I have spent much of the last six months with John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, two apostles of freedom.
The two offered two very different justifications of freedom. Their ultimate conclusions are pretty close - but intriguingly different.
Mill was a romantic about choosers (about you and me, and what we know, and what we are capable of), while Hayek was not a romantic about choosers at all (not close). He was a romantic, or something like that, about undesigned orders and traditions, and a skeptic about planners.
Mill put a bright spotlight on individuals, their knowledge, their potential, and their agency. Hayek put a bright spotlight on markets and traditions, and on government planners and what they cannot know.
Hayek was a bit obsessed with Mill, and highly critical of him. Occasionally he was even a bit nasty about him, I think. It’s a long and intriguing story.
I am tempted to say that Hayek was formed, in large part, by Austrian economics, fascism, communism, and socialism, and that that simple fact helps explain the difference between them. But I know that’s too simple. I am tempted to say that Mill was formed, in large part, by Harriet Taylor, and by the effect of their intense relationship, and the scandal it caused, on his life. But I know that’s too simple as well. More on this below.
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Conclusions first.
Mill of course supported the Harm Principle: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
Hayek did not think that the Harm Principle was far off, but he had two objections.
In a sense, Hayek thought that the Harm Principle would protect too much. Here Hayek distinguished his own view from Mill’s, noting that Mill “directed his heaviest attack against such ‘moral coercion.’” In Hayek’s view, Mill “probably overstated the case for liberty.” That is a wow. Hayek was not famous for complaining that people overstated the case for liberty.
(For Mill, it was very important that the Harm Principle extended to “moral coercion.” He was much concerned about that.)
Hayek also thought that the Harm Principle would protect too little. Hayek urged that Mill left the door too open to official coercion. If I don’t laugh at your jokes, have I harmed you?
Hayek did say that “the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.” That sounds close to Mill, and it might even be seen as an effort to update Mill and to be more precise; “interfere with the protected sphere of other people” is more careful than “harm to others.” But the passage goes by very quickly, and there is no sustained analysis, here or anywhere else, of Mill’s account of liberty.
The most specific statements can be found in The Constitution of Liberty, where Hayek notes that Mill offered “a distinction between actions that affect only the acting person and those which also affect others.”
Hayek said that the distinction “has not proved very useful,” because “there is hardly any action that may not conceivably affect others.” If I do not buy your product, I have harmed you; if you do not like me, you have harmed me. For Hayek, the Harm Principle could be a license for all sorts of coercion.
Hayek urged that “the important question is whether the actions of other people that we wish to see prevented would actually interfere with the reasonable expectations of the protected person.”
Okay, then: instead of harm, “reasonable expectations of the protected person.”
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That raises its own questions, of course. What are those reasonable expectations? Hayek was clear that “the pleasure or pain that may be caused by the knowledge of other people’s actions should never be regarded as a legitimate cause for coercion.” But that does not tell us how to identify “the reasonable expectations of the protected person.”
Hayek’s useful phrase here is “the protected sphere of other people”; that captures his alternative to the Harm Principle. But to know what that protected sphere is, we need a theory of entitlements – of rights that you have against other people. Hayek did not supply that theory, though he surely knew that he needed one. (I speculate that he would have thought that undesigned orders, and the common law, were helpful here.)
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Now to the matter of justification. Mill offered several distinct arguments for freedom, and he ran some of them together. Only one looks at all Hayekian. We will get there at the end.
a. The epistemic argument. Mill emphasized what choosers know, and what outsiders, including those responsible for law, do not know. He insisted that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and that the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”
Mill added, “the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.”
Here, then, is an insistence on the informational advantages of choosers (“means of knowledge”) over those who seek to choose for them.
When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, Mill urged, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.”Mill’s chief goal was to ensure that people’s lives go well (he was a utilitarian, after all, though a complicated one), and he contended that the best solution is for outsiders to allow people to find their own paths, so long as there is no harm to others.
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b. The argument from individuality as part of welfare. Mill also made a different point, emphasizing that “the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being” and indeed that “it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things.” This is an argument about individuality.
c. The argument from learning and self-development. Mill sometimes combined the argument from individuality with a separate argument about learning and development of the faculties. Thus he insisted that “human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best.”
Mill added that conformity to custom “does not educate or develop . . . any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being.. . . . The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.”
These are points about individual self-development, and one could easily argue that self-development and individuality are Mill’s central concerns. Thus Mill also said, “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.”
This is not an argument that choosers know better than outsiders. It is an argument about learning, self-development, and employment of the faculties.
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d. Social learning. Mill also made a point about social learning. Everyone can learn from diverse “experiments of living.” If people go their own way, all of us can learn from each of us.
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That last point gets closer to Hayek’s own arguments for liberty, but not nearly close enough.
Hayek did not make Mill’s epistemic argument, and he did not seem to like it much. His main claims pointed to the virtues of undesigned orders, which incorporate disposed knowledge, and the ignorance of planners.
Still, he did say this: “Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.” This is a strikingly Kantian formulation, not speaking of welfare at all; notice the use of the word “evil” and the objection to treating people as means rather than ends.
And indeed, Hayek seemed to embrace something like a Kantian, nonwelfarist foundation for freedom and against coercion. In his introduction to The Constitution of Liberty, he wrote, “Some readers will perhaps be disturbed by the impression that I do not take the value of individual liberty as an indisputable ethical presupposition and that, in trying to demonstrate its value, I am possibly making the argument in its support a matter of expediency. That would be a misunderstanding.”
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But at pivotal points, Hayek made an epistemic claim of his own, not at all rooted in “an indisputable ethical presupposition,” on behalf of liberty and against coercion. This is the claim that has made Hayek a defining figure, a critic at once of socialism, in all its forms, and of planning of all kinds. It is claim about undesigned orders, or spontaneous orders, and how much knowledge they incorporate.
He put the point concisely in The Constitution of Liberty: “The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.” Here’s something like Hayek’s koan: “Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design.”
These are points not about the epistemic excellence of choosers, or about individuality and self-development, but about the epistemic gaps of social planners, above all those involved in coercing people.
In the end, Hayek stood close to Mill. He thought that the best course was to let people find their own way, not because they always know best, but because free markets and undesigned orders help a lot, and because planners usually know worst.
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This, then, is the key difference between the two great theorists of freedom. Mill placed a spotlight on choosers - on what they know, what they could be, what they need, what they deserve. Hayek placed a spotlight on planners - on what they do not know.
Mill’s writing on liberty is passionate, and sometimes hot, and occasionally beautiful. Hayek’s writing on liberty is much colder though also of course immensely powerful. (And Mill did not know what Hayek knew.)
Mill’s views were formed in concert with Harriet Taylor, and I speculate that his writing had the energy it did, and the fierceness, in part because of the social pressure that their relationship encountered. (Taylor was married when they met.) Hayek’s views developed from Austrian economics, centered on the knowledge problem, and under the shadow of Nazi planners, communist planners, and socialist planners (which were, in Hayek’s view, essentially the same thing).
These are two faces of liberalism. They are complementary, not contradictory. You can agree with Mill, and you can also agree with Hayek. But still, the two show radically different sensibilities.