A very nice essay. I appreciate how you link Churchill’s reflection to the fundamental issues of the disenchantment of modernity and the issue of negative versus positive freedom. It neatly defines the challenge of modernity for liberalism. I think you also hit the nail on the head with Hayek’s response. But I think Hayek’s equation of the anonymity of market outcomes, with the anonymity of natural forces, is just ducking the issue.
The anonymity of the market is fundamentally not like that of nature. Perhaps in some state of nature of perfect freedom and equality, or idealized perfect competition with infinite buyers and sellers, the outcomes would simply be a matter of luck as much as being struck by lightning. But once one person succeeds in the market while others do not (whether by pure luck or the luck of natural talent) they can and will use that wealth to create an ongoing superior economic, social and political status for themselves and their heirs (assuming the law of property, which is coercively enforced, allows them to). They may not be using their power as an individual to directly coerce other individuals, but as a class, the collective power of the wealthy is socially, politically, and economically coercive of the poorer class (oppressive if you like).
By contrast, being struck by flood, fire, or lightning does not per se have the affect of making you more or less likely to be struck by it in the future. This is not Marx, it is just Rousseau’s analysis in the Second Discourse and you can find elements of it in Smith and Mill. CB MacPherson makes this point about the stiltedness of Hayek’s definition of coercion and freedom in his review of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty. Even Hayek’s Mont Pelerin buddy, Frank Knight, criticizes Hayek on just this point in Laissez Faire Pro and Con: “Obviously, in exchange and other formally free relations, great inequality of power - which is the only issue, whatever the form - gives the stronger party some control over the weaker and may mean his helplessness. But for Hayek, even that does not prove coercion. He does not note that inequality tends to grow, especially economic; for one who at a moment possesses more wealth is in a better position to acquire still more. And free inheritance continues the tendency over generations. The facts have forced preventive or offsetting social action on a vast scale. The tendency is not disproved, as has sometimes been alleged, by the modern rough statistical constancy of the ratios between larger and smaller incomes. If all have grown at about the same rate, the differences grow at that rate, and it is differences not ratios that are felt, since they determine what the richer families can do and the poorer cannot.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 75, No. 6 (Dec., 1967), p.791
In Western society, the freer we've become, the colder we've gotten.
The philosopher Schopenhauer uses the image of porcupines huddled together in the cold for warmth. At first they try huddling close together but they poke each other with their quills. So they each move backwards and settle into a comfortable middle distance. That's a symbol of our society: good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes.
In more traditional societies, like Brazil for example, what they lack in wealth and freedom they make up for in social warmth and creative community. That's what we've lost in America and in the West, we know only the cold freedom of hard work and puritan individualism.
But we can recover warmth in society if we're willing to rearrange our values. Vitality and Imagination are two secular sources of warmth. If we can reform democratic society so that it's based on cooperation and association rooted in mutual imagination and experimental creativity, then we have a secular basis for a new high-energy society and not a dead cold one.
A very nice essay. I appreciate how you link Churchill’s reflection to the fundamental issues of the disenchantment of modernity and the issue of negative versus positive freedom. It neatly defines the challenge of modernity for liberalism. I think you also hit the nail on the head with Hayek’s response. But I think Hayek’s equation of the anonymity of market outcomes, with the anonymity of natural forces, is just ducking the issue.
The anonymity of the market is fundamentally not like that of nature. Perhaps in some state of nature of perfect freedom and equality, or idealized perfect competition with infinite buyers and sellers, the outcomes would simply be a matter of luck as much as being struck by lightning. But once one person succeeds in the market while others do not (whether by pure luck or the luck of natural talent) they can and will use that wealth to create an ongoing superior economic, social and political status for themselves and their heirs (assuming the law of property, which is coercively enforced, allows them to). They may not be using their power as an individual to directly coerce other individuals, but as a class, the collective power of the wealthy is socially, politically, and economically coercive of the poorer class (oppressive if you like).
By contrast, being struck by flood, fire, or lightning does not per se have the affect of making you more or less likely to be struck by it in the future. This is not Marx, it is just Rousseau’s analysis in the Second Discourse and you can find elements of it in Smith and Mill. CB MacPherson makes this point about the stiltedness of Hayek’s definition of coercion and freedom in his review of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty. Even Hayek’s Mont Pelerin buddy, Frank Knight, criticizes Hayek on just this point in Laissez Faire Pro and Con: “Obviously, in exchange and other formally free relations, great inequality of power - which is the only issue, whatever the form - gives the stronger party some control over the weaker and may mean his helplessness. But for Hayek, even that does not prove coercion. He does not note that inequality tends to grow, especially economic; for one who at a moment possesses more wealth is in a better position to acquire still more. And free inheritance continues the tendency over generations. The facts have forced preventive or offsetting social action on a vast scale. The tendency is not disproved, as has sometimes been alleged, by the modern rough statistical constancy of the ratios between larger and smaller incomes. If all have grown at about the same rate, the differences grow at that rate, and it is differences not ratios that are felt, since they determine what the richer families can do and the poorer cannot.” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 75, No. 6 (Dec., 1967), p.791
In Western society, the freer we've become, the colder we've gotten.
The philosopher Schopenhauer uses the image of porcupines huddled together in the cold for warmth. At first they try huddling close together but they poke each other with their quills. So they each move backwards and settle into a comfortable middle distance. That's a symbol of our society: good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes.
In more traditional societies, like Brazil for example, what they lack in wealth and freedom they make up for in social warmth and creative community. That's what we've lost in America and in the West, we know only the cold freedom of hard work and puritan individualism.
But we can recover warmth in society if we're willing to rearrange our values. Vitality and Imagination are two secular sources of warmth. If we can reform democratic society so that it's based on cooperation and association rooted in mutual imagination and experimental creativity, then we have a secular basis for a new high-energy society and not a dead cold one.