I. INTRODUCTION
To Friedrich Hayek, only after a lot of trial and error did liberalism appear as a real doctrine, spurred by eighteenth century Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. But in the nineteenth century, while the disciples of those thinkers, “mostly economists in the tradition of Adam Smith,” were gathering around the Edinburgh Review,Footnote 1 “this development was paralleled” by the Benthamite Radicals, “which traced back more to the Continental than to the British tradition” (1973, p. 125).
Hayek therefore insisted on the difference between the “continental” liberal tradition and the “British” liberal tradition. He wished the word “Enlightenment” were not used to refer to “the French philosophers from Voltaire to Condorcet on the one hand, and the Scottish and English thinkers from Mandeville through Hume and Adam Smith to Edmund Burke on the other” (1963, p. 101). To him, this view of the eighteenth century as “a homogeneous body of ideas” had “very grave” and “regrettable consequences” (1963, p. 102).
In Hayek's opinion, a specific ideological current was to blame for this confusion: “It was in the end, the victory of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals over the Whigs in England that concealed the fundamental difference” (1960, p. 55). Indeed, Hayek considered that the merging of these two traditions—that of the Philosophical Radicals and that stemming from the theses of Hume and Smith—had given birth in the 1830s to the party “which from about 1842 came to be known as the Liberal Party” (1973, p. 125).Footnote 2
Despite this impure origin and “a progressive infiltration by interventionist” elements into this party, Hayek noted that “the dominating influence of liberal ideas in Britain” lasted until World War I, after which “the influence of liberalism steadily declined” (1973, p. 130).
Hayek therefore considered his work as being written right in the middle of a period of decline of liberalism and of western civilization: “The final abandonment of the gold standard and the return to protection by Great Britain in 1931 seemed to mark the definite end of a free world economy” (1973, p. 131). To him, this material decline stemmed from an intellectual perversion that dated back to the nineteenth century. Hayek's project was to restore the purity of the liberal doctrine as it stood before interventionist “infiltrations” corrupted it. “The two traditions became finally confused when they merged in the liberal movement of the nineteenth century” (Hayek Reference Hayek1960, p. 55).
Hayek defined his “true liberalism” as opposed to “constructivist rationalism.” His project thus consisted in denouncing a number of intellectual errors. But in Hayek's historical fresco, “constructivist rationalism” was not only an obstacle in the way of “true liberalism”; from the nineteenth century onwards, it became an enemy from within. We will discuss how, according to Hayek, Mill introduced elements of this “rationalism” into the liberal tradition. This is a common vision.Footnote 3 But very little attention has been given to Hayek's readings of Mill.Footnote 4 His texts on Mill are little known and will be republished as part of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek with Sandra J. Peart as volume editor.
Since the way he viewed Mill's role evolved through time, we have chosen to chronologically present the different works he wrote either dealing with or referring to Mill. We will content ourselves with following the evolution of Hayek's opinion on Mill and to identify which of Mill's ideas he found “constructivist.” Hayek's readings of Mill are revealing as to the evolution of Hayek's thought. Our goal here is not to assess whether Hayek's criticisms are justified or not but to describe his view of the history of liberalism and the role he assigns to Mill.
II. THE FORTIES: EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL CRITICISMS
Hayek made very few references to Mill during the 1930s.Footnote 5 He actually started dedicating time to the study of Mill's work in the 1940s, on the occasion of a preparatory research for essays he wrote in London about Saint-Simon and Comte. At that time, he criticized his epistemology,Footnote 6 in particular his use of the notion of “law” in social sciences. After quoting an excerptFootnote 7 from l'Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain by Condorcet (1795) and noting that this quotation is “characteristically” the epigraph of the last book of the System of Logic by Mill (Reference Mill and Robson1843), Hayek writes: “The idea of natural laws of historical development and the collectivist view of history were born” (Hayek Reference Hayek1941, p. 193 and n. 13).
Hayek considered that Comte's ideas had benefited from Mill's intellectual aura, which allowed them to exert a considerable influence over “European thought” (1941, p. 359). Hayek's target remains Mill's Reference Mill and Robson1843 work: “Mill himself, in the sixth book of his Logic, which deals with the methods of the moral sciences, became little more than an expounder of Comtian doctrine” (1941, p. 359). Moreover, Hayek believed that these epistemological errors paved the way for more harmful influences: backing up his demonstration with a letter in which Mill claimed that the “social organization” proposed by Saint-Simonians would be, “under some modification or other . . . the final and permanent condition of our race,” Hayek added: “he differed from them in believing that it would take many or at least several stages” (Hayek Reference Hayek1941, p. 296). “We have here undoubtedly the first roots of J.S. Mill's socialist leanings. But in Mill's case, too, this was largely a preparation for the still more profound influence which Comte was later to exercise on him” (1941, p. 297).
Yet, Hayek acknowledged in the same article that Comte's ideas had “finally so revolted J.S. Mill” (1941, p. 258) and, in an article written in the same period and published in the same collection of essays,Footnote 8 he recognized that Mill had strongly criticized Comte, whose project he regarded as “liberticide.”Footnote 9
Then, in 1942, Hayek wrote the preface to The Spirit of the Age, a collection of articles that Mill had first published in The Examiner (1830-31). In about thirty pages, entitled “John Stuart Mill at the age of twenty-five,” Hayek draws a portrait of the young author. He considers that in 1831 Mill “is a more attractive figure than the zealous sectarian of his early days or the austere and balanced philosopher of mature years” (Hayek Reference Hayek and Mill1942, p. viii). According to Hayek, “[Mill is] almost at the height of his reaction against his earlier views” and he begins “his career as an independent thinker” (1942, pp. viii, x).
Mill and Socialism: Harmful but Limited Influences
It is, however, interesting to notice that Hayek repeatedly kept relativizing this independence by insisting on the new influences to which Mill had been exposed. He considered that Mill had gotten away from the influence of his father and Bentham only to fall under that of the French thinkers (1942, p. vii): “Though he built on the foundation of a strong English tradition, the new structure that he erected upon it added more that derived from foreign than from native source” (1942, p. vii). What are those foreign sources? Hayek reminded that in 1829, Mill became acquainted with the ideas of Comte and the Saint-Simonians and that he met Harriet Taylor in “1830 or 1831” (it is now known that he met her in 1830).Footnote 10 “Whatever may have been its true significance for Mill's intellectual development, [this close friendship] certainly had the effect that he entirely withdrew from social life and became the recluse he remained for the rest of his life” (Hayek Reference Hayek and Mill1942, p. xii). Hayek also mentioned Mill's stay in France when he was fourteen. He quotes an extract from Mill's autobiography, in which Mill insists on the importance of this journey:
The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development, keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England, and from which even my father with all his superiority to prejudice was not exempt, of judging universal questions by a merely English standard
(Mill Reference Mill1873, p. 64).Besides this, Mill kept up a correspondence with Saint-Simonian thinker Gustave D'Eichtal. According to Hayek, “[he] spares no pain to convert his young English friend to the new creed” (1942, p. xviii). Hayek noted that in his letters to D'Eichtal, Mill worded “a most thoroughgoing criticism of the whole of Comte's theoretical and political views,” and added that it was “interesting” that Mill had “immediately laid his fingers on one of the most vulnerable spots in Comte's political doctrines” (1942, p. xix).Footnote 11
Then, Hayek, who was indeed conversant with Mill's criticism of Comte, maintains that one can “watch how Mill gradually approaches to the views of the Saint-Simonians, although he never fails to stress that in no circumstances would he become a member” (Hayek Reference Hayek and Mill1942, pp. xx-xxi). Of what does this “approach” consist? Talking about The Spirit of the Age, Hayek asserts that: “Mill takes from Comte and the Saint-Simonians his leading idea and several details but he uses them for his own ends. What he takes are characteristic aspects of their philosophy of history” (1942, pp. xxvii-iii). One can thus recognize the same kind of accusation as that stated a year earlier in “The Counter-Revolution of Science.”
But Hayek's most interesting opinion can be found in the last pages of this introduction: “Mill indeed, while sympathizing with the ultimate aims of socialism, disagreed to the end with the concrete suggestions for the abolition of private property and [dissented from] their declamations against competition” (Hayek Reference Hayek and Mill1942, p. xxx). Hayek, therefore, knew that Mill's ideas did not make him a socialist. Fighting socialism was still one of Hayek's main purposes at that time. In that same period, he was working on the political pamphlet that would make him famous. The Road to Serfdom, dedicated to “socialists of all parties,” was published in 1944, and within a few weeks, it met with quiet a lot of success in Great Britain and the United States. An abridged version of the book, published in the Reader's Digest in August 1945, reached a circulation of more than 600,000.Footnote 12 In the introduction, Hayek writes: “If it is no longer fashionable to emphasise that ‘we are all socialists now’, this is so merely because the fact is too obvious. Scarcely anybody doubts that we must continue to move forward to socialism” (Hayek Reference Hayek1944, p. 3).
The famous assertion which Hayek was referring to was uttered in the 1880s by Sir William Harcourt. In this sentence, the world “socialist” is therefore used in its broadest sense.
When Mill maintained, that he had become a “socialist,” he too used the word in a very general sense.Footnote 13 What he was referring to was only the ultimate goals of socialism.Footnote 14 Moreover, he considered that “the object to be principally aimed at, in the present stage of human improvement, is not the subversion of the system of individual property, but the improvement of it” (Mill Reference Mill1848, p. 217).
Mill and “False” Liberalism
In order to understand Hayek's opinion about Mill, it is important to describe his first attempt at distinguishing “true” from “false” liberalism. In a paper entitled “Individualism: True and False” (presented in 1945 and published in 1946), Hayek explained that “individualism” has come to describe an aggregation of heterogeneous principles. Yet, to Hayek, there are still good reasons for retaining this term, one of them being the fact that the word “socialism” was “deliberately coined to express its opposition to individualism” (1945, p. 3).
Hayek tries to distinguish “true” from “false” individualism. The first one is primarily a theory of society that “accounts for most of the order which we find in human affairs as the unforeseen result of individual actions,” while the second one “traces all discoverable order to deliberate design” (1945, p. 8). Hayek sees the origin of false individualism in “French and other Continental writers,” especially in the Cartesian school which is “the product of an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason” (1945, p. 8). He believes that this kind of individualism must be regarded as a source of modern socialism.
Hayek supports the “antirationalistic approach” of British individualism, which he traced back to the works of Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Burke, and Ferguson. The fundamental principle of this kind of individualism is that “it uses the universal acceptance of general principles as the means to create order in social affairs” (1945, p. 19). The interest of society is better served by general rules than by expediency. The point is that Hayek placed Mill on the borderline between the two forms of liberalism:
It was only liberalism in the English sense that was generally opposed to centralization, to nationalism and to socialism, while the liberalism prevalent on the Continent favored all three. I should add, however, that, in this as in so many other respects, John Stuart Mill, and the later English liberalism derived from him, belong at least as much to the Continental as to the English tradition (1945, p. 28).
In this text, Hayek did not provide explanatory elements concerning Mill's alleged proximity with “socialism” and “nationalism.” But he laid stress on the influence of the “French tradition” which Mill had been subject to when he was young: “Partly because the classical economists of the nineteenth century, and particularly John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, were almost as much influenced by the French as by the English tradition, all sorts of conceptions and assumptions completely alien to true individualism have come to be regarded as essential parts of its doctrine” (1945, p. 11).
Shortly after, Hayek expressed a much more clear-cut opinion. Indeed, in one of the speeches he delivered in April 1947 on the occasion of the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society,Footnote 15 Hayek maintains that “Mill himself, like so many others, soon turned his attention to schemes involving restriction or abolition [of property rights] rather than [their] more effective use” (Hayek Reference Hayek1947b, p. 110). Hayek does not mean that Mill endorsed concrete socialist proposals. But he now insists on Mill's sympathy with socialism more strongly.
The context in which Hayek expressed this criticism toward Mill's alleged socialism was particular: it was that of the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society. The main purpose of this think tank consisted in reasserting the true principles of liberalism and “purging traditional liberal theory” (Hayek Reference Hayek1947a, p. 238) of some elements that were considered as going against these principles, namely to remove all the “constructivist” ideas introduced into the British tradition in the nineteenth century. What was therefore at stake was to convince the intellectuals of how relevant and necessary the distinction between “true” and “false” liberalism was. Hayek insisted on the importance of spreading the ideas advocated by the groups opposed to a “continued movement toward more government control.” The priority was to remedy “the lack of a real program, or perhaps, to a consistent philosophy” of these groups (1947b, p. 107). After quoting Keynes's famous words on the great influence of the economists and philosophers’ prevailing ideas,Footnote 16 Hayek asserted that “he has never said a truer thing” and added:
It is from the long-run point of view that we must look at our task. It is the beliefs which must spread, if a free society is to be preserved, or restored, not what is practicable at the moment, which must be our concern. But, while we must emancipate ourselves from that servitude to current prejudices in which the politician is held, we must take a sane view of what persuasion and instruction are likely to achieve (1947b, pp. 108-109, italics added).
The speech by Hayek containing the first exposure of Mill's “socialism” was delivered in front of the same audience as his speech about the necessity to spread a truly liberal program, “or rather” philosophy. One may also wonder on what material Hayek based his criticism. What work did he do on Mill during this period (1942-1947)? At that time, Hayek was carrying out some research on Mill's correspondence. For that, he benefited from human and financial help from the London School of Economics and was given access to the Mill-Taylor collection of this University's library (The British Library of Political and Economic Science). In 1943 he published an article in The Times’ literary supplement in order to gather some new material or information. After reviewing Mill's already published letters, Hayek appealed for help:
The London School of Economics, which some years ago acquired some substantial part of the papers left behind by Mill, has conducted a preliminary survey of existing material with a view to the publication after the war of a new collection of his letters … These efforts can, however, hardly be successful without spontaneous cooperation from the numerous private owners of such autograph letters. The London School of Economics will therefore greatly appreciate any offers of the loan of such letters or communications of information which may help in tracing such letters
(Hayek Reference Hayek and Cunningham Wood1943, pp. 42-43).These investigations made in the forties, led to the publishing in 1951 of part of the correspondence between Mill and his wife, under the title John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. Therefore, it appears interesting to examine this work in search of clues to the causes of Hayek's change of opinion, or at least of signs that could bring to light the nature of these causes.
III. THE FIFTIES: HAYEK'S FASCINATION FOR MILL AND HARRIET TAYLOR
Harriet Taylor's Role, According to Hayek
In his 1951 book, Hayek reminds the reader of Mill's admiration for Taylor (1807-1858) and quotes the passages in which Mill describes his intellectual collaboration with his wife-to-be. Although he generally confines himself to describing the context in which some letters were written, Hayek lets his opinion show on several occasions. In the introduction, for instance, he wonders if Mill's admiration for his wife's intellectual capacities was not a “sheer delusion” and “how far Mill's ideas, and especially his changes of opinion at a critical juncture of European thought, may have been due to this delusion” (Hayek Reference Hayek1951, pp. 14-15). Hayek gives his own answer further down:
I may perhaps here express the conclusions I have formed on the significance of Harriet Taylor in Mill's life. They are, that her influence on his thought and outlook, whatever her capacities may have been, were quite as great as Mill asserts, but that they acted in a way somewhat different from what is commonly believed. Far from it having been the sentimental it was the rationalist element in Mill's thought which was mainly strengthened by her influence (1951, p. 17).
In Hayek's mouth, the word “rationalist” is of course pejorative.Footnote 17 He therefore gives up the neutrality he displayed towards Harriet Taylor in the 1942 introduction.Footnote 18 As Janet Seiz and Michèle Pujol observe in The American Economic Review, “for more than a century, debate has raged over the extent and nature of [Harriet Taylor's] ‘influence’ on John Stuart Mill” (Seiz Reference Seiz and Pujol2000, p. 476). Following A. Rossi (1970), they note that two positions have so far prevailed in the debate: “either HTM was declared incapable of having contributed significantly to JSM's thought, or if the aspect JSM's work being examined was one of the scholar disapproved of, ‘the disliked element was seen as Harriet's influence’” (2000, p. 476).
The second position is that taken up by Hayek in his 1951 book. Hayek still subscribed to it at the end of his life since he asserted in his final book that “despite the great harm done by his work, we must probably forgive Mill much for his infatuation with the lady who later became his wife” (1988, p. 204). What then were the elements that bothered Hayek, and why did they bother him? We said earlier that in his previous work Hayek criticized Mill for epistemological reasons. He believed that the last book of A System of Logic (1843) had contributed to the development of “scientist” ideas.Footnote 19 Moreover, at the end of his life, Hayek seems to consider that under Taylor's influence, Mill passed from having sympathy with socialism to actually adopting socialist positions.Footnote 20
Hayek's Fascination for Harriet Taylor
Hayek therefore attributed a crucial role to Harriet Taylor; one of the portraits that he reproduced in his 1951 book represents her (p. 128). The caption says “Oil portrait in possession of the Author,” that is to say in Hayek's possession.Footnote 21 At the end of his life, he maintained that going through Mill's unpublished correspondence had revealed some interesting material, among which was “the peculiarly fascinating correspondance of Mill with his later wife” (Hayek Reference Hayek1994, p. 129). How can this fascination be accounted for? Several clues suggest that it could be due, at least partly, to the similarities between Hayek's and Mill's lives.
This thesis, to which Gilles Dostaler first drew our attention, could only be confirmed by taking a close look at Hayek's correspondence, written around 1950.Footnote 22 Like Mill, Hayek had long been separated from the person with whom he longed to share his life. He had first married Hella Frisch in 1926. According to Alan Ebenstein, Hayek wrote in his letters dated 1948 to 1950 that the reason why he had not married his distant cousin (Helene) was “because of simple miscommunication” between them (Ebenstein Reference Ebenstein2001, p. 167). “They remained in close contact after they were married, and considered divorce as early as the 1930s” (2001, p. 168). The war prevented them from seeing each other from 1939 to 1946. Then Hayek “sought a relatively high paying position on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago largely because this would provide the funds to maitain his family in England and himself and Helene” (2001, p. 168). Hayek left his wife in December 1949, sent his resignation letter to the LSE in February 1950, and divorced on July 13, 1950. He married Helene Bitterlich and, at the end of the same year, became a lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Chicago. As stated by the present editor of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
It may not have been entirely a coincidence that Hayek decided to edit the correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor during this period . . . the similarities of the circumstances of their personal lives may have held some interest. Hayek's trip (accompanied by his new wife) through Italy and Greece in 1954-55, one hundred years after the Mills' own journey, also suggests a connection
(Caldwell Reference Caldwell2003, p. 297, n. 9).Hayek's Fascination for On Liberty
For Hayek, the year 1954 bears witness to another fascination. Having written a short preface for Michael St John Packe's biography of Mill,Footnote 23 Hayek embarked upon a curious project: to make again the journey that Mill had done exactly a century before. Hayek's motives were different from those of Mill, who had been staying in southern Europe for health reasons: “it might be interesting to repeat the journey after exactly a hundred years with the aim of producing a fully annotated edition of the letters” (Hayek Reference Hayek1994, p. 129). The letters are those written by Mill to Harriet Taylor during this journey. They do not appear in the 1951 book. In fact this journey, financed by the Guggenheim Foundation, never gave rise to the scheduled publication. But Hayek had a second motive for his tour:
In his Autobiography, Mill describes how the conception of his book On Liberty came to him walking up the steps of the capitol at Rome. When I repeated this on the appropriate day a hundred years later, no inspiration, however, came to me. And as I later noticed, it was indeed not to be expected, since Mill had fibbed: The letters show that the idea of writing such a book had come to him before he reached Rome. Nevertheless, shortly after the conclusion of our journey, I had before me a clear plan for a book on liberty (1994, p. 130).
This book, The Constitution of Liberty, was completed in 1959 and published in 1960. When it came out in 1960, it was sometimes compared to On Liberty by the British and American press. Hayek's work was thus hailed by Henry Hazlitt as “the twentieth-century successor to John Stuart Mill's essay, On Liberty” (Newsweek, February 15, 1960).Footnote 24 As for Milton Friedman, he considers that The Constitution of Liberty shows the deep influence on Hayek of the people he had met at the University of Chicago.Footnote 25
The episode at the steps of the Capitol proves the regard (a century later to the day) that Hayek still had for Mill in 1954. It should also be noted that nine of the twenty-eight passages referring to Mill in The Constitution of Liberty are noteworthy, among which only two are critical of Mill.Footnote 26 Hayek uses quotations from Mill on many occasions and his work even ends with an extract from On Liberty.Footnote 27
But at the end of his life, Hayek downplayed his interest in Mill and even declared that he had always been indifferent to this author: “[My] work on the Saint-Simonians in particular led unexpectedly to my devoting a great deal of time to, who in fact never particularly appealed to me, though I achieved unintentionally the reputation of being one of the foremost experts on him” (Hayek Reference Hayek1994 p. 128, italics added).Footnote 28
Hayek's denying any appeal for Mill does not seem in keeping with the facts. However Hayek seems to have left behind his initial admiration, as many of his criticisms show and as he himself acknowledged: “My many years of work on John Stuart Mill actually shook my admiration for someone I had thought a great figure indeed, with the result that my present opinion of John Stuart Mill is a very critical one indeed” (1994, p. 140). One may wonder about the reasons why he changed his mind in that way; why did Hayek take such an interest in Mill, to eventually criticize him so severely?
We are going to see that the 1960s and ‘70s marked the beginning of a new period during which Hayek no longer contented himself with calling Mill a socialist or holding him responsible for the infiltration of constructivism into the liberal tradition. He also expounded the reasons why he now disapproved of Mill.
IV. 1962-1988: A GROWINGLY CRITICAL STAND
In 1962, Hayek wrote the introduction to the twelfth volume of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill published by Francis Mineka. Behind the customary politeness he displayed in it, the first stirrings of his disapproval can be felt:
During the forty years after his death, he governed liberal thought as did no other man, and as late as 1914 he was still the chief source of inspiration of the progressive part of the West—of the men whose dream of an indefinitely peaceful progres and expansion of Western civilization was shattered by the cataclysms of war and revolution. But even to that development Mill had unquestionably contributed by his sympathies for the rising aspirations of national self-determination and of socialism
(Hayek Reference Hayek and Mineka1962, p. xvi).Here we can recognize the now familiar reproach concerning Mill's alleged “sympathies” for nationalismFootnote 29 and socialism. This reproach is all the more justified since Mill's intellectual influence was considerable: “It must probably still be admitted that it is not so much for the originality of his thinking as for its influence on a world now past that Mill is chiefly of importance today . . . there can be no question that his influence is such that to the historian of thought all information we have about Mill's activities, his contacts . . . is nearly as important as his published work” (1962, p. xvi).
The Wage Issue
In the draft copy of an article published in 1968 (“Competition as a Discovery Procedure”), Hayek proved even more critical. His reproaches concerned one particular point:
The classical aim, which, in the words of John Stuart Mill, was “full employment at high wages” can therefore be achieved only by an efficient use of labour which requires the free movement of relative wage rates. That illustrious man, whose name for this reason I believe will go down to history as the grave-digger of the British economy, chose instead full employment at low wages. For this is the necessary result if the rigidity of relative wages is accepted as unalterable, and attempts made to correct its effects by lowering the general level of real wages by the round-about process of lowering the value of money (1968, p. 88).Footnote 30
By advocating such a dangerous objective as full employment with high wages,Footnote 31 Mill would therefore be indirectly responsible for the decline of British economy. Hayek did not specify in which context Mill used this expression. In his autobiography Mill maintained that the principle of population stated by Malthus “originally brought forward as an argument against the indefinite improvability of human affairs” was interpreted by the Radicals “in the contrary sense, as indicating the sole means of realizing that improvability by securing full employment at high wages to the whole labouring population through a voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers” (Mill Reference Mill1873, p. 94). Therefore, Mill did not deal with the monetary policy but with the economic consequences of birth control. Moreover, Mill's idea that “full employment with high wages” leads to the happiness of the majority has a strong Smithian flavor.Footnote 32 And Hayek considers Smith as a true liberal.
Hayek nevertheless repeated his criticism of the objective of “full employment with high wages” in his later works. Indeed, it can be found again in two articles published by The Institute of Economic Affairs in 1975 and 1984. It is, however, interesting to notice that Hayek slightly altered this reproach: in 1975, he wished the expression “full employment”—which he associated to the “Keynesian dream” and to his “inflationist policy” but also to Mill—were “abandoned.”Footnote 33 On the other hand, he asserted in 1984 that: “Nobody can claim a moral right to employment at a particular wage, unless there is opportunity profitably to employ him at such wages. The problem today is that access to such employment is denied to him by the monopolistic organizations of his fellows. All opportunities for employment are a creation of the market and the classical ideal of “full employment at high wages” (J. S. Mill) can be achieved only by a functioning market on which the wages offered for different kinds of work tell the worker where, in the circumstances of the moment, he can make the largest contribution to the social product” (Hayek Reference Hayek1984a, p. 318).
The objective set by Mill was therefore no longer regarded as out of reach, and the expression “full employment” was no longer questioned. Here, Hayek considered that this objective was attainable “by a functioning market,” provided that the role of the trade unions be limited (Hayek called them the workers’ “monopolistic organizations”).Footnote 34 His criticism of the “moral right” to enjoy a certain level of wages is in keeping with his favorite theme in the 1970s: the criticism of social justice.Footnote 35
Two Conflicting Ideas: Social Justice and Liberty
And indeed, from that time on, Hayek increasingly focused his criticism of Mill on his moral philosophy. In his article entitled Liberalism he said:
John Stuart Mill in his celebrated book On Liberty (1859), directed his criticism chiefly against the tyranny of opinion rather than the actions of government and by his advocacy of distributive justice and a general sympathetic attitude towards socialist aspirations in some of his other works, prepared the gradual transition of a large part of the liberal intellectuals to a moderate socialism
(Hayek Reference Hayek1973, pp. 129-30).This passage clearly expresses the idea that Hayek repeated throughout the 1970s and ‘80s: Mill was to blame first for not defending the right liberties in On Liberty and secondly for supporting demands for “social justice.” Mill's Reference Mill and Robson1859 book was no longer considered as a model. As a matter of fact, Hayek maintained in an interviewFootnote 36 that “the decline of liberalism begins with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty” (Hayek Reference Hayek1978, p. 6). For what reason?
In a sense, his argument is directed against the tyranny of the prevailing morals, and he is very largely responsible for the shift from protest against government interferences to what he calls the tyranny of opinion. And he encouraged a disregard for certain moral traditions. Permissiveness almost begins with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty” (1978, p. 5).
In his major work, Law Legislation and Liberty, Hayek reproached Mill for adopting a view of social justice that “leads straight to full-fledged socialism” (1976, p. 77). He based his criticism on the idea that Mill's moral doctrine, utilitarianism, rested upon the assumption that individuals are omniscient. In the texts he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s, Hayek repeatedly maintained that Mill, by trying to defend “social justice,” had fostered socialism. Hayek considered that “social justice” was an absurd notion and that Mill had been blinded by three “errors” that reinforced one another:
(1) The utilitarian doctrine, which, according to Hayek, assumed that individuals were omniscient.
(2) The classical theory of value, which Hayek considered as an inversion of the true functional relationship of value.Footnote 37
(3) An erroneous distinction between the laws of production and the laws of distribution.
What Mill and Hayek have in common is the cross-disciplinary aspect of their work. But Hayek disagreed with the way Mill linked the different domains of knowledge. In a text entitled “The Muddle of the Middle,”Footnote 38 he reproached him for having introduced “a moral problem” into economics by making his distinction between production and distribution (Hayek Reference Hayek and Pejovich1981, p. 92). This distinction is presented by Hayek as a consequence of “the objective theory of value,” which itself rests on ideas borrowed from physics. The ultimate consequence of scientism is therefore the introduction of a “moral problem,” that of social justice. What seems to arouse Hayek's interest in particular is precisely this notion which Mill is supposed to have invented.Footnote 39
V. CONCLUSION
From the forties onward, Hayek criticized Mill's sympathy with socialism. Yet he tried to distinguish, within Mill's work, between the ideas influenced by Comte's and Harriet Taylor's “rationalism” on the one hand and the ideas that allowed defending liberty on the other. That is why until the sixties his criticism of the System of Logic and of the Principles of Political Economy went together with a great admiration for On Liberty.
As explained earlier, this interpretation gave way to a much more critical opinion in the sixties. Now, Hayek also criticized On Liberty. He considered that a “free society” could be worked more “successfully” if “voluntary conformity” prevailed over “original personality.” On that point he disagreed with Mill's defense of “spontaneity,” “originality” and “individuality” against conformity and “the despotism of custom” (On Liberty, 1859). This is fairly ironic for someone complaining about the “bad” influences to which Mill had been exposed.
In fact, Hayek did not change his views but changed his emphasis. He already argued against “the cult of the distinct and different individuality” in a passage of “Individualism: True and False” in which he briefly refers to Mill's On Liberty (1945, p. 26). But this criticism grew as time went on. Hayek even wrote that in directing his heaviest attack against moral coercion Mill “probably overstated the case for liberty” (1960, p. 146). He held Mill responsible for the disregard for the prevailing morals. At the end of his life, this charge against Mill (but also against Keynes and Freud) became a dominant theme in Hayek's thought (1979, pp. 161-76).
One can also point out the rhetorical value of denouncing Mill: the expression “Mill himself” is used twice by Hayek and the expression “Even to that development Mill had unquestionably contributed” once. The “Saint of Rationalism” had been corrupted and had become a socialist. If Mill had, which rationalist would not? Mill is used as a demonstration of Hayek's theory about the danger of rationalism.
