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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
72 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
for a rationalist groundwork for liberty. While Hayek has
improved on his previous draft slightly, in richness of material
and in qualifying particularly poor passages, there is no
substantive change in his position. As before, Hayek begins
very well in the first chapter by defining freedom as meaning
“absence of coercion,” but fails badly in defining “coercion.”
For Hayek, “coercion” is defined as arbitrary, specifically
harmful acts; the term is thus used much more broadly
and yet more narrowly than its proper definition: “the use of
violence.” Hence, Hayek can say that for a factory to fire a
worker in a place where unemployment is heavy—or to
threaten to fire him—is an act of “coercion,” on the same
level as actual acts of violence.
Hayek’s only principle of noncoercion for government is
the “rule of law,” on which he places exclusive reliance. In
such a chapter as chapter 16, “The Decline of the Law,”
Hayek is excellent in attacking modern legal philosophers
who push the state in a socialistic direction beyond the rule:
such as Kelsen and the legal positivists, and Harold Laski. 21
However, Hayek spends virtually equal emphasis on attacking
those who would narrow the rule to limit government
activity to defense of life, liberty, and property. Hayek
attacks this as an “extreme,” unduly narrow, etc., view of
the role of government. To Hayek, laissez-faire is almost as
bad an outgrowth of “rationalism” as is socialism.
This book makes clear to me, as the first fourteen chapters
of the draft did not, that Hayek’s rule of law limits are
21 Harold Laski (1893–1950) was an English political theorist
and professor of political science at the London School of Economics
from 1926 to 1950. He was convinced that socialism in England
had been more greatly influenced by John Stuart Mill than by Karl
Marx, and he taught a kind of modified Marxism. He was a member
of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee between 1937
and 1949 and significantly influenced its policy. He was chairman of
the Labour Party from 1945 to 1946. He wrote A Grammar of Politics
(1925); Liberty in the Modern State (1930); Reflections on the
Revolution of Our Time (1943); and The American Democracy
(1948).