# Editor’s Introduction **URL:** **By** Tom G. Palmer **Published:** January 1, 1989 --- “Hayek points the way toward an exciting research program for a new generation of classical liberal thinkers.” At nearly ninety years of age, Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek has published an important and original work, _The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism_ (ed. by W. W. Bartley, III, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and London: Routledge). In one volume, Hayek has drawn together the many strands of his distinguished career as scientist, scholar, and man of letters. Insights from decades of study in anthropology, law, economics, history, psychology, and many other fields are woven together into a compelling case against socialism and for the free society. The work is controversial, to be sure. Not only socialists and other statists will be challenged, but even Hayek’s fellow defenders of liberty. For Hayek has traced a careful pathway through the thickets of moral and social philosophy, cutting across established oppositions (nature versus convention, for example) and pointing the way toward an exciting research program for a new generation of classical liberal thinkers. He has issued a bold challenge that is already causing classical liberal thinkers to reexamine old commitments and categories. Among the highlights of the work are his history of the evolution of liberty, property, and justice, in which he shows how “the revival of European civilisation” and the growth of the market order during the later Middle Ages “owes its origins and _raison d’être_ to political anarchy,” i.e., to the competition among overlapping political and legal jurisdictions. Hayek cites here the pioneering work of the French historian Jean Baechler (_The Origins of Capitalism_ \[Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975\]), who has shown how competition among political jurisdictions to attract capital and population produced results as salutary as does the more widely appreciated competition among firms to attract customers. This emphasis on the centrality to the growth of liberty and the rule of law of competition among legal and political entities is strongly corroborated by recent scholarship in economic and legal history. Economic historian E.L. Jones has argued that Europe’s remarkable economic growth is attributable in large part to the plurality of competing jurisdictions, in which “Playing two authorities against one another was a ploy made commoner by the many and overlapping jurisdictions in Europe.” (_The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia_ \[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981\], p. 91. See also Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., _How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World_ \[New York: Basic Books, 1986\].) In his magisterial _Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) legal historian Harold Berman has revealed “The source of the supremacy of law in the plurality of legal jurisdictions and legal systems within the same legal order” (p. 38) and shown how “Given plural legal systems, victims of unjust laws could run from one jurisdiction to another for relief in the name of reason and conscience.” (p. 146) This competition among a plurality of sources of law is responsible for a uniquely Western institution: the rule of law, i.e., the conception of the law as an evolving body (_corpus juris_) distinct from the whims, interests, or dictates of this or that ruler. Another highlight of the book—and a powerful challenge to those who would follow the path he has blazed—is Hayek’s recasting of the age-old opposition between law as conventional (_nomos_) and law as natural (_physis_). Here Hayek draws his inspiration from David Hume and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment; as Hume argued, “though the rules of justice be artificial they are not arbitrary.” This idea has been powerfully advanced by economist Robert Sugden in his book _The Economics of Rights, Co-operation, and Welfare_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Sugden shows how “if individuals pursue their own interests in a state of anarchy, order—in the form of conventions of behaviour that it is in each individual’s interest to follow— can arise spontaneously....\[A\]lthough these conventions need not maximize social welfare in any meaningful sense, they will tend to become norms: people will come to believe that their behaviour ought to be regulated by convention. I argue that such beliefs represent a genuine and coherent system of morality, towards which most of us have some leanings, and for which none of us needs to apologize.” (p. vii.) Sugden updates the technique of “conjectural history” using game-theory to show how conventions can solidify around naturally prominent features of human life (sometimes referred to as “Schelling points”). > Hayek points the way toward an exciting research program for a new generation of classical liberal thinkers. In a similar way Hayek has extended his analysis of competition as a discovery procedure (cf. his essay, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” in Hayek, _New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas_ \[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978\]) to history; history is conceived as a discovery procedure. Thus, the fact that a rule, law, or tradition is conventional is no argument against its being natural; nature reveals itself through history. Hayek illuminates for us the historicity of such moral and legal rules, while avoiding the pitfall of historicism. The contributors to this special symposium on _The Fatal Conceit_ include representatives of a number of scholarly specialities, including law, philosophy, economics, history, political science, and physics. Each has offered critical remarks intended to illuminate the central achievements or failings of Hayek’s ambitious project. Some are enthusiastic in their praise; others are equally so in their condemnation. Each, however, has attempted to confront the challenge Hayek has made. > Hayek has extended his analysis of competition as a discovery procedure to history. The readers of this symposium are similarly encouraged to obtain and read Hayek’s work in order to judge for themselves. _The Fatal Conceit_ is the first volume of a planned twenty-two volume series of _The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek_, to be issued in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press and in the United Kingdom by Routledge. (German and Japanese editions are also underway, under the editorship of Alfred Bosch and Reinhold Veit, and Chiaki Nishiyama, respectively.) The Institute for Humane Studies is proud to be a supporter of this project, undertaken by W. W. Bartley, III, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and encourages faculty and students alike to request that their college or university libraries subscribe to the entire series.