The Convergent Thinking of Burke and Hayek

It is said that at a meeting of party officials in the 1970s, soon-to-be British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cut short a colleague’s presentation by slamming a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty down on a table and declaring, “This is what we believe.” What some find ironic about this event is that the book the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party had so dramatically presented to her colleagues contains a postscript titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative”. The inattentive reader might think, based on that title alone, that Hayek would have little in common with another man who has also provided intellectual ballast to Right-leaning parties across the Anglosphere; eighteenth-century Irish-born statesman Edmund Burke. Best known for his striking criticism of the French Revolution, Burke is widely regarded as the founder of modern political conservatism. However, although Hayek’s philosophy is centred on his belief in spontaneous order, and Burke’s on his Christian conception of natural law and his penchant for established custom, the pair reached similar conclusions on a wide variety of topics including jurisprudence, the economy and the state.

The philosophical core of Hayek’s thought was his understanding of society as an organically developing spontaneous order. The crux of spontaneous order theory was, for Hayek, that “in the process of cultural transmission … selection takes place, in which those modes of conduct prevail which lead to the formation of a more efficient order for the whole group, because such groups will prevail over others”. Put simply, Hayek saw order within a society as resulting not from planning and design, but from the constantly evolving, voluntary and unorganised acts of individuals. As a result of his belief in spontaneous ordering, Hayek also saw “the experimentation of many generations [to] embody more experience than any one man possesses”, and thus thought that “to act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking … [will] do [us] much harm”.

Hayek’s belief in spontaneous order meant that he was fundamentally sceptical of the constructive powers of individual human reason. While not an outright anti-rationalist, Hayek did think that “the belief that [reason] can become its own master and control its own development may yet destroy it”; he connected an inflated faith in human reason with a plethora of contemporary issues. It was on the basis that his anathema, socialism, “proceed[ed] strictly in accordance with reason” that Hayek launched his central attack on it; contrasting socialism with the greatly superior spontaneous ordering of a free society. Overall, Hayek’s belief in spontaneous order, and his scepticism of human reason which was purely a corollary of this view, formed the basis of his opinions on a wide range of political and economic quandaries.

Burke’s core philosophy differs significantly from Hayek’s. Burke’s beliefs were the direct result of two different, although not mutually exclusive, underlying philosophical influences: his strong religious conviction and conception of natural law, and his belief in the worth of established custom. Like many of his contemporaries, Burke was a Christian statesman who believed that “all the good things which are connected with … civilization, have … depended for ages upon … religion”, and who often appealed to God in his writings. This religious faith also went hand in hand with Burke’s belief in God-given natural law. Although Christian at its core, Burke’s conception of natural law was influenced by Ciceronian and Stoic traditions; and has been referred to by one leading scholar as his “cardinal moral philosophy”. Hayek, on the other hand, was a near lifelong agnostic who was raised in an irreligious household. He explicitly rejected the natural law tradition that so heavily influenced Burke.

Running parallel to this religious influence was Burke’s confidence in the benefit of conventions and traditions. This outlook is best encapsulated in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke wrote that “a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman”. Apart from Burke’s trademark advocacy of preservation, note also his parallel emphasis on the “ability to improve”; it is this that distinguishes Burke’s strand of conservatism from the solely reactionary variety that Hayek lambasted in his postscript. Burke’s view, that the preservation and gradual improvement of the existing social order are the keys to governing effectively, is commonly referred to as “incrementalism”. It was the motivation behind his famous opposition to revolutionary doctrines of wholesale change.

Burke’s incrementalism can also be connected with his scepticism, similar to Hayek’s, of the value of abstract reason as opposed to the “collected reason of ages”. Indeed, as Hayek opposed the socialists of his time for believing that they could organise society in accordance with some rational plan, Burke opposed the French revolutionaries of the 1790s on much the same grounds; although the justification for his scepticism of reason differs from that of Hayek. Burke talked in terms of tradition and gradual improvement, not spontaneous ordering, but still believed it impossible for anybody to improve society using rationality alone. He thought that is was only by looking “backward to their ancestors” and utilising the wisdom of the past that is embodied in traditions and conventions, that an individual could positively shape society. However, what is striking when comparing Hayek and Burke, is that both thinkers often reached the same normative conclusions on a wide range of political and economic issues despite their different philosophical foundations. This is particularly apparent on the topic of jurisprudence.

Hayek’s belief in spontaneous order, and Burke’s conception of natural law and confidence in the benefits of established custom, formed the basis of the pair’s remarkably similar views on jurisprudence. Because Hayek saw society as developing spontaneously, he was of the opinion that “law”, as in a code of moral conduct, grew organically within a community and predated government legislation. Hayek believed that legal rulings should be “discovered” by judges and legislatures from within the norms of a society, as opposed to “created” artificially. This view led him to attack the opposing doctrine of legal positivism, which asserts, in Hayek’s words, that “law … ought to be the product of the free invention of a legislator”. Hayek felt that this view was based “on the fiction that all the relevant facts are known to some one mind, and that it is possible to construct from [a] knowledge of the particulars a desirable social order”. Society develops organically and unconsciously, and it is not for law-makers to invent legislation—because they cannot facilitate the progress of a civilisation better than unconstrained spontaneous ordering can. Hayek’s legal vision is diametrically opposed to that of the socialist planners that he spent nearly his whole life debating, and finds its best practical expression in the English common law.

The English common law was also an inspiration for Burke, who would have understood it as being able to deliver the incremental change that he desired. As a result of his reverence for custom and tradition, Burke also asserted that:

if civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures.

This view, that the role of law-making is to codify already existing social conventions, not to invent legislation under some theoretical criteria, is, albeit for different reasons, the same position that Hayek took, and by its very nature a rejection of the tenets of legal positivism. It was also against this backdrop that Burke opposed the French revolutionaries, who set about inventing the legal framework of the new French Republic using abstract reasoning alone, without consideration for conventions or traditions. Moreover, legal positivism, with its dismissal of moral value judgments in law-making, is fundamentally opposed to natural law theory. This was a fact also identified by Hayek, who remarked that “the doctrines of legal positivism have been developed in direct opposition to the conception of a law of nature”. Burke, with his firm belief in the natural law, would have had more than one objection to this doctrine. Both Hayek and Burke saw the role of law-making to be the formalisation of established conventions, and were opposed to legal positivism.

On the economy, both Hayek and Burke favoured what is today known as the “free market”—although the pair justified this position differently, in accordance with their different philosophical underpinnings. Indeed, the reason why Hayek championed the free market was because, unlike its alternative the planned economy, it is both the result of spontaneous growth, and not inimical to future spontaneous growth. In his argument for the superiority of the free market, Hayek’s scepticism of human reason was also brought to the fore. This is demonstrated by his view that planners cannot improve elements of the social order, such as the economy, because a person “cannot acquire the full knowledge [of society] which would make mastery of the events possible”. Hayek saw economic planners, who were erroneously convinced that they could improve the economy using a rational design, as producing worse outcomes for society because they impeded the forces that created spontaneous order. It was only the free market that could lead to both “a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any design could achieve”, and the preservation of the constantly evolving spontaneous order that is “the prime condition of the general welfare of [society]”.

Although Burke is not known for his economic thinking, he did possess an intelligible economic philosophy and was, in a similar way to Hayek, opposed to state intervention in the market. As he progressed through his career, Burke became more convinced that “unrestrained freedom of buying and selling is the great animating principle of production and supply”, and that “the moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted … and the consumer in the end will suffer”. Burke wrote these words less than two decades after his contemporary Adam Smith had published his landmark The Wealth of Nations, making them some of the first affirmations of the free market in modern economic thought. And although these passages can be traced back to Burke’s unique underlying philosophy, they could easily have been written by Hayek in one of his attacks on socialist planners.

The reason for Burke’s championing of the free market is twofold. First and foremost was his view that trade in a free market brings about certain “laws of commerce” governing transactions, which Burke directly identified as an element of divinely predicated natural law. Indeed, in Burke’s thinking, “laws of commerce … are laws of nature, and consequently laws of God”. To break a law of commerce through state intervention was thus a sin against God, so risked “Divine displeasure”, and was to be avoided. Second, Burke, ever the believer in traditions and sceptical of human reason, also thought that many forms of new and rational government intervention in the economic sphere were simply beyond the competence of the state to execute effectively.

Overall, Hayek and Burke clearly held similar normative views on the economy. Although Hayek was influenced by his belief in spontaneous order, and Burke by his Christian natural law conception and scepticism of human reason, which was the product of a firm belief in the benefits of tradition, both were passionate supporters of the free market.

Furthermore, Hayek and Burke were both in favour of a limited role for the state, although they justified this belief in dissimilar ways. While Hayek was not the anti-government radical that he is sometimes caricatured as being, his confidence in limited government cannot be doubted. Indeed, Hayek did not envisage the state as having a significant part to play in the everyday lives of individuals, believing instead that it should have a role like that “of a maintenance squad of a factory, its object being not to produce any particular services or products to be consumed by the citizens, but rather to [be] the mechanism which regulates the production of those goods and services”. Simply put, Hayek thought that the essential function of the state should be to preserve the spontaneous ordering process within society, which he believed was the best outcome for all citizens. This is not a worldview compatible with a large and pervasive state apparatus.

Although Burke did not use the parlance of modern political theorists, it can clearly be inferred from his works that he was, like Hayek, a supporter of “small government”. Indeed, Burke believed that the role of the state was only “to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, [and] to the public prosperity”. The reason Burke envisioned such a circumscribed role for government, more circumscribed than even Hayek did, was because he thought an expansion of state responsibilities beyond the most rudimentary of tasks was “not in the power of Government, [and that] it would be a vain presumption of statesmen to think they [could] do it”. This view is indicative of Burke’s scepticism of human reason and its practical capabilities, a product of his faith in the benefits of tried-and-tested conventions. Therefore, although Hayek was motivated by his belief in the benefits of spontaneous order, and Burke by his scepticism of human reason, which was the corollary of his support for established traditions, both thinkers were opposed to a large and empowered state.

However, one cannot fully understand either Hayek’s or Burke’s conception of the ideal role of the state without also considering their attitudes towards financial inequality and government-mandated wealth redistribution. Hayek thought that attempts to redistribute wealth in order to lower financial inequality impeded individual liberty, with “equality of the general rules of law and conduct … the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty”. Crucially, Hayek valued liberty, something essential to the spontaneous organisation of a society, above any egalitarian ideals; meaning he believed that governments should not embark upon large-scale, liberty-annihilating attempts at wealth redistribution. Once Hayek had rejected a significant redistributive function for government, the concept of a large state became redundant.

Burke’s opinions regarding the role of the state were also partly anchored in his attitudes towards financial inequality and wealth redistribution. On the matter of inequality, and the egalitarian thinkers of his time, Burke could not have been clearer; stating that “those who attempt to level never equalise … the levellers … only change and pervert the natural order of things”. This passage also demonstrates Burke’s belief in natural law, as does his conviction that “the characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal”. Coupled with this denigration of the importance of wealth inequality, was Burke’s opinion that individuals must “resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence of Government” to provide the poor with the necessities they lack. In short, wealth inequality was simultaneously not a cause for governmental concern, and something that the government would not be able to effectively address even if it wanted to. Because Burke did not believe that the state should engage in any form of wealth redistribution, then there was no reason for him to advocate “big government” in any form.

Although Friedrich Hayek’s philosophy revolved around his belief in spontaneous order, and Edmund Burke’s philosophy revolved around his Christian conception of natural law, and belief in the benefits of established tradition, the pair held almost identical views on a variety of issues; not least jurisprudence, the economy and the state. So, while Hayek might not have considered himself a “conservative” in the way that he defined that term, he was undoubtedly a Burkean. In many ways, Hayek’s writings represent a development and improvement upon concepts originally discussed by Burke, and the pair share remarkable similarities in their outlooks because of it.

Oliver Friendship lives in Queensland. He reviewed Souls in the Twilight by Roger Scruton in the April issue.