Modern Conservatives and F.A. Hayek

In a recent exchange that I had in the comments section of a posting at a Conservative blog, the subject of F.A. Hayek's classic treatise "The Road to Serfdom" was up for some discussion. Of course, modern conservatives think the world of Hayek and often refer to his arguments as both a defense of conservatism and an attack on modern liberalism as an inevitable path towards totalitarianism.

I have read Hayek and find that I agree with him on some issues (his more libertarian bent), but disagree with him on others (such as his mischaracterization of welfare-state liberals as Marxian socialists). I respect his work as a provocative and thoughtful "conservative" intellectual and scholar, and I believe any modern liberal thinker worth his or her salt needs to be familiar with Hayek's work.

But I feel the need to point out to my modern conservative rivals that Hayek did not consider himself a conservative in the way that term has come to be defined. No. In fact, he considered himself to be a classical liberal. And, in fact, he recoiled from the notion that he should be considered a conservative. The reason for this is that he recognized the reactionary tendencies within conservatism as he understood it and found that conservatism posed as much of a potential threat to freedom and democracy as did the modern liberalism he equated with socialism. I firmly believe that Hayek would reject the fundamentalism and the reactionary character of what has come to define modern conservatism today. In fact, this is what Hayek had to say in the Foreward to The Road to Serfdom, written in 1956, 12 years after the original publication of the book, and included in the 1962 Phoenix Books edition of the text published by the University of Chicago Press, page xi-xii:

But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is a danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of the government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting the rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

Those who would call themselves conservatives in America today, I believe, reflect much of what Hayek finds deplorable, dangerous, and backwards in conservatism. He would see the fanaticism of folks currently benefitting from government-run healthcare through Medicare opposing an expansion of such benefits to others as "defending established privilege" and their disruption of health care town hall meetings as an effort to "lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege." Hayek would see the movement among conservatives to establish a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution as another example of reactionaries seeking to "lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege" as anti-thetical to his arguments and as much a recipe for totalitarianism as left-leaning "socialist" policy would be. He would view the Patriot Act and the powers of the executive to claim the unchecked authority to monitor private phone conversations, for instance, even if this authority were never exercised, as very troublesome and against the entire grain of his argument. I remain firmly convinced that Hayek would not recognize the character of what passes for conservatism in the United States today and that he would think of such Palin/Limbaugh conservatives invoking his name to defend their demagoguery and exclusionary fundamentalism with abject horror.