Hayek and the Intellectuals
June 25, 2014 in Economics
In the past week there has been a hugely entertaining brouhaha on Peter Boettke’s Face Book page concerning the most fruitful approach to promoting libertarian social change. It seems to have been precipitated by an irritated Boettke hectoring youthful libertarian activists for adopting a populist “flattened structure of production” model of propagating libertarian ideas while ignoring Boettke’s preferred IHS model of an elitist, top-down “intellectual structure of production.” In the populist model, broadly libertarian ideas are directly absorbed by people in all professions and walks of life and directly “messaged” to their peers. In the IHS-elitist model the only libertarian ideas worthy of dissemination are those that are created and approved by scholars, invariably academics, at the pinnacle of the intellectual “pyramid of social change” and then carefully prepared for public consumption by the” lower-stage” intellectuals in libertarian-leaning think tanks, libertarian media “communicators,” and designated top-level activists or “actuators.” The blueprint for this IHS model is commonly attributed to Friedrich A. Hayek, who purportedly developed it in his 1945 article, “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” As Boettke’s argues:
Hayek is pretty crystal clear in that essay in his desire to inspire a new generation of philosophical thinkers to explore the foundations of a free society…. If you have doubts let’s go to the text. Second-hand dealers are a by-product of philosophical thinkers and policy results when the climate of opinion shifts. Re-read the text carefully PLEASE.
Now my purpose is not to adjudicate between the claims of these competing positions. I wish only to correct some of the profound distortions of Hayek’s views embodied in the Boettke-IHS position. Boettke exhorts his young opponents to re-read Hayek’s article carefully. But when one does so, it is clear that Boettke has gotten Hayek’s position exactly reversed. The intellectuals, who Hayek refers to as the “secondhand dealers in ideas” are not a “by-product” of the scholars, experts, and scientists who originate and refine ideas. To the contrary, according to Hayek, the intellectuals are an independent and powerful class, who create or suppress the popular reputations of the scholars by “exercising their censorship function” in choosing which new ideas to present to the public.
As Hayek (p. 376, 372-73) explains :
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the …read more
Source: MISES INSTITUTE
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