Hayekian Liberalism Expressed in Speech Made Us Rich and Free
We liberals such as Hayek, liberals in the old and true sense, miss the main source of liberalism’s enriching goodness.
We tend to think that the liberal order is mainly founded on its black-letter laws, its constitution, its “rules of the game,” in the unhappy phrase of the economist and Nobel laureate Douglass North. 1 We devise legal tricks to constrain people, and think of institutions therefore as wordless budget constraints in the style of orthodox, Samuelsonian economics. Hayek fell into such a thought from time to time, though he often thought his way out of it. His master Ludwig von Mises vacillated as well.
But as Donald Trump’s régime vividly reminds us, laws and constitutions, whether black-letter explicit or English-ly tacit, live on the lips of people. Judges, for example. Or attorney’s general. Or entrepreneurs.
Such a claim will sound to some of you mushy and feminine. You wish to be tough and Hobbesian, and want to follow the master’s claim that "the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power." "Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man."2 Game theorists in economics despise talk as "cheap."
Confident though they are in their no-language lemma, political scientists like Barry Weingast, Hobbes, and the game theorists of Samuelsonian economics are mistaken that words are too weak and have no strength.3 Consider your own motivations, for example, or the motivations of Barry himself, to be a serious and courageous scholar, or for you to be an honest and professional lawyer, or a true and just friend.4
And soft and feminine or not, the proposition that words matter, though are not sufficient if not backed by ethics—as against a backing by the Leviathan’s monopoly of violence—has the special merit of being true. I do not think that law or the economy could work for another ten minutes without what linguists call “pragmatic” agreements, which are merely one form of ethics, honoring self and others and the transcendent. They are not rules of the game, mere budget constraints. They are the creative dance of humans: “O body swayed to music, o brightening glance. / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
In the morning before the Hayek Lecture I went in search of a computer mouse on 6th Avenue. The hotel told me to go uptown a bit to find a stationery store on the left. I stopped in a hardware store. “We sell nails and hammers, not computers,” said the owner. His friend chatting with him was more kindly helpful: “Go to 14th and turn left, second store.” I caught the mouse in the end, with the cooperation of a half-dozen New Yorkers. That is, in my experience now and on earlier occasions, New Yorkers, contrary to the cynical clichés, or indeed the black-letter law governing their behavior, are sweetly helpful even to Chicagoans, at least when they are not making gentle fun of people from the sticks. It is a dance of language and human engagement.
