Abstract
This paper replies to “The Servants of Obama's Machinery,” which is a criticism of Boettke's interpretation of Hayek's ideas in The Road to Serfdom. We find the authors raise many interesting questions for both political economy and history of thought but ultimately are unconvincing in their critique. In addition to responding to their overall critique, we also respond to their smaller points on Hayek and Arrow, Public Choice, and the historical problems they raise. Despite our disagreement we believe this is a fruitful line of discussion and deserves to be looked into further both theoretically and empirically.
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Notes
See Caldwell's introduction to Hayek's [2007].
See also Ostrom's [1973] The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration.
The work of Merkle [1980] on the ideology of the international scientific management movement is essential background reading for these discussions. Also see Rodgers [1998] on the role of social politics in Europe and the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.
Keynes in the same letter to Hayek from June 28, 1944 about The Road to Serfdom even stated, “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement.” He did, however, go on, “You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line. You agree that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it” (quoted in Hayek's [2007, p. 24]).
See Hayek's [1948] essay Individualism: True and False, especially his discussion of Smith and his contemporaries and how they wanted to find a system in which bad men will be able to do least harm, rather than finding a system where the best and the brightest can rule.
See also Hayek [1960], “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postscripts to The Constitution of Liberty Hayek [1960, pp. 397–411].
For a further development of this rather precursory statement, see Boettke and Leeson [2002]. It also picks up from a correspondence between Karen Vaughn and Buchanan on this issue, and also William Riker's [1982] Liberalism against Populism work in political science, which discusses a broader meaning of Arrow's theorem for a working democratic system.
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Boettke, P., Snow, N. The Servants of Obama's Machinery: F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom Revisited? — A Reply. Eastern Econ J 38, 428–433 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2011.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2011.19