Selected Excerpts
Introduction
In the struggle for the moral support of the people of the world, the lack of firm beliefs puts the West at a great disadvantage. The mood of its intellectual leaders has long been characterized by disillusionment with its principles, disparagement of its achievements, and exclusive concern with the creation of “better worlds.” This is not a mood in which we can hope to gain followers.
But, since the matter of the ever recurring conflict between the economist and the other specialists will repeatedly come up in this book, I want to make it quite clear here that the economist can not claim special knowledge which qualifi es him to coordinate the efforts of all the other specialists.5 What he may claim is that his professional occupation with the prevailing confl icts of aims has made him more aware than others of the fact that no human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society and of the consequent need for an impersonal mechanism, not dependent on indi- vidual human judgments, which will coordinate the individual efforts.
Some readers will perhaps be disturbed by the impression that I do not take the value of individual liberty as an indisputable ethical presupposition and that, in trying to demonstrate its value, I am possibly making the argument in its support a matter of expediency. This would be a misunderstanding. But it is true that if we want to convince those who do not already share our moral suppositions, we must not simply take them for granted. We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condi- tion of most moral values.7
LIBERTY AND LIBERTIES
Even our tentative indication of what we shall mean by “freedom” will have shown that it describes a state which man living among his fellows may hope to approach closely but can hardly expect to realize perfectly. The task of a policy of freedom must therefore be to minimize coercion or its harmful effects, even if it cannot eliminate it completely.
The question of how many courses of action are open to a person is, of course, very important. But it is a different question from that of how far in acting he can follow his own plans and intentions, to what extent the pat- tern of his conduct is of his own design, directed toward ends for which he has been persistently striving rather than toward necessities created by others in order to make him do what they want. Whether he is free or not does not depend on the range of choice but on whether he can expect to shape his course of action in accordance with his present intentions, or whether somebody else has power so to manipulate the conditions as to make him act according to that person’s will rather than his own. Freedom thus presupposes that the individual has some assured private sphere, that there is some set of circumstances in his environment with which others cannot interfere.
The application of the concept of freedom to a collective rather than to individuals is clear when we speak of a people’s desire to be free from a for- eign yoke and to determine its own fate. In this case we use “freedom” in the sense of absence of coercion of a people as a whole. The advocates of indi- vidual freedom have generally sympathized with such aspirations for national freedom, and this led to the constant but uneasy alliance between the liberal and the national movements during the nineteenth century.
Whether or not I am my own master and can follow my own choice and whether the possibili- ties from which I must choose are many or few are two entirely different ques- tions. The courtier living in the lap of luxury but at the beck and call of his prince may be much less free than a poor peasant or artisan, less able to live his own life and to choose his own opportunities for usefulness.
It may well be that the benefi ts we receive from the liberty of all do not derive from what most people recognize as its effects; it may even be that lib- erty exercises its benefi cial effects as much through the discipline it imposes on us as through the more visible opportunities it offers.
In the sense in which we use the term, the penniless vag- abond who lives precariously by constant improvisation is indeed freer than the conscripted soldier with all his security and relative comfort. But if lib- erty may therefore not always seem preferable to other goods, it is a distinctive good that needs a distinctive name.
It is often objected that our concept of liberty is merely negative.29 This is true in the sense that peace is also a negative concept or that security or quiet or the absence of any particular impediment or evil is negative. It is to this class of concepts that liberty belongs: it describes the absence of a particular obstacle—coercion by other men. It becomes positive only through what we make of it. It does not assure us of any particular opportunities, but leaves it to us to decide what use we shall make of the circumstances in which we fi nd ourselves.
But that one should be allowed to do specifi c things is not liberty, though it may be called “a liberty”; and while liberty is compatible with not being allowed to do specifi c things, it does not exist if one needs permission for most of what one can do. The difference between liberty and liberties is that which exists between a condition in which all is permitted that is not pro- hibited by general rules and one in which all is prohibited that is not explic- itly permitted.
There were four rights which the attainment of freedom reg- ularly conferred. The manumission decrees normally gave the former slave, fi rst, “legal status as a protected member of the community”; second, “immu- nity from arbitrary arrest”; third, the right to “work at whatever he desires to do”; and, fourth, the right to “movement according to his own choice.”
Coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion.32 Free society has met this problem by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state33 and by attempting to limit this power of the state to instances where it is required to prevent coercion by private persons. This is possible only by the state’s protecting known private spheres of the individuals against interference by others and delimiting these private spheres, not by specifi c assignation, but by creating conditions under which the individual can determine his own sphere by relying on rules which tell him what the government will do in different types of situations.
THE CREATIVE POWERS OF A FREE CIVILIZATION
In other words, it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profi t from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual’s use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized so- ciety can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
Man prides himself on the increase in his knowledge. But, as a result of what he himself has created, the limitations of his conscious knowledge and therefore the range of ignorance signifi cant for his conscious action have constantly increased. Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that “the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science.”7 Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities.
Who will prove to possess the right combination of aptitudes and opportu- nities to fi nd the better way is just as little predictable as by what manner or process different kinds of knowledge and skill will combine to bring about a solution of the problem.8 The successful combination of knowledge and apti- tude is not selected by common deliberation, by people seeking a solution to their problems through a joint effort;9 it is the product of individuals imitating those who have been more successful and from their being guided by signs or symbols, such as prices offered for their products or expressions of moral or aesthetic esteem for their having observed standards of conduct—in short, of their using the results of the experiences of others.
Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a max- imum of opportunity for accidents to happen.11 These accidents occur in the combination of knowledge and attitudes, skills and habits, acquired by individ- ual men and also when qualifi ed men are confronted with the particular cir- cumstances which they are equipped to deal with. Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances.
Handwritten Notes
A scanned copy of my handwritten notes on The Constitution of Liberty, by Friedrich Hayek.