"Liberal"
A couple recent posts in streonwold and k_calypso's journals got me thinking and I got out the copy of the F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom that I borrowed from fox_sejant (and really should give back to him, along with his copies of The Victory of Reason and The Killing of History - Sorry, Joel).
This is the kind of book where I actually read this introduction, and the 1994 edition has one by Milton Friedman which begins by extensively quoting the introduction he wrote for the 1971 German edition of the book. A footnote caught my eye:
"(Added in 1994.) I use the term liberal, as Hayek does in the book, and also in his Preface to the 1956 Paperback Edition, in the original nineteenth-century sense of limited government and free markets, not in the corrupted sense it has acquired in the United States, in which it means almost the opposite."
This is the section the footnote applies to:
"As Hayek so persuasively demonstrates, these values require an individualistic society. They can be achieved only in a liberal order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework within which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives. The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy."
Friedman then continues:
"Unfortunately, the relationship between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood. Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction. It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise -- easy to come by and satisfying as well. To understand why it is that 'good' men in positions of power produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating the emotions to the rational faculty. Surely that is one answer to the perennial mystery of why collectivism, with its demonstrated record of producing tyranny and misery, is so widely regarded as superior to individualism, with its demonstrated record of producing freedom and plenty. The argument for collectivism is simple if false: it is an immediate emotional arguement. The argument for individualism is sublte and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals."
Ouch.
This is the kind of book where I actually read this introduction, and the 1994 edition has one by Milton Friedman which begins by extensively quoting the introduction he wrote for the 1971 German edition of the book. A footnote caught my eye:
"(Added in 1994.) I use the term liberal, as Hayek does in the book, and also in his Preface to the 1956 Paperback Edition, in the original nineteenth-century sense of limited government and free markets, not in the corrupted sense it has acquired in the United States, in which it means almost the opposite."
This is the section the footnote applies to:
"As Hayek so persuasively demonstrates, these values require an individualistic society. They can be achieved only in a liberal order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework within which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives. The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy."
Friedman then continues:
"Unfortunately, the relationship between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood. Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction. It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise -- easy to come by and satisfying as well. To understand why it is that 'good' men in positions of power produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating the emotions to the rational faculty. Surely that is one answer to the perennial mystery of why collectivism, with its demonstrated record of producing tyranny and misery, is so widely regarded as superior to individualism, with its demonstrated record of producing freedom and plenty. The argument for collectivism is simple if false: it is an immediate emotional arguement. The argument for individualism is sublte and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals."
Ouch.