trivas7
19th June 2008, 05:54
F. Hayek, who absorbs from Menger an Austrian emphasis on process and spontaneous order enunciated a profoundly dialectical critique of utopianism. Hayek railed against both collectivist and atomist viewpoints. For Hayek, since no human being can know everything there is to know about society, people cannot simply redesign it anew. Human beings are as much the creature of their context as they are its creators. Hayek’s rejection of utopianism is a repudiation of what he calls “constructivist” rationalism.The utopian relies on a “pretense of knowledge,” Hayek argued, in an attempt to construct a bridge from the current society to a future one.Where as the collectivists have criticized bourgeois theorists for embracing “ahistorical” and “state of nature” arguments for capitalism, they themselves have embraced an ahistorical, exaggerated sense of human possibility in their projections of an ideal communist society.
Although Marx himself was critical of this “constructivism” in the works of the utopian socialists, did his own work succumb to the same constructivist impulse? Implicit in his communist ideal is the presumption that human beings can achieve godlike control over society, as if from an Archimedean standpoint, virtually transcending unintended social consequences such that every action brings about a known effect. Hayek saw this as a “synoptic delusion,” an illusory belief that one can live in a world in which every action produces consistent and predictable outcomes. As a literary man, I'd call it the "Tolstoyan fallacy". And, invariably, the quest for total knowledge becomes a quest for totalitarian control.
Is this a conservative red herring or is there anything to this argument?
Although Marx himself was critical of this “constructivism” in the works of the utopian socialists, did his own work succumb to the same constructivist impulse? Implicit in his communist ideal is the presumption that human beings can achieve godlike control over society, as if from an Archimedean standpoint, virtually transcending unintended social consequences such that every action brings about a known effect. Hayek saw this as a “synoptic delusion,” an illusory belief that one can live in a world in which every action produces consistent and predictable outcomes. As a literary man, I'd call it the "Tolstoyan fallacy". And, invariably, the quest for total knowledge becomes a quest for totalitarian control.
Is this a conservative red herring or is there anything to this argument?