Band-man:
Red on the Inside
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BY DANIEL KLEIN
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
DKLEIN@GMU.EDU
Degovernmentalize now!
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 That’s Bryan’s central message.
 How does that happen?
 Government has at least one important and
necessary function:
Dismantling other governmental
functions!
 Democracy the least bad system …
 But why don’t voters call for
degovernmentalization?
The Hayekian Narrative
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1.
2.
3.
The EEA => Upper Paleolithic
10,000 years ago: Agriculture, settled society,
Rise of liberalism: 1400-1900.

4.
Liberal heyday 1759-1863.
Social Democratic Cultural Reaction:1848-1970.
Atavism: Reassertion of stage 1.

5.
Liberalism shattered
Cultural struggle ...
Hayek texts
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Collectivism as atavistic:
 “The Atavism of Social Justice,” New Studies in
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Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas,
1978.
Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol 2: The Mirage of Social
Justice, 1976, esp “The Discipline of Abstract Rules and
the Emotions of Tribal Society.”
“The Three Sources of Human Values,” Epilogue to Law,
Legislation and Liberty, Vol 3: The Political Order of a
Free People, 1979.
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988, esp
“Between Instinct and Reason”
Essay on David Hume, in Studies volume, 1967.
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The Environment of Evolutionary
Adaptation
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 Our genes haven’t changed much in 10,000 yrs
 Small groups, 20-100 people
 An organization
 Some hierarchy in allocation (“alpha male”)
 But otherwise quite equal: A gang
 “Anybody can kill anybody.”
 No growth, no trade with others
Selected mentality (following Rubin)
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 No appreciation of trade
 No conception of innovation or growth
 Resource access is zero-sum
 Envy and suspicion of consuming more than one’s
share
 No comprehension of consequences on modern scale
Epistemic instincts of the small band
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 I know everyone
 Everyone knows me
 No privacy
 Our alphas govern all
 Common experience
 Everyone knows THE WAY THINGS ARE. Common
knowledge.
Ethos of the small band
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Togetherness
Belonging
Encompassing sentiment, encompassing cooperation
Social organism
Solidarity
Democratic
Validation in the group
 Otherwise, you die: “Smack-down.”
 Group survival depends on expelling the misfits.
Intentionality makes an effect seen
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 In the simple familiar society, social outcomes are
intended or tolerated by the leader. Social outcomes
are amenable to principles of justice.
 In organizations, actors usually achieve their
intended goals. The intended is the seen.
The Mind of Band-man sees…
RATHER THAN…
 Society as…
 Intentional order
 Or organization
 Society as…
 Spontaneous order
 Ownership of the polity’s
 Ownership of the polity’s
resources as…

Public or collective
resources as…


Private
individuated
 Society as proceeding on
the basis of…

Common knowledge
 Society as proceeding on
the basis of…

Disjointed knowledge
The Mind of Band-man…
RATHER THAN…
 Yearns for…

The people’s romance
 Sees fairness in society as
a matter of…

Social justice
 Yearns for….

Club romance
 Sees fairness in society as
a matter of…

Procedural or
commutative justice
Rise of liberalism
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 Liberty: a logic of property and consent
 Negative: Like grammar, not like the rules for beautiful
writing
 Like a great “operating system”
Highlights of liberalism
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 John Locke
 Scot. Enlight: Hutcheson, Hume, Smith etc.
 The American founding, Paine, Mason, Jefferson
 American Abolitionists
 European 19th cent. liberals (many!)
 Social reform thru 19th century
Liberalism and democracy
 “It is today fairly generally recognized that the
programme of nineteenth-century liberalism contained
two distinct and in some ways even antagonistic
elements, liberalism proper and the democratic
tradition. … The uneasy partnership which the two
ideals kept during the nineteenth century should not
lead us to overlook their different character and
origin.” (Essay on Hume, Studies, 120).
Old Regime, Liberalism, and Social
Democracy
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Revolts against liberalism
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 Rousseau
 Marx
 Romantic, nationalistic, conservative, socialist, and
communist writers
 Social democrats, progressives
Evolved instincts no longer applicable
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 We have an evolved instinct for sweets.
 That instinct no longer applies.
 We learn to subdue it.
 We have Weight Watchers.
 We have evolved instincts for band ethos and
mentality.
 Those instincts no longer applies.
 Do we learn to subdue them?
 (We need State Watchers.)
The Social Democratic Cultural Reaction:
The soft version of the reversion
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 Band-man loves society-as-organization, but he does
not like hierarchy or dominance.
 How do they square the circle?
Democracy: de Tocqueville
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 “Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two conflicting passions:
they feel the need of guidance, and they long to stay free. Unable to
wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them
both together. Their imagination conceives a government which is
unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but elected by the people.
Centralization is combined with the sovereignty of the people. That
gives them a chance to relax. They console themselves for being
under schoolmasters by thinking that they have chosen them
themselves.”. Thus, citizens “are turned alternatively into the
playthings of the sovereign and into his masters, being greater than
kings and less than men” (694).
 “It was the Rousseauesque idea of democracy, his still
thoroughly rationalist conceptions of the social
contract and of popular sovereignty, which were to
submerge the ideals of liberty … It was Rousseau and
not Hume who fired the enthusiasm of the successive
revolutions which created modern government on the
Continent and guided the decline of the ideals of the
older liberalism and the approach to totalitarian
democracy in the whole world.” (Essay on Hume, Studies,
120.)
Hayek:
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 The traditional conception that the process of legislation was
especially hedged about with all kinds of limitations was
conceived to be a limitation only on the arbitrary powers of the
sovereign. These controls and limitations seemed unnecessary
once these powers had all been placed in the hands of the duly
elected democratic assembly. And all the wisdom assembled
over many centuries about the necessity of placing restrictions
on the power’s ultimate legislator was completely forgotten.
Once this had been achieved, power had been put in the hands of
the people and therefore it can no longer be abused. We are now
certain that the self-interest of the people will not allow them to
pass any laws which restrict their liberty. (Side A, FEE tape)
Language subversion
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 Schumpeter : “As a supreme if unintended
compliment, the enemies of the system of private
enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its
name.”
 Hayek speaks of “that pseudo-liberalism which in
the course of the last generation has arrogated the
name.” He describes their thinking as “profoundly
antiliberal.”
(1954, 394)
(1976, 44)
The subversion of liberal semantics
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 The language changers were explicit and conscious
about it. “New Freedom”, “New Liberalism”.
 The true liberals were very conscious and disturbed.
Undermining of language
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 Confucius (as dubiously quoted by
Hayek):
When words lose their meaning
people lose their liberty.
Subverted words
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Freedom
Liberty
Liberalism
Justice
Rights
Law
Rule of law
Equity
Equality
Property
Contract
Example: justice
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Justice Violation Form
1.
Scott Peterson
acted unjustly against
2.
Scott Peterson
committed the following unjust act: murder
3. The act of
justice:
murder
Self-ownership
Laci Peterson
violates the following principle (or rule) of
“Social justice”
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 “Homelessness is a growing social injustice in the
United States.”
 Doesn’t work as a system of justice.
Managing our instincts
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 Our genetic inheritance is all we have to work with.
 The expression of an instinct is atavistic only if it
doesn’t fit the modern context.
 UP WITH
 Private,
voluntary communion
 Private, voluntary solidarity
 Private, voluntary distributive justice
Managing our instincts
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Learn to accept and appreciate:
 Disjointed knowledge
 Unintended consequences
 Commutative justice
 Private ownership
 Spontaneous order
Learn to be wary of:
 The people’s romance
 Social justice
The end
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 Thank you for your attention.