value can be gained through coercion. An individual can value only what he freely chooses.

When pressed, most libertarians will appeal to this essentially Kantian—and ultimately Protestant—account of the relationship of freedom and value, and the most sophisticated among them will not defend it as . . . fact but rather as a fiction which can be shown to be socially useful. . . . Libertarians are, in short, capable of appropriating Hayek’s ideas in more subtle ways than Mr. Glasner makes out. . . .

Third, Mr. Glasner claims that Hayek’s “thoroughgoing philosophical skepticism” is “decidedly incompatible with the religious beliefs to which a large segment of the conservative movement subscribes.” As stated, this is ambiguous. Hayek’s skepticism is incompatible with any attempt to found politics upon revelation. His thought, like Hume’s, is as much opposed to political providentialism as it is to political rationalism. He was an advocate of specifically secular foundations for the liberal order. But even though Hayek was a professed agnostic, he was—again like Hume—deeply appreciative of the social value of religion within the liberal order. . . .

The real issue at stake between Hayek and today’s Christian Right is not, then, whether religious values are important to the liberal order—which Hayek grants—but whether or not the Bible can serve as an external foundation for the political order. The answer consistent with Hayek’s views is “no,” . . . for the Christian Bible itself is situated within the very institutions it is expected to shore up. It was created by the early Christian church, not vice versa. And, contrary to some Protestants, the Bible does not interpret itself, but must be interpreted within the ever-changing matrix of traditions, institutions, and social practices. It is these that are primary. They govern Scripture, not the other way around.

This, however, is a view to which, in their various ways, Catholics, Jews, and Protestant traditionalists can readily assent. It is, moreover, tacitly assented to even by Protestant fundamentalists, who can be relied upon never to interpret the Bible in a way that is opposed to American democracy, capitalism, the modern nuclear family, or football. In the end, tradition governs all, whether we choose to recognize it or not.

Gregory R. Johnson
Athens, Georgia

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To the Editor:

I congratulate David Glasner on his fine article, . . . but I think he errs in trying to . . . drive a wedge between Hayek and contemporary libertarians. According to Glasner, Hayek had “no quarrel” with social-welfare policies, “as long as such measures did not obstruct the free determination of prices by market forces.” But the caveat in that sentence swallows the substantive assertion.

The heart of Hayek’s defense of capitalism, after all, is that prices bear information, that any statist interference with prices spreads misleading information throughout the productive system, and in that way generates inefficiencies and distortions which tempt the state to yet another intervention, with yet more misleading effects upon prices, etc. That is how the road to serfdom is paved and traveled.

How might Mr. Glasner go about having the state provide a “basic minimum level of support” to its poorer citizens without helping to smooth that road? Through price supports for farmers and the housing industry? Obviously not. Through controls on food and rent? Also out. Publicly built housing and publicly managed farms, which would either supplant or compete with private firms in those fields? Direct cash payments to those deemed sufficiently needy? Payments in some form of quasi-cash, as with voucher systems or food stamps? Such payments would have to be financed either by taxation or right off the printing press, and either possibility would interfere with the pricing mechanisms of the free market. . . .

I submit that if Mr. Glasner reviews the post-New Deal socialwelfarist platform plank by plank, he will find that what he calls “wholesale opposition to the New Deal” is more Hayekian than the more piecemeal (or retail?) opposition he would prefer.

There are always, of course, differences between a father and his children. But Mr. Glasner’s attempt to orphan us is unavailing.

Christopher C. Faille
Enfield, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

David Glasner turns a justified tribute to F.A. Hayek into a hysterical tirade against pre-1945 American conservatives based on a sloppy reading of the record. Mr. Glasner portrays conservatives of that era—with the mysterious “exception” of Robert A. Taft, their main leader—as nothing but fanatical Roosevelt-haters and bigots, hostile to involvement in world affairs, and bitterly opposed to resisting fascism. All these attitudes, we are told, “gave birth to the America First movement of the 1930’s,” which was anti-Semitic and even sometimes sympathetic to Nazism.

Contrary to Mr. Glasner’s analysis, . . . there was no uniform or continuous conservative position in favor of isolationism, which cut across the boundaries between Left and Right. This has been amply documented by historians like Manfred Jonas. American politics, until recently, were not as ideologically strait-jacketed as Mr. Glasner imagines. Conservatives generally favored intervention in World War I even more strongly than the Wilson administration, while the political Left opposed the war. Isolationist sentiment was overwhelming on both Right and Left by the 1930’s. Mr. Glasner seems to be under the mistaken impression that American liberals and leftists were champing at the bit to fight Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, but that was far from the case. . . .

There was no America First movement in the 1930’s—it would not have been needed at a time when most Americans were isolationist. It was created by liberal Republicans in 1940 precisely in order to fight the change in opinions then under way. The struggle against isolationism cut across, not between, Right and Left. Much of the Left opposed intervention in the war right up to Pearl Harbor, while conservatives formed the prominent interventionist Century Group. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox were anti-New Deal Republicans, while Southern Democrats were strongly interventionist.

Claims that America First was anti-Semitic, much less pro-Nazi, are smears. Strange as it may seem, there were Jews prominent in the organization, which was supported by liberals like Chester Bowles. Norman Thomas was associated with America First and spoke at its rallies. Does Mr. Glasner think that Norman Thomas was an anti-Semite, or would have associated with anti-Semites?

I dislike “defending” prewar isolationists, who were dangerously wrong-headed. But why this monomaniacal insistence . . . on identifying conservatism with isolationism, and insisting that the isolationists were not merely wrong, but bigots and fascists? It is hardly surprising that, as Mr. Glasner puts it, “free-flowing anger” pervades some branches of the conservative movement, in response to such abuses of the facts. . . .

Alan J. Levine
Kew Gardens Hills, New York

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To the Editor:

Try as he might, David Glasner fails to convert the late F.A. Hayek into a neoconservative. It would take a Herculean effort—if not dyslexia—to read Hayek’s voluminous work and find, as Mr. Glasner does, a “Hayekian agenda” consisting of global military activism, a rejection of “wholesale opposition to the New Deal,” and a wish to focus “government efforts on helping the least well-off. . . .” I can think of many people to whom that agenda could be attributed, . . . but Hayek is not among them. Mr. Glasner’s distortion of Hayek cannot be a mere innocent misreading. It sounds more like ideological axe-grinding.

Contrary to Mr. Glasner, the Hayekian agenda was primarily concerned with severely limiting government power so that the spontaneous social and market forces that emanate from the purposeful activities of free men and women may operate. For Hayek, limiting government power mostly meant restricting it to the maintenance of the rule of law, that framework of general rules within which individuals are free to do as they please.

It is at least curious that Mr. Glasner could write his article without mentioning Hayek’s essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (the postscript of The Constitution of Liberty), in which he criticized conservatives for seeking to use government power to impose their moral views on others. Readers may wish to look it up.

Mr. Glasner’s fixation on Hayek’s approval of guaranteed subsistence and his support of the U.S. war in Vietnam (people who knew him cannot recall any pronouncement on war or foreign policy) demonstrate a failure to distinguish the essential from the incidental. To be sure, Hayek accepted some social-welfare programs, which libertarians for good reason abhor. (Libertarians were always more enthusiastic about Hayek’s teacher, Ludwig von Mises, who rejected all such measures.) But social security or, for that matter, the bloated national-security state does not follow from the fundamentals of Hayek’s thought. Those fundamentals—including a conception of society as self-regulating, the indispensability of property rights, and a view of the competitive market as a discovery process—are what attract libertarians to Hayek.

As for Mr. Glasner’s uninformed assertions about the Old Right, suffice it to say that the leaders of this disparate group were neither anti-Semites nor Nazi sympathizers. The America First Committee barred known anti-Semites like Gerald L.K. Smith from membership (see Wayne Cole’s careful scholarship in America First). What motivated the Old Rightists was not fanaticism, but rather their individualistic and constitutional objection to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of ham-handed national bureaucracies that undermined private enterprise and his covert efforts to involve the United States in war while telling the American people the nation would remain at peace. The Old Right understood that Roosevelt had fundamentally changed America, the constitutional republic.

The fallacy of Mr. Glasner’s article becomes clear when one considers that the world view held by the leaders and inspirations of the Old Right—H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Robert A. Taft, Felix Morley, John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov—and the world view expressed in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom look remarkably alike.

Sheldon L. Richman
Woodbridge, Virginia

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David Glasner writes:

I accept the first two points in Gregory Johnson’s letter, though with some puzzlement at his belief that they conflict with anything I wrote. Concerning his third point, I will grant that instead of writing that Hayek’s philosophical skepticism was “decidedly incompatible with the religious beliefs to which a large segment of the conservative movement subscribes,” I ought to have written that his skepticism was “decidedly uncongenial to the religious sensibilities of a large segment of the conservative movement.”

Christopher C. Faille is most kind to praise my article generously despite his disagreement with a fundamental point. On that point, I can say only that his quarrel about it is not just with me but with Hayek, whose support for many government programs financed out of general tax revenues was explicit and unambiguous. Hayek’s point about the role of prices is that price adjustments implicitly communicate information to people about the availability of, and the demands for, resources, thereby inducing them mutually to adjust their activities so that their separate plans can be simultaneously realized. As long as price adjustment is not blocked by coercive restraints, prices, reflecting the impact of both taxes and government services financed by those taxes, can still perform this vital function. The wonder of the price system is that its capacity to perform this function is not undermined by the provision of various government services, so long as the government does not prevent people from voluntarily agreeing on the prices at which they will exchange goods and services.

Alan J. Levine accuses me of distorting the historical record of prewar conservatism, isolationism, and the America First movement. I did not intend to issue a blanket indictment of all prewar conservatives, isolationists, or America Firsters as anti-Semites and bigots. My mention of Senator Taft was thus not at all mysterious, but an acknowledgment that the Old Right did include individuals of the highest character who were untainted by either bigotry or the toleration of bigotry. And far from viewing American politics of that period as ideologically strait-jacketed, I characterized what passed for conservatism in the era as lacking sufficient coherence to be summarized by any clear set of principles. Nor can I detect even the hint of a suggestion in my article that there were no liberal isolationists, or that all liberals opposed Hitler.

I did not try to write a complete intellectual history of the period, but rather tried to explain Hayek’s crucial contribution in helping to transmute the isolationism, protectionism, and reaction of American conservatism into support for internationalism, responsible anti-Communism, and free trade. My aim was not to condemn the Old Right for its sins, but to show how Hayek allowed conservatives to escape from the ideological and programmatic dead end into which the isolationist, protectionist, and nativist tendencies of the Old Right had led them. On the other hand, I do condemn those, like Patrick J. Buchanan, who continue, even with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, to hold up the Old Right as a model for the future of conservatism.

Whatever Sheldon L. Richman may think of my motives, I had no desire, and certainly made no attempt, to convert Hayek into a neoconservative. I should have thought that this would have been clear from the five direct or indirect references I made to Hayek’s liberalism (in the still honorable European or 19th-century sense of that sadly abused term). My failure to mention Hayek’s wonderful essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” is therefore not curious in the least, nor does it derive from ulterior, and even sinister, motives (“Glasner’s distortion of Hayek cannot be a mere innocent misreading”).

Actually, the misreading is all by Mr. Richman, beginning with his misreading of my article. My characterization of the agenda of postwar American conservatism as Hayekian does not mean that I attributed this agenda to Hayek any more than calling a set of economic policies Keynesian means that one is attributing those policies to Keynes. The adjective “Hayekian” was calculated to underscore an affinity between the agenda I described and Hayek’s general outlook, in ironic contrast to the outright opposition of the Old Right to that agenda.

And Mr. Richman’s description of “the Hayekian agenda” shows that he has misread that, too. For Hayek, “limiting government power” categorically did not mean “restricting it to the maintenance of the rule of law”—a confusion which he repeatedly and explicitly warned against. As he wrote in Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

Far from advocating such a “minimal state,” we find it unquestionable that in an advanced society government ought to use its power of raising funds by taxation to provide a number of services which for various reasons cannot be provided, or cannot be provided adequately by the market.

Readers may wish to look up the entire chapter (“The Public Sector and the Private Sector”) from which this passage is quoted and decide for themselves whether support for some sort of government-sponsored social-security measures follows “from the fundamentals of Hayek’s thought.” What “limiting government power” meant to Hayek was not, as it means to libertarians like Mr. Richman, “restricting it to the maintenance of the rule of law,” but rather subjecting it to the rule of law and requiring that, in performing its service functions, government abide by the same rules that uniformly constrain everyone else.

It is hardly a fixation of mine to note differences between Hayek and libertarians that Mr. Richman himself, however grudgingly, cannot help acknowledging. The difference between us is that it pleases Mr. Richman to think that Hayek’s views on social-welfare spending were somehow aberrational, whereas I respect Hayek enough to take him seriously when he writes (in The Constitution of Liberty) that

though a few theorists have demanded that the activities of government should be limited to the maintenance of law and order, such a stand cannot be justified by the principle of liberty. Only the coercive measures of government need be strictly limited. [Emphasis added.]

Libertarians do, indeed, abhor such views, but they continue to embrace Hayek (albeit somewhat gingerly) as one of their own, preferring to ignore his heresies or to dismiss them as “incidental.”

Mr. Richman intimates a denial, without actually making one, of Hayek’s support for postwar anti-Communist foreign policy, which he pejoratively characterizes as a “bloated national-security state.” I know for a fact that Hayek supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, because he told me so in the first talk I ever had with him, on the Friday afternoon before the 1968 election when I was an undergraduate at UCLA and he was a visiting professor in the philosophy department. But though Hayek did not routinely make public pronouncements about foreign policy, it was never a secret among libertarians that he was a dedicated cold warrior. People who knew him should at least remember that much.

But Hayek was less of a cold warrior than that libertarian paragon Ludwig von Mises, who, with characteristic extremism, served on the advisory board of the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society! So far were Hayek and Mises from sharing Mr. Richman’s disdain for the “bloated national-security state” that they both justified military conscription as compatible with individual liberty. And Mises, again with characteristic extremism, called anyone “who in our age opposes armaments and conscription . . . an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all.”

There is at least one public pronouncement that Hayek did make on foreign policy which readers may want to look up. It was a letter to the editor of the London Times (January 12, 1980), deploring the failure of the United States government to have sent an ultimatum to the Iranian government saying that unless all the hostages were freed within 48 hours “bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian government.” Hayek insisted that in the long run lives would have been saved and peace promoted

if a government with the power to punish international evildoers had promptly done so. Is it not yet understood that the new international organizations do not yet possess this indispensable power?

The case for the role of the U.S. as the world’s policeman has rarely been stated more emphatically.

Mr. Richman asks us to consider the similarity between the world view of leaders and inspirations of the Old Right and the world view Hayek expressed in The Road to Serfdom. I am less impressed by the similarity than he. In fact, the world view Hayek, writing in the early 1940’s, expressed in The Road to Serfdom presupposed unqualified support for the struggle against Hitler and for the effort to wipe out, once and for all, the Nazi menace to Western civilization. That was not a view uniformly or enthusiastically shared by the leaders and inspirations of the Old Right, not because they were anti-Semites or Nazi sympathizers, but because they were unwavering isolationists. And since Hayek regarded Communism as no less a threat to civilization than Nazism, he supported the struggle against Communism as fervently as he did the war against Hitler. What is so troubling about many libertarians is that in their world view (adopted from the Old Right) neither World War II nor the cold war was justified or justifiable.