“This book,” Hayes says at the outset, “is the first to compare Popper and Hayek systematically.” Hayes’ discussion covers both Popper’s epistemology and his political thought. In addition, Hayes offers a discussion of Alasdair MacIntyre, and also—for reasons that never become clear—includes, as Chapter 2, material that was written originally as an article on ideology for a reference book. While Hayes has an extensive knowledge of the material upon which he has written, and sometimes makes perceptive points, the book cannot be judged to be successful, and the reader is also likely to find it hard going. The reason for this is that the work displays a number of systematic faults.

First, the author exhibits difficulty in the development of a sustained argument. He seems at his happiest when making detailed points about the work of particular thinkers. But for the reader of his book, the result is dire. On some issues—e.g. Hayes’ claim that Popper’s epistemological arguments at certain places rest illegitimately on appeals to intuition—we don’t get enough sustained argument, and discussion and the dismissal of alternative explanations, for the author’s claims to be telling. Further, even what Hayes presents as being his own major arguments are not developed in sufficient detail for their character to become fully clear. Second, there are problems with the author’s engagements with other people’s work. We typically find someone mentioned, but we are given very limited information about their views. Hayes then engages with particular issues in their work—but in such a way that what is going on would often be readily comprehensible only if the reader also had the other writer’s work open before them. (Indeed, I found it difficult to understand, from Hayes’ account, some points that he was presenting concerning my own work on Hayek—something that was not helped by the fact that some material that Hayes had highlighted for emphasis had been slightly garbled in the process.) Third, we really don’t get sustained interpretations of Popper and Hayek offered and defended; rather there is again a pattern of engagement with particular claims. Hayes also seemed to me rather too quick in assuming that their views on particular topics are much the same (e.g. he refers to “the Popper-Hayek theory of democracy,” when there would seem to me some significant differences between them). These matters come to a head in his treatment of MacIntyre. MacIntyre is used, by Hayes, as a proponent of traditionalism, as someone who favors Aristotle (with qualifications), as a leftist critic of Hayekian views, and as someone who, because he has written about a variety of figures such as Alan Gewirth, gives Hayes the opportunity to make a bevy of particular points about them, too. (One thus really never gets from Hayes’ work a feel of what Macintyre’s wider enterprise from After Virtue onwards is all about, to say nothing of the way in which his position changes over time.) The outcome of all this is that what Hayes wishes to say gets drowned in a sea of small points and asides, and it becomes difficult for the reader to sustain an overview of Hayes’ work as a whole. The reader’s frustration is added to—or at least this reader’s was!—by the fact that from time to time Hayes raises interesting issues (e.g. about certain significant problems that face market-based societies) which it looks as if he is going to address, but where, in the end, he only addresses much easier issues in their place.

What does the author wish to contend? The book can, I think, be seen as a defense of some ideas that he wishes to draw from Popper and Hayek (e.g. for the advantages of market-based, democratic societies against for example MacIntyre’s dissent) to which he offers what he takes to be some improvements. Hayes refers (e.g. on page 221) to the significance for the book of arguments that he offers in Chapter 10 “concerning ‘is and ought’ and the crucial role of default principles.” It seemed to me, however, that Hayes does not explain these ideas very clearly in the volume under review. To work out what was going on, I was led back to his discussion in Fallibilism, Democracy and the Market (Lanham etc: University Press of America, 2001), to which Hayes himself refers.

His first argument relates to the idea that moral claims may (directly, or via the idea that “ought implies can”) presuppose or imply nonmoral claims that may be open to criticism. This is true enough, but it seems to me a much weaker point than Hayes supposes. For people may hold their moral views in such a way that they are not open to such criticism. (A substantive example, which should be of concern to Hayes, is the reaction to Hayek’s views by those socialists like David Miller and Raymond Plant who took the line: what we favor is a system of welfare which is much more generous than that which you, Hayek, favor, but which, like your own more minimal welfare state, takes care not to put individual liberty or the functioning of the price system at risk.)

Hayes’ second point, concerning “default principles,” does not seem to be spelled out very fully, anywhere. But it would appear to reflect Hayes’ wish to make explicit something that he takes to be implicit in Popper’s anti-justificationist epistemology, which shifts the burden of disproof etc. onto critics of a theory, tradition, view, etc. (cf. Fallibilism etc., p. 41). There are, though, some difficulties about this. For if the ideas in question are simply those which, contingently, we happen to have been born with, or have adopted, and which are currently unrefuted, it is not clear why they should be preferred to others which, if they had been adopted, would also not have been refuted to date—something that has implications for Popperian responses to the Nelson Goodman “grue” problem.

Hayes says: “We prefer an unrefuted to a refuted theory. In case of a tie, priority goes to the theory there first, i.e. to the one sanctioned by ‘tradition’.” (p. 169). The problem with this, however, is that many ideas which we typically now think are ethically defective are or were traditional (e.g. that those who are not our kin, or those who are not our fellow-citizens, should not be accorded full ethical consideration). In addition, Hayek—whose work on tradition Hayes’ seems to like—has spent a lot of time grappling with the problem that many psychologically deep-seated ethical ideas (e.g. ideas about fairness) are ones which he thinks should not be applied in a society that depends on the advanced division of labor coordinated by the price system. Hayek thinks that we should prefer, to such ideas which he takes to be instinctive, others, such as the rules of a market-based society, which he believes are the product of a certain kind of social evolution. What is not clear, however, is how we are to tell which are which, when they are each known to us simply by way of our intuitive reactions to things. (If one responds: we have to have recourse to social theory, and arguments about the likely consequences of following each, this is fair enough; but it seems to mark the end of Hayek’s distinctive view that we should defer to the products of tradition.)

All told, Hayes does have a wide knowledge of the material with which he engages, and sometimes makes reasonable points about it; he has also pursued some issues into the archives. (His treatment of this, however, is not always happy: while, say, he refers to Popper’s William James Lectures delivered at Harvard from 1950, he does not make clear to the reader as a general point that all we have from these are notes and fragments, although he does acknowledge this in respect of one point which he discusses.) His concerns in this volume are similar to those in his earlier book. I would strongly recommend that in the future, Hayes works on less expansive projects which do not call, for their proper execution, for the development and presentation of a systematic interpretation of other authors’ work, and instead brings his genuine talents to bear on the discussion of more restricted topics.