A Dialectical Utopia
Hayek, Marx, Hegel, and the full dialectical goody-bag!
The basis of utopia is generally one in good heart, men who desire to change the world for the better, helping the people in the most need and doing what he sees best to help his fellow man, and himself. Pure evil is something that is incredibly rare, and something historically we have hardly ever seen. While we may see things to be ‘evil’ off of various perspectives, the motivations and perspectives behind such acts are vital to consider in determining whether something can be said to be ‘pure’ evil. As one shall find, those men who tend to plan out and shape utopian societies in abstract do so in the interest of helping those who he perceives ‘allies.’
However, in this formulation of abstract utopian societies, men tend to forget the social conditions in which he lives, losing his touch with reality and unable to make any comprehensive plans as to his path. Utopians tend to be more than ever ‘abolitionists’ and while if that was a feasible option of course we would all be abolitionists, it is invariably entirely unfeasible.
According to Sciabarra;
“For Hayek, utopians internalise and abstract, exaggerated sense of human possibility, aiming to create new social formations upon a pretense of knowledge. In their blueprints for the ideal society, utopians presuppose that people can master all the sophisticated complexities of social life. Even when their social and ethical ends are decidedly progressive, utopians often rely on reactionary means. They manifest inherent bias toward the statist construction of alternative institutions in their attempts to practically implement their rationalist abstractions.”
One of the most vital failures of Utopianism is its severe deprivation as to the intricacies of social and historical complexities, plus institutionalised conscious events, and unintended social externalities. In the context of sociology, these are incredibly difficult to plan out and map, all of which the utopian fails to grasp.
For Marx, the formidable future of communism rests on the pretence that men will eventually be able to master their own destiny, and for Hayek this is simply a dogmatic ‘Marxist illusion’ that serves as a foundation for coercive planning by the state. According to Hayek, for important ontological and epistemological reasons, such utopian goals must engender dystopian consequences.
In this article, I hope to highlight the dialectic elements in Hayekian thinking, and that Marxist thinking is not the only ones to have incorporated such methods. We may note here that I am by no means dismissing Marx’s analysis here, in fact, quite the contrary. There are many valuable insights in Marx’s thinking on this subject that are absolutely correct, and should not be dogmatically dismissed on ideological grounds.
The History of Dialectics
The term “dialectics” has been used in a wide variety of different ways throughout history, the first of which can be drawn back to Aristotle. Aristotle’s idea of a ‘dialectic’ was imbedded in discourse, and its counterpart being that of rhetoric. For Aristotle, dialectic was the art of logical discussion, or argumentation.
According to Sciabarra;
“In dialectic, the interlocutor proceeds from accepted propositions and argues toward a conclusion that is more basic.”
While Aristotle deemed this insufficient for establishing scientific truths, he did value the concept for its necessitation of pondering questions from multiple vantage points and hence why numerous notable dialectical theorists hold Aristotle to be the father of dialectical inquiry. According to Engles, Aristotle was ‘the Hegel of the ancient world’, and Lenin described him as possessing ‘the living germs of dialectics.’
Further than 2000 years after Aristotle’s death Hegel went on to develop his conception of dialectics as an ‘ontological and historical process,’ and in the spirit of Aristotle went to affirm the impossibility of logical contradiction.
According to Sciabarra;
“For Hegel, opposing concepts are merely partial views whose apparent contradictions could be transcended by exhibiting them as internally related within a larger whole.”
Other dialectical philosophers saw this in a more ‘materialistic’ view and uprooted this into its Triadic formulation, moving from thesis to antithesis, and then into synthesis. This was later dubbed ‘dialectical materialism’ and was used as Marx’s philosophy of history.
Dialectics in Social Inquiry
Utilising dialectics in the social sciences certainly may be a helpful tool. It allows for the examination of systems in relation to the whole (synchronic examination) and the whole historically. (diachronic examination) Synchronically speaking it grasps systems as systematically related parts, ‘being both simultaneously constituted by the whole, and constituting the whole.’ Diachronically speaking, it allows for historical examination of the origination and evolutionary development of any such system. In analysis of the whole, all parts are seen as systematically interconnected, and impossible to abstract and separate as the whole we are analysing are jointly constituted by all these systems.
For Hayek, this embodiment of dialectical thinking took its most explicit form in his opposition to deliberate conscious designs in disregard of historical context, and recognised the evolution of mankind’s social conditions as those which are constituted both by conscious cause and effect, and those of unintended social externalities.
For where I will give credit to Marx was his critique of Utopianism, long before Hayek marx introduced such thinking and in many ways as I hope to show it bears great relation to Hayek’s critique of so called ‘constructivism.’ Marx recognises the products of institutional design as a direct product of human action, but not necessarily of conscious human design which can be a valuable insight into further analysis. We may also note this includes an implicit rejection of Althusser that there is a ‘contradiction’ in Marx’s dialectical thinking as he grew. We categorise this moreso as a more ‘matured’ version of his young Hegelian routes.
Hayekian Dialectics
Hayek in terms of specifically evolutionary theory followed theorists such as Karl Popper in what has been called a ‘conservative’ like tradition. This desire is not one of ambiguous clinging to the status quo, but rather is more so associated with the large scale difficulty and transition costs of social changes.
Accordingly to John Plamenatz;
“A conservative believes that the ability to make large social changes according to plan is severely limited, and that the attempt to make them ordinarily does more harm than good.”
For this reason, conservatives direct this toward “radical” ideologies which they deem ‘utopian’ to be socially destructive, requiring great social planning and transition which can lead to extreme spillover effects, and unintended institutional impacts. Conservatives see institutional and social change as one of deliberate conscious human design, and yet its impacts as one independent conscious design.
However, it is vital to note that unlike the orthodox conservative tradition, Hayek drew a distinction between “radicalism” and “Utopianism” and it is also important to note that as much as it is counter intuitive at first conservatism is not strictly about maintaining the status quo, but rather more strictly about maintaining antecedent tradition.
As Edmund Burke wrote;
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of conservation.”
In such traditions it tended to be that strict atomism was embraced, or as it was called ‘atomistic individualism.’ Following what people came to dub as the ‘critical rationalists’ expressed distrust and contempt for the french rationalist school for their contempt of empirical history, as the french rationalist school held that man, with the tools available to utilise his reason he, and with reason alone can construct society anew. The evolutionary tradition that Hayek followed expressed this as dogmatic nonsense, particularly Hayek. Saying this view expresses an insurmountable exaggeration upon the capabilities of human cognition, claiming that society and its interrelations are something that simply cannot be subject to wholly understandable abstracted cause and effect, rather when human cognition is utilised in order to produce social ‘ripples’ it tends to end in a result that is the disparate from the original ‘blue print,’ being really a product independent of human cognition. To Hayek, man is not an omnipresent being capable of rising above those values ingrained in him.
Or as Hayek writes;
“The picture of man as a being who, thanks to his reason, can rise above the values of his civilisation, in order to judge it from the outside or a higher point of view, is an illusion. It simply must be understood that reason itself is part of civilisation. All we can ever do is to confront one part with the other parts. Even this process leads to incessant movement, which may in the very long course of time change the whole. But sudden complete reconfiguring of the whole is not possible at any stage of the process, because we must always use the material that is available, and which itself is the integrated product of a process of evolution.”
Clearly this it is, for Hayek impossible for any individual to have some sort of ‘transcendental’ view of the society he is present in. Or in other words, to change society, he must necessarily use, and vary the cogs existing within the society to begin with, thus any idea of ridding away and starting ‘anew’ is futile, the history of civilisation is not one of stages, but rather is one of continuous spontaneous evolution. Of course, he may always interact and relate with each of the parts, but he is always subjected to an internal relation. He can never be an ‘external’ observer, he can only gain sight of the constitution whole relative to his presence within in. Thus Hayek says while we may be able to adjust and vary certain cogs that make the whole what it is, we can never, as an individual make a total societal adjustment directly from the products of evolutionary human cognition. In this way, we again see these similarities in Hayek’s dialectical sociological analysis to Marx’s.
Methodological Individualism, Atomism and Organicism
Methodological individualism has more or less been dismissed, at least as it comes to me due to its ties to atomism. This has often been associated with a complete rejection of all empirical reality, and reductionism. Atomism meaning that it views the whole, or the product system simply as the mere product of an aggregate addition of its parts. Assuming an external view of abstract analysis by simply demonstrating an analytic addition. As Chiani Nishiyama pointed out however, individualism does not necessarily imply that the whole is reduced to the mere sum of its parts simply because it is wrongly associated with it.So what is the Hayekian view on this? Well, the way Hayek sees it is counter intuitive to what one initially would suppose, the dialectical method underlying Hayek’s sociological views encompasses both atomistic and holistic principles, but noted fully. Hayek had an explicit opposition to the atomistic tradition, seeing the whole as more than the mere analytical aggregate of its sum, he sees factors as both a ‘precondition’ and ‘result’ of an infinitely casual chain in both individual and overlapping social factors. Thus he ascribes a sort of ‘dual causation’ or ‘constitutive’ relation between factors and wholes.
On this Hayek writes;
“The overall order of actions in a group is in two respects more than the totality of regularities observable in actions of the individuals and cannot be wholly reduced to them. The whole is more than the mere sum if it’s parts because it presupposes that the elements are related to each other in a particular manner and because the existence of these relations which are essential for the existence of the whole cannot be account for wholly by the interaction of the parts but only by their interaction with an outside world of both the individual parts and the whole.”
This is to say that each individual component and its interrelations across a broader whole is what gives a definite meaning to the whole itself, each relation is constitutive of some integral variable. For example if we imagine an art piece with a tiny hole in the middle, the piece is no longer ‘itself’ in the broader sense, the whole product is necessarily comprised by its parts, and their wider relations being compromised.
The way Hayek views the whole, is to say it is comprised as an ‘organism’ that performs necessary functions for its own preservation, while simultaneously being a product beyond that of human cognition. The dialectical method contains an implicit organicist view of society, and yet differs from a strict interpretation. It is so in social existences, that parts, never mind wholes cannot be analysed without an implicit understanding of the broader picture, I.e., an understanding of all other constituent parts and their relations. This interdependence shows that propositions are not to be abstracted and isolated, as they necessarily distort further relations in other developments internal to the whole. Yet, there must be a developed analytical balance in balancing complete abstracted atomism with categorical holistic analysis.
One crippling flaw of a strict organicist interpretation is that if fails to stress the relative integrality of certain relations to the whole, at least, proportionally. It sees all relations in almost an ‘egalitarian’ light, all of which are viewed as of equal necessity in defining the whole. The separation that comes between a dialectical organicist interpretation and that of strict organicism in its identification of its constituent elements. Such strict organicism depends on what Sciabarra calls ‘Omniscience.’ It requires an impossible abstract synoptic view for omnipresent identification, and thereby utopian process. The dialectical method recognises these varying degrees of functional necessity interrelated in varied parts however, and seeks to analyse these parts relative to necessity. Further, an adoption of strict atomism would be equally as unviable as strict organicism. The more microscopic and abstract or analysis becomes, the more we obscure and ignore the importance of internal relations between the parts in constituting the whole.
As Sciabarra says;
“Seeing an individual person as nothing more than a physiological and chemical mass of cells makes it difficult to define the essential characteristics of human being.”
Unlike the two rather ‘orthodox’ perceptual interpretations of sociological reality, dialectical thinking stresses not on some synoptic omnipresent, or abstract static view of relations, but rather on contextual dynamic analysis. It sees everything it attempts to analyse as internally related, that is to say that in the absence of its outward relations it would not be what it is said to be. With the conclusion being reached that, all parts are integral to the overall system, but not all parts are as vital in defining the overall system relative to one and other. Blanshard puts it plainly, by noting that “every character counts, but not all characters count equally.”
Here is an epistemic account of what Hayek’s evolutionary theory brings, that reason is not infallible, rather it is constrained by his existence as an actor that exists within a certain context. He is not abstract or synoptic to an ahistorical being, rather he is constrained by those traditional customs ingrained into him by his conditional existence internal to a whole.
Scibarra expands;
“We are internal to these rules and cannot take an external, transcendental role. Even our consciousness operates according to rules of which we are not conscious, since these rules are internal to the operation itself.”
Cultural development and historical context is not something that developed casual to design and planning by that of human cognition, rather human cognition and social context, or culture developed simultaneously with reason.
For Hayek;
“It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man created his culture, than that culture created his reason.”
Mises on Society
Mises, in his expansive sociological analysis of socialism undertakes an analysis of society, its origins, and what it entails. While I may note, this is certainly an incredible work I highly recommend everyone read, we will only be undertaking an quick note of his views relevant to Hayek’s evolutionary theory.
Mises noted that the comparison to society an ‘organism’ is yet another in a continuous line of examples regarding the relation between the social and physical sciences. This ‘flirtatious’ relation between sociology and biology wear to say that, society should be conceived of a living social entity compromised as a system of ‘organs.’ However, as mises notesthis must only mean that the core of society and further human civilisation is really, the division of labour.
As Mises says;
“Comparison with the biological organism can only be conceived to have taught sociology one thing: that the organism can only be conceived as a system of organs. This, however, merely means that the essence of the organism is the division of labour. Only the division of labour makes the parts become members; it is in the collaboration of the members that we recognise the unity of the system, the organism.”
Here we can see that much like Hayek, Mises also has a degree of ‘dialectical’ thinking in his approach in noting the vitality of emphasising the complex social reality of interrelations in a complex interrelated ‘organism.’ He emphasises the importance of these contextual relations, and by extending reading of Mises’s writing on economics it is easy to see that he must conceive some parts of the social organism as more vital relative to other parts and their relations. Further, clearly mises has a sort of ‘internalist’ interpretation of the whole, seeing it as defined by the interrelations between individual parts which produces astronomical social cohesion. Mises views, much like Hayek, reason as systematically developing with customs and rules, and that when man appears as a rational creature, he is already a social creature.
Mises goes on to comment:
“Modern man is a social being, not only as one who’s material needs could not be supplied in isolation, but also as one who has achieved a development of reason and of the perspective faculty that would have been impossible except within society. Man is inconceivable as an isolated being, for humanity exists only as a social phenomena.”
The most explicit formation of Mises’s dialectical thinking is his view that society is more than its mere composed parts.
Mises adds;
“Vegetable and animal organisms are more than more than can conglomerations of single cells, and society is more than the sum of individual parts which it is composed.”
This is unfortunately as far as I wish to go in this context. I wish to a further, more extensive analysis specifically on Hayek’s spontaneous order in the future, and on wider cultural development, and the role of societal customs on reason. But this must be left to a later time.
(This article was published on April 2nd, 2021)