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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]
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. Hayek borrows from Polanyi and calls this dimension of order‘ Spontaneous Order’. The emergence and persistence of Spontaneous Order are understood by the analogy of the theory of evolution which Charles Darwin presented for giving an explanation of the evolution of species. But Gray claims that the theory of social or cultural evolution, which Hayek deploys, is different from Social Darwinism in nineteen century in that his explanation of natural selection involves in groups or populations, therefore not individuals. And Gray further conducts an analysis of this type of order and discerns some phases‘: the invisible-hand thesis’, which states that social institution is the result of human action, not from human design‘. the primacy of tacit or practical knowledge’, which states that our knowledge about the world and society is embodied in our custom or skill and is inarticulate for the most part, and‘ the natural selection of competitive traditions’, which states that traditions as the whole of rule of our （6） action or perception are evolutionally filtered and advanced . As described earlier, the main claim of Hayek’s philosophy is that knowledge is abstract in the sense that the image of the world we gain emerges through conceptual thought and through selecting some aspects among which the world contains, and that, at the same time, knowledge is practical in the sense that most of knowledge is embodied in rules in our actions and perceptions. And these rules, in turn, are exposed to natural selection in cultural competition. Within this mechanism (in which the growth of population acts as a benchmark of success), the rules which are adoptive to circumstances are emulated by the other rules and supersede them. And this type of order is no purposive construction and (indeed facilitates some human purposes, but) serves no specific purpose in general. This view is also reflected in Hayek’s distinction between‘ economy’ (unitary hierarchy of ends) and‘ catallaxy’ (the whole of social exchange) or between‘ Taxis’ and‘ Cosmos’. The confusion of these ideas could be attributed to the inability to recognize that the order which is produced by directing mind depends on a larger Spontaneous Order as the unintended consequences of human actions. And Hayek’s idea of Spontaneous Order functions as an explanatory framework for the complex phenomena in our society.
Ⅲ．John Gray after Hayek on Liberty
Hayek on Liberty was revised in 1986 and 1998. Gray had finished writing with the section titled‘ [t]he Hayekian research programme and the prospects of social philosophy’ in the basic edition. But Gray appended the section:‘ Hayek’s though and the future of political philosophy’ to the second edition and a new‘ [p] ostscript: Hayek and the dissolution of classic liberalism’ to the last edition. In the basic edition, Gray made the point that central and significant elements of Hayek’s thought from the perspective of‘ the prospects of social （7） philosophy’ are, what he calls,‘ the epistemological turn’ and‘ the evolutionist turn’. Gray has proceeded John Gray and F. A. Hayek 37 with arguments on these issues in various articles and works. To begin with, we will be better to get started with his article:‘ the argument from ignorance’ in Liberalims. According to Gray, it is Hayek who explicated, in a different way of Mill’s fallibilism, more subtle theory of liberalism on the basis of ignorance. This type of argument suggests that, against dominant tradition at that time, social institutions must be assessed and compared in the light of the use or growth of knowledge rather than the conformity to some given moral contents. And social institutions and the rules of our conducts are deemed vehicles of knowledge about a man and the world. In this context, a regime of liberty will bring a competition among competing practices and traditions well and, in the result, effectuate the surviving practices or traditions which generate the most practical knowledge. So liberal system, in contrast socialism and the other systems, can make best use of (practical) knowledge and gain the benefit from that. And Gray also points out that, though it is closely related to the aforementioned argument, distinct traditions and institutions, which are transmitters of information about a man and society, are the unintended consequences of human action, but, at the same time, are prone to be passed through practical competition in which some error are filtered out. For this reason, existing traditions are regarded as the residue of an evolutionary process of trial and error and as the things adjust to needs or circumstances of their practitioners. In this context, a liberal system has a kind of filter process in which false believes and practices are filtered out and, in this social evolution, its substantial factor is the selection through imitation of successful institutions and habits rather through individuals and, further, the ultimate decisions about good and bad are attained by the decline of groups which stand to false or wrong （8） believes . However, Gray insists that, at first, there are significant objections to the idea that the genuine growth or increase of knowledge is attained through the transmission of mutual and intergenerational tradition of tacit and practical knowledge. Because, it is undeniable that our inheritance of practical knowledge may run （9） to the‘ tacit error’ and that this tacit errors may be transmitted and reproduce. And it is also undeniable that false or wrong believes, in some way, may reemerge for some reasons. After all, the epistemological justification for liberalism, like Hayek’s, has difficulties and if we admit that the growth of knowledge can most effectively attain in a liberal system, this is only generalization including exceptions, and neglects that the growth of knowledge may be one human good among many and that the growth of knowledge may antagonize the other human goods in some cases. Furthermore, Gray goes on to say that the view, like Hayek’s, that the decision about good and bad depends on the decline of groups which have false believes is leaving much room for dispute because, though this claim presupposes that there is the filtration akin to shakeout of firms in the market, it is difficult for us to find out such a mechanism which functions to select our believes or practices in our society. Gray thinks that what happens is maybe a succession of singularities and, at least, it is optimistic that we suppose the mechanism in which surviving and prevailed groups are morally acceptable rather than the vanishing groups. These interrogations are also laid out in his article mentioned earlier‘, Hayek on liberty, rights and justice’. He puts them there that this sort of evolutionary functionalism lacks the criteria which can apply to cultural fitness 38 or utility of forms of life. Next, our society, it seems, lacks something like the mechanism of natural selection of genetic accidents as seen in Darwinian evolutionary theory, which engages for the surviving of useful social practices. Finally, our society is missing the absolute proof which can support the belief that‘ Cosmos’, the order （10） beyond our directing minds, always leads to a liberal order .
ⅰ）theory of knowledge
（11） Hayek had said that‘ Progress is movement for movement’s sake’ in his primary work The constitution of Liberty. However, Gray has been skeptical of the idea of Progress from among diverse perspectives since, （12） at least, around the publication of Mill on Liberty . The project of Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty which gives （13） the utilitarian foundation to Liberty is grounded on‘ the permanent interest of man as a progressive being’ . But Gray has experienced a worry about the belief in the possibility of progress on the unlimited strength of the efficacy of social education or self-cultivation and become suspicious about, for example, whether Mill’s adherence to the progress is indicative of human freedom for its own sake. Though Gray’s views of epistemology come across the various articles, we can put them together for now as follow: the first thing about which Gray is skeptical is the belief in the possibility of progress in particularly ethical and political life. Next is the belief that the growth of knowledge and human emancipation are compatible each other and knowledge enhances freedom. The last is the belief that, as a consequence of the growth of knowledge, human can attain a rational consensus （14） on values . According to Gray, Positivists are original prophets of modernity and its catechism has some main tenets. History is moved by the power of science and increscent knowledge and new technology are definitive elements of change in human society. Science gives an ability to overcome natural scarcity and, in the result, the evils of poverty and war, say, will fade away forever. And Progress in science and Progress in ethical and political （15） life are compatible each other . But, against these prophets, Gray insists that the human prospect shaped by rising human numbers, ever-increasing competition for natural resources, environmental affairs, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction itself is outgrowth of the growth of scientific knowledge. Here the growth of knowledge indeed may solve some of these problems. For example, one of energy problems could be solved by use of unclear power. However, at the same time, they will generate new problems, for example, a proliferation of unclear weapons. Thus, the growing knowledge will not necessarily lead us to liberation from this kind of difficult problems. And we can say that the growth of scientific knowledge may be good. But the growth of knowledge in ethical and political life remains (and perhaps, should be) bad as well as good. In these circumstances, ethical theory Gray embraces is, despite his recognition of its contentious position,‘ value- pluralism’ and the ideal Gray embraces (for liberalism) is Modus Vivendi which sheds the belief that there is a rational consensus about‘ the best way of life’ for all. John Gray and F. A. Hayek 39
ⅱ) Modus Vivendi
Though I will not discuss the concrete content of Modus Vivendi here, I will describe his arguments with a focus on the evolutionary theory as far as Hayek’s thought is concerned. And now, Gray has often exercised ‘immanent criticism’, in which one aspect of tradition we have inherited illustrates and corrects the rest and, then, we can discover contradictions and rectify them. Meanwhile, what become of the criterion of the functional utility of social institutions? Hayek’s strategy is, it seems, an evolutionary ethics or a theory of cultural evolution. However, this evolutionary strategy is very controversial point indeed. According to Gray, Hayek’s argument on justice, for example, is an attempt to integrate Kant’s postulation of universalizability in practical reasoning with Hume’s type of argument on the content or basis of rule of justice. Within it, the points we can not bring together are made up for the theory of evolution and Hayek relies on, particularly, the notion of group selection. And this group selection functions as the scientific metaphor in which competitive traditions (including, e.g. social institutions) are subject to natural selection. Gray had forecasted for continuing legacy in the close of basic edition that, if we recognize that cultural evolution has generated unviable moralities or much tacit ignorance or error for us, Hayek’s system will be strain between rational and skeptical elements and, then, evolutionary view may be withdrawn. And Gray claims that, if we go ahead with the former element, the result will come close to neo-Hobbesian contractatian constitutionalism, such as James Buchanan and if with the latter, to M. Oakeshott’s type of elucidatory and （16） explanatory position . In the added section to the second edition, Gray actually referred to its potent of Buchanan’ （17） s theory again . In this regard, though Buchanan aimed to refashion constitutionalism and to represent （18） limited government as a rational reconstruction, it seems that, though Gray does not negate the rule of law , he came to take account of representative institutions rather than theoretical refashion of constitutionalism. And Gray goes on to discuss in the postscript to the third edition, limited government (governmental non- interference) itself, as John Stuart Mill had viewed, is not a fundamental principle but a rule of thumb, and ‘market institutions’ and‘ democratic institutions’ are desirable for means to human ends rather than ends in themselves. Here we should think of Hayek’s grope selection theory as described earlier in which competitive traditions (including‘ social institutions’) are subject to natural selection and the gropes which have false belief are decline through an evolutionary filter process. In this point, Gray thinks that this explanation of complex phenomena in our society is not functioning with propriety and even may do harm to the contingency of （19） historical events in some cases . Rather, in our late modern age, we should seek‘ common institutions’ within which conflicts of interests and values can be negotiated without relying on an evolutionary theory. And these‘ common institutions’ means not that we should live in society unified by‘ common values’ but that we （20） should live in society with these institutions through which the conflicts of values can be mediated . 40
Ⅳ．conclusion
John Stuart Mill in youth addressed that useful knowledge is that which teaches us‘ how we should increase the sum of human happiness’.[ Mill 1988:258] And Mill went on to say that‘ Knowledge has triumphed. It has worked the downfall of much that is mischievous. It is in vain to suppose that it will pass by and spare any institution the existence of what is pernicious to mankind.’[Ibid.,:261] Though Hayek, who had acknowledged himself as a Burkean Whig, had not taken up with Mill particularly because of Mill’s inoculation from French Positivist, Hayek had also been thinking about an epistemology in some articles:“ Economics and Knowledge”,“ The Facts of the Social Sciences”,“ The Use of Knowledge in Society”, and so on. Thus, each of them had common interest in theory of knowledge regardless of their different views. Gray, a person who achieved results of the studies on Mill and Hayek, thinks that it is an idea of progress that plays a central role of their epistemology, and that Hayek presupposed that the growth of knowledge is inherently good and assumed that competitive traditions (including social institutions) are subject to natural selection. But Gray thinks that progress is a contentious idea at least on theoretical grounds and that the growth of knowledge supposedly goes with mixed results. And what is more, evolutionary scheme, particularly group selection, in social studies is dubitable. Instead, Gray insists that in late modern world, without relying on an evolutionary theory, we should seek to‘ common institutions’ which enables competitive interests and values to be reconciled. In this regard, we have a good reason to think back on Mill’s thought again. Mill dealt with the‘ conflicting theories respecting political institutions’ in his work and said that“ [b]y some minds, government is conceived as strictly a political art, giving rise to no questions but those of means and an end. …They look upon a constitution in the same light (difference of scale being allowed for) as they would upon a stream plough, or a threshing machine. To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history.” [Mill 2008:205~6]And Mill thought that“ it is evident that neither of these is entirely in the right, yet it being equally evident that neither is wholly in the wrong. We must endeavour to get down to what is at the root of each, and avail ourselves of the amount of truth which exists in either.” [Ibid.,207] On this point, it seems that Gray and Mill are in the similar direction. 〔投稿受理日 2010.11.20／掲載決定日 2011.1.27〕 References Alan Ebenstein 2003, Friedrich Hayek ─ a biography, The university of Chicago press and London. Bruce Caldwell 2004, Hayek’s challenge ─ an intellectual biography of F.A. Hayek, The university of Chicago press and London. Chandran Kukathas 1989, Hayek and Modern Liberalism, Clarendon press Oxford. John Gray and F. A. Hayek 41
Eamonn Butler Hayek: his contribution to the political and economic thought of our time New York Edward Fesered. 2006, The Cambridge companion to Hayek, Cambridge University press. G.R. Steele 1993,The economics of Friedrich Hayek, Macmillan. John N.Gray 1980‘, F.A. Hayek on Liberty and Tradition’ in The journal of Libertarian studies, vol.Ⅵ no.2 Spring. 1982‘, F.A, Hayek and the Rebirth of Classic Liberalism’ in Literature of Liberty, Vol.V No.4 Winter. 1983a, Mill on Liberty: a defense (sencond edition, 1996), Routledge. 1983b‘, Classic liberalism, positional goods and the politicization of poverty’ in Dilemmas of liberal democracies. 1984, Hayek on Liberty (revised in 1986, 1998), Routledge. 1986, Liberalism (second edition 1995), Open university press. 1988,‘ Hayek, the Scottish school, and contemporary economics’ in The boundaries of economics. (Gordon C. Winston and Richard F. TeichgraeberⅢeds.） 1989a‘, Hayek on the Market Economy and the Limits of State Action’ in Oxford review of economic policy. 1989b, Liberalisms ─ essays in political philosophy, Routledge. 1991, Liberalism trans. by Yasunobu Hujiwara and Wajima Tatsuro. 1993a, Beyond the New Right-markets, government and the common environment, Rouledge. 1993b‘, From post-communism to civil society’ in Social Philosophy & Policy. 2003,‘ Enlightenment humanism as a relic of Christian monotheism’ in 2000 years and beyond ─ faith, identity, and‘ the common era’ Routledge. 2008, On Liberty and other essays (Oxford world’s classic) with an introduction(1991) and notes by John Gray, Oxford university press. John Stuart Mill 1988, The collected works of John Stuart Mill, Vol.XXVⅠ ─ Journals and Debating Speeches PartⅠ ed. J.M.Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 2008, On Liberty and other essays (Oxford world’s classics), ed. by Gray. Oxford University press. Norman Barry 1982‘, The tradition of Spontaneous Order’ in Literature of Liberty ,Vol.V no.2. 1986, On Classic liberalism and Libertatianism The Macmillan press. 1996, Classic Liberalism in the age of Post-Communism, The Shaftesbury papers,6. 2000, Modern political theory, Palgrave. Friedrich A. Hayek 1982, Law, legislation and liberty―a new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 2006, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge. 2008, Hayek on Hayek ―an autobiographical dialogue, eds. by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar.
⑴ For this summary, see Liberalism 1995, 1991 edition’s preface. ⑵ See also, Ethics 92 October 1981. ⑶ See also‘ Bibliographical essay’ in A. Ebenstein’s work and“ Guide to further reading” in E. Feser’s. ⑷ Hayek on Liberty, p.171. 42
⑸ Gray’s analysis of this Skeptical Kantianism is also found in Post-libersalism(chapter three). ⑹ Hayek on Liberty, p.33f. ⑺ For these elements, see also Gray‘, Hayek , the Scottish school, and economics’. ⑻ In this regard, see also B. Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge, pp352-361. ⑼ Liberalisms, p.247f ⑽ Ibid., p98f. ⑾ Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p.38. ⑿ See Gray, Mill on Liberty: a defense ( particularly chap six.) ⒀ Mill, On liberty and other essays (ed. Gray) p.15. ⒁ Particularly see Gray‘, Enlightenment humanism as a relic of Christian monotheism’. ⒂ Gray, Al Qaeda and what it means t be modern, p27f. ⒃ Hayek on Liberty, p.139. ⒄ Ibid.,p.145. ⒅ Two faces of Liberalism, p.106f. ⒆ Hayek on Liberty, p.138. ⒇ Two faces of Liberalism, p.25, It is fair to say that Hayek had not entirely disregarded for the importance of institutional functions either.See, Hayek, law, legislation, and liberty.