A fine example of true irony: Hayek on constructivist rationalism

(Rodrigo Pealoza, july 2015)

Before I say what it is, let me first draw some background. In the first volume
of his masterpiece "Law, Legislation, and Liberty", Hayek argues that many human
institutions are not the result of deliberate will put into action for the sole
purpose of deliberate ends. These institutions are social norms that come to li
ght in an evolutionary way and our compliance to them can even be unconscious. T
his is called spontaneous order. Unfortunately, simple as this idea is, many sch
olars still don't understand it clearly. Indeed, it makes absolutely no sense to
claim that primitive humans started to bury their dead together with their belo
ngings because some enlightened individual enforced this behavior upon them as a
n act of law in the first place. Archaeology shows this behavior to have arisen
simultaneously in different places and independently through time. The invention
of writing is another case in point. It began with the drawing of some pictoria
l symbols. The first human to do it had certainly no intention of creating a who
le alphabet and a written language. In addition, there were actually many people
who did it for the "first time" in different places and through time. The most
obvious example, however, is trade. The exchange of objects among people is not
the result of a deliberate purpose. I have to be clear on this. It was not the w
ill of some neanderthal chief to impose trade as an act of law. What Hayek says
is, there are institutions created deliberately for some end, but there also soc
ial norms. The idea of social norms has been the object of much research in Econ
omics, specially by game-theorists. The main conclusion is that a social norm en
forces itself as a Nash equilibrium in a dynamic game (this is called a subgame
perfect Nash equilibrium). This is one step towards Hayek, though there still re
mains a fundamental difference not easy to overcome: for Hayek the submission to
social norms may not be entirely based on rational grounds, in the sense that i
t is indeed impossible to gather all the elements to substantiate a rational syl
logism; a big chunk of it is simply tradition, not-thought-of habit. It is just
a matter of fragmented knowledge. On the other side of the spectrum there are th
ose who navely believe that any institution and social norms alike are the sole c
reation of some powerful mind who thoroughly thought so deeply about it and who
was so divinely capable of foreseeing their consequences, and so broadly, that t
he institution be so created for the ends he foresaw, as if society, with its mi
llions of people, were just a machine under his control. These are the construct
ivist rationalists. Theirs is an old belief in the intellectual world. The idea
of spontaneous order is much newer, it is from the XVIII century. Though Hayek h
imself traces elements of it in pre-Socratic philosophers, I disagree and claim
that this idea precedes Greek philosophical thinking and can be traced to pre-cl
assical Greek culture, but this is not something I will go into here. Back to Ha
yek, in the following excerpt from Hayek's treatise he explains it further:
"The great thinker from whom the basic ideas of what we shall call constructivis
t rationalism received their most complete expression was Rene Descartes. But wh
ile he refrained from drawing the conclusions from them for social and moral arg
uments, these were mainly elaborated by his slightly older (but much more long-l
ived) contemporary, Thomas Hobbes. Although Descartes' immediate concern was to
establish criteria for the truth of propositions, these were inevitably also app
lied by his followers to judge the appropriateness and justification of actions.
The 'radical doubt' which made him refuse to accept anything as true which coul
d not be logically derived from explicit premises that were 'clear and distinct'
, and therefore beyond possible doubt, deprived of validity all those rules of c
onduct which could not be justified in this manner. Although Descartes himself c
ould escape the consequences by ascribing such rules of conduct to the design of
an omniscient deity, for those among his followers to whom this no longer seeme
d an adequate explanation the acceptance of anything which was based merely on t
radition and could not be fully justified on rational grounds appeared as an irr
ational superstition. The rejection as 'mere opinion' of all that could not be d
emonstrated to be true by his criteria became the dominant characteristic of the
movement which he started."
It is clear that Hobbes and other social-contractarian thinkers extended the car

tesian rationality to fields not previously intended to: the social and moral fi
eld. I don't have much more to say about it, other than exposing the source of c
onfusion many people fall into regarding the meaning of spontaneous order. Reaso
n either can do anything or does not. We either believe human beings act solely
on conscious reasoning, never on the basis of unconscious habits and traditions,
or we believe that some human behavior is not thought of and is not thought of
that it was not thought of. I am not repeating myself: "not thinking of" of "not
thinking of" is epistemological formal language. Brake this infinite chain and
you are bound to be irrational.
The irony? I only need this: "The great thinker from whom the basic ideas of wha
t we shall call constructivist rationalism received their most complete expressi
on was Rene Descartes. But while he refrained from drawing the conclusions from
them for social and moral arguments, these were mainly elaborated by his slightl
y older (but much more long-lived) contemporary, Thomas Hobbes". Hayek was smart
enough to explain the flaws of constructivist rationalism in the previous secti
on of the chapter and how it is a little older intellectual belief. He also show
s it has received extra injection of life in our era. When he says that Hobbes i
s slightly older than Descartes but lived much longer, he was using Hobbes's age
and long life as a metonimy for the idea Hobbes elaborated upon. This is a fine
piece of irony indeed. We simply can't be sure weather he was only writing a gr
ammatical apposition or really making a metonimy out of Hobbes. I have given iro
ny some thought recently and came to the conclusion that irony is undecipherable
. Irony requires intelligence and we can never be fully secure about its meaning
. This is what differentiates irony from debauchery. Debauchery is obvious, quit
e often grotesque. It is a sad thing that nowadays the popular debate among econ
omists is built on debouchery, as if it were a sign of brilliance.