Another excerpt from The Fatal Conceit

Another excerpt form FA Hayek's The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. This one from Chapter Five, also titled "The Fatal Conceit"

...(Socialists) continue to fail to face the obstacles in the way of fitting separate individual decisions into a common pattern conceived as a "plan." The conflict between our instincts, which, since Rosseau, have become identified with "morality", and the moral traditions that have survived cultural evolution and serve to restrain these instincts, is embodied in the separation now often drawn between certain sorts of ethical and political philosophy on the one hand and economics on the other. The point is not that whatever economists determine to be efficient is therefore "right", but that economic analysis can elucidate the usefulness of practices heretofore thought to be right--usefulness from the perspective of any philosophy that looks unfavorably on the human suffering and death that would follow the collapse of our civilization. It is a betrayal of concern for others, then, to theorize about the "just society" without carefully considering the economic consequences implementing such views. Yet, after seventy years* of experience with socialism, it is safe to say that most intellectuals outside the areas--Eastern Europe and the Third World--where socialism has been tried remain content to brush aside what lessons might lie in economics, unwilling to wonder whether there might not be a reason why socialism, as often as it is attempted, never seems to work as its intellectual leaders intended. The intellectuals' vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealization of, and then disillusionment with a seemingly endless string of "utopias"--the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua--should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. But such facts, first explained by economists moire than a century ago, remain unexamined by those who pride themselves on their rationalistic rejection of the notion that there could be any facts that transcend historical context or present an insurmountable barrier to human desires.

FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
University of Chicago Press, 1988
pps 85-86

A couple of notes: Since American socialist call themselves "progressives", denying any connection with socialism, these arguments may be difficult to use in a debate. (Somewhere in the book Hayek makes a short reference to the left's theft of the term "liberal", which, in the nineteenth century, indicated a philosophical respect for the rights of the individual, as opposed to the collective, i.e., the crown, the empire, the collective...)

Also, I did slightly alter the text quoted above, using "American" spelling and punctuation, instead of "British", which Hayek habitually did.


*Remember, The Fatal Conceit was published in 1988