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John Gray and F. A. Hayek －Theory of Knowledge and Evolutionary Theory－

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John Gray and F. A. Hayek －Theory of Knowledge and Evolutionary Theory－ View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DSpace at Waseda University 33 社学研論集 Vol. 17 2011年３月 論 文 John Gray and F. A. Hayek －theory of knowledge and evolutionary theory－ Shota Mitsushima＊ Ⅰ．History and Philosophy John Gray was educated at the Exeter College, Oxford University, where he gained his Ph.D. ‘( Liberty and human nature in the liberal tradition’) and taught as a Fellow of Jesus College. He published a book titled Mill on liberty: A defence. And he brought out Hayek on Liberty. This book is originated in a monograph:‘ F.A. Hayek and the Rebirth of Classic Liberalism’ and published on the anniversary of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He set out in this book Hayek’s systematic and philosophical, particularly Kantian, characters. After this, he brought out Liberalism soon. This work consists of historical and philosophical parts, and its construction, it seems, gives us a key to understand his subsequent works. As he had been saturated with Mill and Hayek in those days, the conclusion of this book is as follows:“ no one can predict the outcome of the current revival of liberal thought. But, if there is hope for the future of liberty, it is in the fact that, as we approach the end of a century of political frenzy, we see a return to the wisdom of the great liberal writers. For it is in the works of the classical liberal thinkers that we have the most profound reflective response to the dangers and opportunities of the modern age.” [Gray 1986: 93]However, I think that he became more conscious of the fact that‘ the end of a century of political frenzy’ was one among many and mainly meant only an end of ideological conflict against Socialism for the meantime. In other words, we were seeing the demise of Socialism, against which Hayek, whose final work The fatal conceit is subtitled‘ the errors of Socialism’, had fought in his life. But we were not seeing the final stage in the development of the world. Therefore it seems that Gray has come up agaist historical events and has kept a philosophical enquiry. （1） His historical perspective of that time can be generally described as follows : at first, the demise of Soviet system, in which totalitarian order had suffocated the institution of civil society. But, at the same time, stable free civil society was not attained anywhere in the region of decommunization and economical and human costs to achieve them was on the increase at every turn. In addition, the erosion of totalitarian institutions brought out racial and religious conflicts rather than civil society.‘ The end of history’ was illusion there. Another is that ＊早稲田大学大学院社会科学研究科 博士後期課程４年（指導教員 古賀勝次郎） 34 post-war system or framework became weak in the joints because of, for example, the demise of communism in East Europe, reunification of Germany, and the presence of EU. The other is the presence of some Asian countries. In the wake of these circumstances, Gray had considered the validity of philosophical foundations of liberalism, which some liberal thinkers had underpinned, and has searched for the way to protect the liberal heritages. The comparatively important work among his opuses in this light is Liberalisms ─ studies in political philosophy. In the preface to this book, he says that“ [t]his collection, which begins and ends with a paper on J.S. Mill, contains a dozen essays, written over as many years, together with a new postscript written specially for this volume. The essays collected here were neither written nor selected haphazardly. They embody a single project, pursued continuously over the period in which they were written ─ the project of defining liberalism and giving it a foundation. The enterprise ended in failure. The upshot of the arguments developed in these essays is that the political morality that is constitutive of liberalism cannot be given any statement that is determinate or coherent and it has no claim on reason. The various projects of grounding liberalism (conceived as a set of universal principles) in a comprehensive moral theory ─ rights-based, utilitarian, contractarian or whatever ─ are examined in turn and found wanting. Recurrently in these essays, I conclude that a particular path of justification of liberalism is a dead end and a liberal ideology an impossibility ─ only to take up later another, and apparently more promising, justificatory strategy.” [Ibid.1989: vii] Now this book also collects an article （2） ‘Hayek on liberty, rights and justice’, which is prior to the forementioned monograph, and we can see that he had recognized there the difficulties of sustaining some aspects of Hayek’s thought. Then, the aim of my article is to describe his arguments for and against Hayek so that we can make sense of where he places a distance from Hayek’s thought and we can see his further arguments onward. In order to make them clear, I will particularly focus on their differences of theory of knowledge and evolutionary theory. But, before that, we need to take a look into his work Hayek on Liberty. Ⅱ．John Gray and Hayek on Liberty ⅰ）theory of knowledge （3） Gray is among who played a pioneering role for studies on Hayek’ thought . The late Norman Barry, for example, was also a forerunner and presented us solid survey of Hayek’s comprehensive thought. But Gray’ s work is distinctive in that he extensively read the philosophical dimension of Hayek’s thought and brought up his Kantian characters, which Hayek favorably recognized later in some extent. Gray insists that Hayek’s philosophical dimension partakes of post-Kantian critical philosophy, and this Skeptical Kantianism, what he calls, comes under the influence of, particularly, Mach, Popper, Wittgenstein and M.Polanyi and is found in the entirety of Hayek’s works. According to Gray, Hayek is Kantian in the way that we cannot know the things as it is and the order which we find by experience is not given by the external world alone but created by the process of our minds. With that, Hayek is against the ground of such as essentialism, which makes an attempt to seek for John Gray and F. A. Hayek 35 the essence behind the veil of appearance, and reductionism, in which, like behaviorism, the statements about mental order understood as physical processes can be reduced to that about empirical phenomena. Instead, Hayek emphasizes that the whole thing in our sensory order is created through the activity of our minds and is abstract and conceptual, and the world is understood by way of theories in character. Meanwhile, though Gray (4) points out its tension , Hayek also puts stress that human knowledge is au fond practical or tacit knowledge which is embodied in our skills, dispositions to act in a rule-following manner, and tradition and which cannot be theorized nor articulated all the time. Gray calls this dimension of Hayek’s though‘ thesis of the primacy of practice’ and by this means that theoretical reconstruction of our knowledge, which is of necessary abstract or pattern prediction and conduces to an explanation of the principle, is not able to avoid being imperfect. The things derived by this skeptical Kantian critical philosophy is that, because we cannot attain to the position― like Archimedian point, from which we can command a view of society as a whole, the task of philosophy is not to give account of the necessary feature of the thing nor to construct anything like metaphysical system but to （5） make sure of the limits of our reason . And the proper criticism of our moral traditions is immanent criticism in which a part of our whole practices we have inherited induce to illustrate and correct the rest. What is the implication of these philosophical characters for social theory? Gray recognized that the main response of this question is that, against Cartesian or Hobbesian rationalism, say, social order is not the construction of directing human mind. It may well be that to grasp the basic rules which operate human mind is beyond our ability in the first place and the rules we find in our society are the result of evolutionary selection and modification. And most of our knowledge is unable to be concentrated in a single person or unified scheme, because these are embodied in customs or propensities. It is from this insight that we can see that the central social panning is epistemological impossible. Central planning authorities, by and large, fail to recognize the market as a discovery procedure, in which generates and uses not only explicit knowledge but tacit knowledge (including that of individual’s preference through price mechanism). And Gray insists that the thing Hayek posed in social theory is that“ a way of assessing different social systems more fruitful than the traditional method of appraising their moral content is to be found in illuminating the demands they make upon the powers of the mind and the uses they are able to make of human knowledge. His[Hayek’s] conclusion is that, once we have arrived at a realistic picture of the powers and limitations of the human mind, we see that many important social doctrines ─ those of socialism and interventionist liberalism, for example, ─ make impossible demands upon our knowledge.”[Gray 1998: x] ⅱ) Spontaneous Order According to Hayek,‘ constructivistic rationalism’ is the error in that the order we find in society is designed by human mind. In contrast, Hayek encourages us to pay attention to the order which is the result of human action, but not of human design. Though the theory of this type of order has long tradition, this type of 36 idea enable us to transcend the dualism which views the social phenomena as a comprehension of natural (physis) and conventional (nomos), and to focus to another dimension of social phenomena which is the evolvable and self-regulating structures through the natural selection of rules as to action and perception.
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