Bradley in DC
01-28-2008, 09:25 AM
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke/workshop/spring08/Studies_onthe_Abuse_andDecline_ofReason.pdf
Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
Editor’s Introduction
Bruce Caldwell
The Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek came to the London School of
Economics as a visiting professor in fall of 1931, and secured a permanent position as
the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics the following year. From late
1933 onwards, he toiled fitfully over a big book on capital theory, an endeavour that
was finally nearing completion in 1939. On August 27 of that year Hayek wrote a
letter to Fritz Machlup, an old friend from university days.1 He told him about his
plans for his next big research project, a wide-ranging historical investigation that
would incorporate intellectual history, methodology, and an analysis of social
problems, all aimed at shedding light on the consequences of socialism:
A series of case studies should come first, that would have as its starting
point certain problems of methodology and especially the relationship
between scientific method and social problems, leading to the fundamental
scientific principles of economic policy and ultimately to the consequences
of socialism. The series should form the basis of a systematic
intellectual historical investigation of the fundamental principles of the
social development of the last hundred years (from Saint-Simon to
Hitler).2
The date on the letter is significant. Four days earlier, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-
aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union had been signed. Five days
later Hitler would invade Poland. On September 3, England and France would
respond by declaring war on Germany. The Second World War was begun.
The war might well have stopped Hayek’s grand project in its tracks. Within a
week of England’s declaration Hayek had drafted a letter to the director general of the
British Ministry of Information offering his services. Describing himself as an “ex-
Austrian,” a University professor, and someone who had “for some time” been a
British subject (he had in fact been naturalised only the previous year), it was evident
that he wanted to make crystal clear both his credentials and his allegiances.
Accompanying the letter was a memo, “Some Notes on Propaganda in Germany”, that
contained a variety of suggestions about how to launch an effective propaganda
campaign in the German speaking countries.3 Among the recommendations was an
initiative that would seek to demonstrate to the German people, using German
sources, that the principles of liberal democracy now being defended by England and
France had also once been embraced by some of the great German poets and writers
of the past, a fact that had been effectively written out of German history since Bismarck’s time.4 Evidently envisioning a rôle for himself in the propaganda effort,
Hayek went on to say that “If such ‘historical instruction’ is to have a chance of
success it is absolutely essential that all historical references should be scrupulously
and even pedantically correct...”.5
Hayek would wait until December for his answer from the Ministry of
Information. How different his personal history might have been had the director
general accepted his offer! But it was not to be; the letter from the Ministry thanked
him for his proposals but failed to ask for his assistance. Instead of working for the
government as a propagandist, Hayek would begin writing the book that he had
described to Machlup just days before the war began.
Only parts of that grand project would ever be finished. The “series of case
studies” relating methodology and the scientific method to social problems that Hayek
mentioned first would ultimately become his essay, “Scientism and the Study of
Society”. The intellectual history part would never be completed: only his study of the
origins of scientism in France, which carried the title “The Counter-Revolution of
Science”, plus the short piece “Comte and Hegel”, would be published. Hayek got
sidetracked, first by the growth in scope of his “Scientism” essay, and then by his
decision to transform the last part of his project, the part on “the consequences of
socialism”, into a separate full length book. That volume would appear in 1944, and
would be called The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek’s larger book, had it been completed, would have carried the
provocative title, Studies in the Abuse and Decline of Reason, and that title has been
retained for this Collected Works edition. This introduction will tell the story of
Hayek’s greatest unfinished piece of work. It will document the sequence in which the
essays were created, explore some of their major themes, and examine some aspects
of Hayek’s intellectual history which will help to explain why he made the arguments
that he did. In the concluding sections a brief assessment of Hayek’s main theses will
be offered, and the significance of the Abuse of Reason project for the later
development of his ideas will be traced.
The Creation of the Essays
About ten months after his initial letter, in June 1940, Hayek wrote again to
Machlup about his new endeavour. His enthusiasm is transparent:
...so far as my time permits, I am already at work on my new book, a history
of the influence of scientific and technological development on social thought
and policy (to be called The Abuse and Decline of Reason) and have in the
course of the last year already worked out a fairly definite plan and done a
good deal of preliminary reading. It is a great subject and one could make a
great book of it. I believe indeed I have now found an approach to the subject
through which one could exercise some real influence. But whether I shall
ever be able to write it depends of course not only on whether one survives
this but also on the outcome of it all. If things go really badly I shall certainly
not be able to continue it here and since I believe that it is really important and
the best I can do for the future of mankind, I should then have to try to transfer
my activities elsewhere. Since at a later stage it may be difficult to write about
it, I have already sent copies of the outline of the first part to Haberler and
5
Lipmann (sic)6 as a basis of any future application to one of the foundations
for funds, and I am enclosing another copy with this letter. I am afraid it only
gives the historical skeleton round which the main argument is to be
developed, but I have not the peace of mind at the present moment to put the
outline of the argument itself on paper. The second part would of course be an
elaboration of the central argument of my pamphlet on Freedom and the
Economic System.7
It is clear from this passage that, in addition to being enthusiastic, Hayek also
thought that his project was a vitally important one: for a man not normally given to
hyperbole, “the best I can do for the future of mankind” is certainly an unexpected
phrasing. The dramatic choice of words presumably reflected his response to the
recent course of the war. The ‘phoney war’ had ended dramatically on May 10, 1940,
when Hitler invaded France and the low countries. Hayek was writing only three
weeks after the British Expeditionary Force and its allies had just barely avoided
annihilation or capture on the beaches of Dunkirk. He was worried about whether he
would survive the war, and perhaps even about which side would win, and was
convinced that this was his best means for making a real contribution to the war
effort.
The outline he included shows that he had established where he wanted to go
with the book, even to the point of creating titles for the first eighteen chapters. The
subtitle and title of Part I reveal his major theme: the abuse and decline of reason was
caused by hubris, by man’s pride in his ability to reason, which in Hayek’s mind had
been heightened by the rapid advance and multitudinous successes of the natural
sciences, and the attempt to apply natural science methods in the social sciences. The
letter also indicates that he had already decided that the second part of the book, to be
titled “The Totalitarian Nemesis”, was to be an expansion of the themes found in his
1939 article “Freedom and the Economic System”.8
[...]
58
Finally, in his own mind at least, Hayek saw a connection between the Abuse
and Decline of Reason project and his last book, The Fatal Conceit, which was
published in 1988, only four years before his death. On a file card dated May 22,
1985, Hayek described the manuscript on which he was then working as follows:
“This is to be the final outcome of what I planned about 1938 as The Abuse and
Decline of Reason and of the conclusions which I published in 1944, the sketch on
The Road to Serfdom. It is a work for which one has to be an economist but this is not
enough!”122
This allows us to conclude by pointing out a final irony. As we have shown, a
great deal of Hayek’s subsequent work, either directly or indirectly, had a connection
to his great unfinished war effort. The book was, it would seem, left uncompleted in
name only.
Bruce Caldwell
Greensboro, North Carolina
January 2007
Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason
Editor’s Introduction
Bruce Caldwell
The Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek came to the London School of
Economics as a visiting professor in fall of 1931, and secured a permanent position as
the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics the following year. From late
1933 onwards, he toiled fitfully over a big book on capital theory, an endeavour that
was finally nearing completion in 1939. On August 27 of that year Hayek wrote a
letter to Fritz Machlup, an old friend from university days.1 He told him about his
plans for his next big research project, a wide-ranging historical investigation that
would incorporate intellectual history, methodology, and an analysis of social
problems, all aimed at shedding light on the consequences of socialism:
A series of case studies should come first, that would have as its starting
point certain problems of methodology and especially the relationship
between scientific method and social problems, leading to the fundamental
scientific principles of economic policy and ultimately to the consequences
of socialism. The series should form the basis of a systematic
intellectual historical investigation of the fundamental principles of the
social development of the last hundred years (from Saint-Simon to
Hitler).2
The date on the letter is significant. Four days earlier, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-
aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union had been signed. Five days
later Hitler would invade Poland. On September 3, England and France would
respond by declaring war on Germany. The Second World War was begun.
The war might well have stopped Hayek’s grand project in its tracks. Within a
week of England’s declaration Hayek had drafted a letter to the director general of the
British Ministry of Information offering his services. Describing himself as an “ex-
Austrian,” a University professor, and someone who had “for some time” been a
British subject (he had in fact been naturalised only the previous year), it was evident
that he wanted to make crystal clear both his credentials and his allegiances.
Accompanying the letter was a memo, “Some Notes on Propaganda in Germany”, that
contained a variety of suggestions about how to launch an effective propaganda
campaign in the German speaking countries.3 Among the recommendations was an
initiative that would seek to demonstrate to the German people, using German
sources, that the principles of liberal democracy now being defended by England and
France had also once been embraced by some of the great German poets and writers
of the past, a fact that had been effectively written out of German history since Bismarck’s time.4 Evidently envisioning a rôle for himself in the propaganda effort,
Hayek went on to say that “If such ‘historical instruction’ is to have a chance of
success it is absolutely essential that all historical references should be scrupulously
and even pedantically correct...”.5
Hayek would wait until December for his answer from the Ministry of
Information. How different his personal history might have been had the director
general accepted his offer! But it was not to be; the letter from the Ministry thanked
him for his proposals but failed to ask for his assistance. Instead of working for the
government as a propagandist, Hayek would begin writing the book that he had
described to Machlup just days before the war began.
Only parts of that grand project would ever be finished. The “series of case
studies” relating methodology and the scientific method to social problems that Hayek
mentioned first would ultimately become his essay, “Scientism and the Study of
Society”. The intellectual history part would never be completed: only his study of the
origins of scientism in France, which carried the title “The Counter-Revolution of
Science”, plus the short piece “Comte and Hegel”, would be published. Hayek got
sidetracked, first by the growth in scope of his “Scientism” essay, and then by his
decision to transform the last part of his project, the part on “the consequences of
socialism”, into a separate full length book. That volume would appear in 1944, and
would be called The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek’s larger book, had it been completed, would have carried the
provocative title, Studies in the Abuse and Decline of Reason, and that title has been
retained for this Collected Works edition. This introduction will tell the story of
Hayek’s greatest unfinished piece of work. It will document the sequence in which the
essays were created, explore some of their major themes, and examine some aspects
of Hayek’s intellectual history which will help to explain why he made the arguments
that he did. In the concluding sections a brief assessment of Hayek’s main theses will
be offered, and the significance of the Abuse of Reason project for the later
development of his ideas will be traced.
The Creation of the Essays
About ten months after his initial letter, in June 1940, Hayek wrote again to
Machlup about his new endeavour. His enthusiasm is transparent:
...so far as my time permits, I am already at work on my new book, a history
of the influence of scientific and technological development on social thought
and policy (to be called The Abuse and Decline of Reason) and have in the
course of the last year already worked out a fairly definite plan and done a
good deal of preliminary reading. It is a great subject and one could make a
great book of it. I believe indeed I have now found an approach to the subject
through which one could exercise some real influence. But whether I shall
ever be able to write it depends of course not only on whether one survives
this but also on the outcome of it all. If things go really badly I shall certainly
not be able to continue it here and since I believe that it is really important and
the best I can do for the future of mankind, I should then have to try to transfer
my activities elsewhere. Since at a later stage it may be difficult to write about
it, I have already sent copies of the outline of the first part to Haberler and
5
Lipmann (sic)6 as a basis of any future application to one of the foundations
for funds, and I am enclosing another copy with this letter. I am afraid it only
gives the historical skeleton round which the main argument is to be
developed, but I have not the peace of mind at the present moment to put the
outline of the argument itself on paper. The second part would of course be an
elaboration of the central argument of my pamphlet on Freedom and the
Economic System.7
It is clear from this passage that, in addition to being enthusiastic, Hayek also
thought that his project was a vitally important one: for a man not normally given to
hyperbole, “the best I can do for the future of mankind” is certainly an unexpected
phrasing. The dramatic choice of words presumably reflected his response to the
recent course of the war. The ‘phoney war’ had ended dramatically on May 10, 1940,
when Hitler invaded France and the low countries. Hayek was writing only three
weeks after the British Expeditionary Force and its allies had just barely avoided
annihilation or capture on the beaches of Dunkirk. He was worried about whether he
would survive the war, and perhaps even about which side would win, and was
convinced that this was his best means for making a real contribution to the war
effort.
The outline he included shows that he had established where he wanted to go
with the book, even to the point of creating titles for the first eighteen chapters. The
subtitle and title of Part I reveal his major theme: the abuse and decline of reason was
caused by hubris, by man’s pride in his ability to reason, which in Hayek’s mind had
been heightened by the rapid advance and multitudinous successes of the natural
sciences, and the attempt to apply natural science methods in the social sciences. The
letter also indicates that he had already decided that the second part of the book, to be
titled “The Totalitarian Nemesis”, was to be an expansion of the themes found in his
1939 article “Freedom and the Economic System”.8
[...]
58
Finally, in his own mind at least, Hayek saw a connection between the Abuse
and Decline of Reason project and his last book, The Fatal Conceit, which was
published in 1988, only four years before his death. On a file card dated May 22,
1985, Hayek described the manuscript on which he was then working as follows:
“This is to be the final outcome of what I planned about 1938 as The Abuse and
Decline of Reason and of the conclusions which I published in 1944, the sketch on
The Road to Serfdom. It is a work for which one has to be an economist but this is not
enough!”122
This allows us to conclude by pointing out a final irony. As we have shown, a
great deal of Hayek’s subsequent work, either directly or indirectly, had a connection
to his great unfinished war effort. The book was, it would seem, left uncompleted in
name only.
Bruce Caldwell
Greensboro, North Carolina
January 2007