Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 67
Burke who led both the bloody and murderous war against the
French abroad and the tyrannical, liberty-destroying suppressions
at home—while it was Price and his Radical friends who
defended both domestic liberty and foreign isolationism.
Philosophically, Hayek, much as he denies it, is a conservative,
in the sense that he believes we must blindly follow
traditions even if we can’t defend them. He differs from
Kirk, et al., largely in a bad way, i.e., by adopting the opposite
fallacy that the case for liberty rests on the fact that we
know nothing, or very little, and must therefore keep the
roads open so that we can learn something. In short, Hayek
explicitly rests his case on man’s ignorance, differing from
Kirk who believes that at least tradition gives us some
knowledge. This is the J.S. Mill, H.B. Phillips, Gerald
Heard argument. 18 Of course, such a puny argument means
that, as civilization advances, and we get to know more and
more, the case for liberty becomes weaker and weaker. To
evade this conclusion, Hayek employs two contradictory
stratagems: (1) using the absurd and self-contradictory bromide
that “the more we know, the more we know how little
we know,” and (2) saying even if we do know more, we still
know less than we don’t know, i.e., we still know less than
50 percent of what there is to be known. How he knows this
is, of course, in the lap of the gods.
Both the Kirkian worship of the past and the Mill-Phillips
emphasis on man’s ignorance have one thing in common:
their attack on man’s reason. But how else could Hayek combine
two contradictory fallacies? In an interesting way:
through his knowledge of the free market. For to Hayek, the
market is an example of a social institution that works better
than any individual knows and is needed because of each
18 Gerald Heard (1889–1971). A historian and philosopher,
Heard studied at Cambridge and briefly taught at Oxford before
moving in 1937 to the United States. He briefly taught at Duke University
before founding Trabuco College in 1941. He was well known
for his evolutionary theory of human consciousness. See his works
The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Source of Civilization (1935),
and The Five Ages of Man (1963).