Hayek on the Market

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. Today's talk in our series, History of Ideas, is about Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which made the case for the power of the free market. Hayek thought democracy was on a slippery slope to oppressive government control. What exactly was he so worried about? Talking Politics, History of Ideas is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading literary magazine. After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas in their unrivaled archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the LRB can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their website lrb.me forward slash ideas. That's lrb.me forward slash ideas. This talk is about an economist and it's the first one I've given about an economist. Yes, Karl Marx was a kind of economist, but economics as a separate academic discipline and profession didn't really exist. In 1848, what Marx did was usually called political economy and it included politics, economics, philosophy, history, everything. Hayek was an economist in something more like the sense we tend to use the term in the 21st century. He belonged to an academic discipline and profession and he was enough of an economist that he won the Nobel Prize for economics. You kind of have to be an economist to do that though, one or two have snuck under the wire without being one. But Hayek was a really unusual sort of economist because he didn't set much store by economics as a profession, as an academic discipline. He thought it was hubristic. He thought it made exaggerated claims for itself. He thought you shouldn't really trust most economists. The Nobel Prize for economics was an example of the desire of economists to be taken more seriously because it was set up in order to boost the discipline, to give it a kind of status alongside the medical and physical sciences. And it's kind of worked. People do hang on the news of who gets the Nobel Prize for economics each year as though it weren't that different from chemistry. But Hayek expressed his grave doubts in his speech when he accepted the prize. He made a point of emphasizing the fact that he thought that economics had much too grand ideas about itself and that economists in particular should not be trusted above all when they claim that they know what's going to happen next. What Hayek really doubted was that economists could see into the future because Hayek didn't believe anyone could see into the future. And he probably also thought that most economists understood that too. Economists like political scientists should know that their discipline is not a predictive science. They're not in the prophecy game. And yet many economists, like many political scientists, and I know what I'm speaking of here, find it really hard to resist making predictions. But those predictions have no more weight than random guesses. And Hayek in 1974 thought that the world was in danger of believing economists when they succumb to the temptation to second guess the future. To think that their models weren't just forms of analysis of the things that have happened but were prophecies about the future. That means that Hayek belongs to a tradition that connects us right back to the beginning of this series of talks. Like Hobbes, he was a skeptic. He really thought that claims to knowledge had to be tested and they had to be doubted. And if there wasn't something that could reassure the doubters, they had to be discarded. And Hayek thought that that applied to most forms of economic prediction and therefore to much of his profession. The reason that he thought we couldn't know the future, particularly of something like the economic functioning of a society, was partly because modern societies are much too complex. The complexity is far greater than any model can conceivably accommodate. But also because the future is inherently unpredictable. That things that happen are almost always surprising or random. That social development is not that different from natural development. It depends upon random mutations. Things happen that change the world because something happens that no one saw coming or noticed at the time or recognized until long after it was too late to do anything about it. An example that's often given today by people who take some of their inspiration from Hayek is the digital revolution, which before it happened no one predicted and no one foresaw, least of all economists. It happened because of a kind of mutation in the organization of information and knowledge. Matt Ridley, the author of a book called The Rational Optimist, and someone who's inspired in part by Hayek, has described the internet as what happens when the telephone has sex with the personal computer. He also described the motor car slightly more extravagantly as what happens when the bicycle, or at least the idea of the bicycle, has sex with the idea of the horse-drawn carriage. But the point being that this kind of evolution, this kind of change, happens on a scale and a complexity and an unpredictability that could match the natural world. And we don't claim to be able to predict that, not evolution. So Hayek was that sort of skeptic and the people who draw that lesson from him are truly speaking in Hayekian terms. But he belongs to another tradition too, which also connects back to earlier parts of this series. He was a liberal, a small L liberal, a liberal not in the North American contemporary sense, but in the classic modern European sense. He believed in the freedom of the individual. He believed in freedom from arbitrary interference and freedom from attempts at coercive control. He was a believer in negative liberty in Isaiah Berlin's terms. And he also believed in constitutions as a check on the power and authority of governments, including democratic governments. So in that way, he comes out of a tradition that stretched back at least a century or more and connects to some of the thinkers that I've been talking about, Constant One, but also Tocqueville, another 19th century French liberal. And the book of Hayek's I'm going to talk about today, The Road to Serfdom, took its title from Tocqueville. The idea behind The Road to Serfdom comes from volume two of Democracy in America, in which Tocqueville is talking about his fears of what will happen in a democratic state if the power and the authority of the government becomes too great and is justified in the name of the majority. Tocqueville's term for that was the tyranny of the majority, and Hayek took his inspiration for The Road to Serfdom in part, at least in its title, from that idea of Tocqueville's. So a skeptic and a liberal. Those ideas come together in something for which Hayek is still famous, the defense of the free market, the defense of the market, the place where people trade ideas and goods and services, as a site not just of freedom but also of a kind of knowledge. The market knows things that no human being knows. We can't understand the future, we can barely understand the present. We often don't understand the past. But the market is a source of a kind of information which, even if it doesn't have predictive power, gives us knowledge of our world that cannot be achieved any other way. But the market can only do this if it is itself free from interference. If governments try to control the market, they skew the outcomes and that kind of knowledge is lost. It goes from being a sort of impartial understanding to a kind of skewed or prejudiced preconception. It becomes just more human, fallible insight into a future that no human being can know. So for instance, if you want to know the price of something, what is something worth? One way you could try and work that out is literally to try and work it out, to take all the information that's available, to try and calculate as best you can what you think people will do under certain circumstances. How will they behave? How will they transact? How will they exchange? Or you could try and sell something rather than being an academic or an economist or anyone else trying to work out what the market should, could, ought, might do. You could go into the market and offer your goods or your services and see what people are willing to pay. And when enough people do that, you get a different kind of answer. You get the answer that only the market can give. You get an answer which does tell you something that no human being otherwise can know, which is the price of a good. The market sets the price. No person can know that until the market has done it. So the market has a kind of knowledge and it has a kind of power, but it doesn't have coercive power. It's not a state. It's not a source of political authority. States, which are sources of political authority, do have the power to control the market. But if they control the market, they squander all of that information and all of that knowledge. The Road to Serfdom, which Hayek wrote and published in 1944, is an early attempt by him, about halfway through his life, so he wasn't a young man, and he'd already been involved in fights about the market and the need to allow the market to tell us what it knows, long before he wrote The Road to Serfdom. But it's his best-known attempt to defend that idea in broadly accessible terms. It was an enormously influential book in part because after he published it, the Reader's Digest in the United States published a much shorter truncated version for a general audience and it actually worked. Millions of Americans read Hayek's book in the Reader's Digest form. But it's not a Reader's Digest book. It's a serious, complicated, sophisticated argument in defense of the market, but much more than that, against forms of arbitrary government control. It was written in 1944, so it also connects to another theme of these talks. It came out of a time of enormous political turmoil, perhaps the greatest crisis of all, the Second World War, certainly the greatest disrupter of all, something on a scale that even put the First World War in the shade. But writing in 1944, close to the end of that war, though no one knew it at the time, because no one in Hayek's terms knows the future, Hayek wasn't really writing about wartime economies and what should be done. It was a book written in war, written at a time of crisis, that was trying to imagine the world when the war was done and the crisis, in some sense, was passed. By 1944, it seemed likely, though not certain, that Nazism would be defeated and that at some point it would be possible for the Western democracies to resume whatever it was they had been doing before the war. But Hayek's fear was the way that Western political societies had organized themselves to fight the war, which was an extension of how they had begun to organize themselves to fight the great crisis they'd faced before the Second World War, which was the Great Depression, would linger long after the war and the Depression were over. His name for that form of organization was economic planning. States, in order to fight total wars, and the Second World War was a total war, feel that they have to try and take charge of as much of social and economic activity as possible, setting prices, organizing employment, regulating industry, managing the free movement of people, organizing, at the most basic level, armaments and the military, making sure that the war machine had what it needed to do its job. States organized on that basis, on a mass industrial scale, take on enormous powers, many of them arbitrary, and that is what happened in the United States of America in Britain. To prosecute the Second World War, states took on huge powers, huge responsibilities, and huge debts as well. What Hayek thought and feared was that that would not cease when the war was over, that having taken on those powers, those responsibilities, and indeed those debts, modern democratic states would continue down that path, and that path is what he called the road to serfdom, because they wouldn't be able to get off it. That what was undertaken for a crisis would long outlast the crisis, and Hayekians ever since, at every moment of crisis, have repeated the same set of anxieties. How do we know that the things we do to get us through this great period of threat will be undone when the threat is passed? Why did Hayek think that these things would persist, that states would continue to try and plan and regulate and control what ultimately, for Hayek, cannot in the long run be planned and regulated and controlled? Because it is not possible to know the future. First, he thought it was because of what we might today call technological determinism. That is the idea that technology in modern societies requires a certain kind of political organization, and it predetermines a certain form of political control, that the technology itself tells us what to do. It's an argument that persists into the 21st century. It comes up today in relation to digital technology. There are many people who argue that technology actually tells us how to organize our societies because technology is our organizing structure. It's the job of governments and states to adapt to what the technology makes possible. It's not the job of technology to adapt to what governments and states want. So in a digital world where it's possible to surveil people and to keep an eye on everything that they do and to know enormous amounts about how they behave and who they are, it's impossible for states to resist that kind of knowledge, to resist that kind of interference. It's for states to judge what they do with it, but the technology means that this has to be a part of our politics. That's an ultimate form of technological determinism of political life. Hayek's version was not the digital version. No one can know the future. No one can know that the personal computer is going to have sex with the telephone, not least because Hayek in 1944 didn't know that there would ever be a personal computer. So he's not thinking about internet forms of technological determinism, but he is thinking about mass industrial forms of technological determinism. By 1944, modern societies, not just democratic ones, the Soviet state too, the Soviet state, which would play perhaps the biggest part of all in ultimately defeating Nazism, required enormous amounts of industrial organisation to engineer mass industrial production. Factories on vast scales, huge employment enterprises, mass forms of communication through the radio, through the telephone, of course. This was the early days of television, but it was coming. Mass communication, mass production, mass employment, mass consumption. Doesn't that sort of society require forms of mass control? Doesn't it require governments that get involved in the regulation of industry and communication and transportation? How can something so vast, so complex, so total, not require political control? That was the technological determinism that Hayek feared, and he thought that the war, particularly as it was inching towards a successful conclusion, had reinforced the message. If we're going to manage this kind of technological industrial society, we're going to need a state on an equivalent scale, or the technology will just take us over. And Hayek thought that that argument was nonsense, because technology doesn't determine anything. Technology is not coercive power any more than the market is coercive power. Technology doesn't have an army. Technology doesn't have a police force. Technology doesn't send people to jail. Governments do that. States do that. So technological determinism is a kind of category error. Technology is a tool. Technology is not an organizing instrument of political life, but it's the sort of tool that states can use to organize their political life. So Hayek's argument turned what he thought was a growing conventional view about technology on its head. We don't have to have government control and government planning because the technology demands it. Hayek thought the technology doesn't demand anything. It can't speak. It's just an inanimate machine. But governments that decide that they do want to control, they do want to plan, can do so much more, and in Hayek's terms, so much more damage, if they deploy the technology at their disposal. So you can control a mass industrial society using technology. You can't control ultimately an economy and economic outcomes because that's a futile endeavor. But you can use the coercive powers of the state, enhanced by technological instruments, to try and get people to do what you want them to do. The radio, for instance, doesn't tell anyone to do anything. Radios are not coercive instruments. But coercive states can use the power of the radio to regulate their populations, which is, of course, what all of them did during the Second World War. The other reason that Hayek thought that planning and government control of the economy was likely to continue after the Second World War, and possibly even to intensify and deepen, was because of democracy. He thought, and he had good reason to think this, that when the war was over, the peoples of the democratic states that had been fighting it, and ultimately, it looked like, were going to win it, would demand some kind of reward for their sacrifices and their efforts. And what they would want, understandably, because it's a human impulse, would be security. After the uncertainties, not just of the war, but crucially, of the Great Depression that preceded it, the economic turmoil, the great misery of economic uncertainty, and having seen what their states could do during wartime, and having acclimatized themselves to certain forms of economic control, Hayek feared that Western democratic electorates would elect into power governments offering them security through planning. That the easiest way to win an election would be to outbid your rivals by promising more. More security, more welfare, full employment, pensions, benefits, security from unemployment, universal healthcare. all the trappings of the modern welfare state. And more than that, perhaps controlling prices, perhaps continuing to regulate industry, perhaps mass nationalizations, perhaps government control of almost everything. That could be a vote winner because that looked like the thing that would make individuals lives more secure. Again, Hayek thought it was a kind of lie because that sort of security was impossible. Those plans, two-year plans, five-year plans, ten-year plans, tried to bring into being a future that could not be controlled. No five-year plan can ever deliver because five years is much too long a time to know what will happen next. But governments that offer that kind of security and that kind of planning will be tempted to reinforce their coercive controls in a desperate attempt to get the market to behave like it should. And the more they try and get the market to behave like it should, and the more the market misbehaves, the more controls they will seek. And perhaps the more controls their electorates will demand that they get. Hayek says explicitly that when governments try to control a free market and a free economy what they're actually doing is simply responding to demands for special treatment. The way those demands are expressed are in the language of justice. But Hayek says as soon as a government tries to deliver on justice in the name of democratic responsibility, what will happen is they try and buy people off. This group wants this, that group wants that, the trade unionists are demanding more jobs, the workers are demanding lower prices, and all governments can do is keep trying to offer people the things they demand. Each demand will create another demand, and each attempt to buy off one group will just inflate the price that will have to be paid to buy off the next one. So it's a slippery slope argument because Hayek thinks once you get onto that path, all you can end up doing is trying to buy off everyone. Forms of piecemeal control become attempts at total control. Trying to fix your five-year plan leaves you trying to control everything. And since nothing can be controlled in that way, it will end in Hayek's terms, in the loss of freedom. There's another way of trying to describe this, it's not exactly Hayek's image, it's mixing metaphors, this is no longer the slippery slope. But another way to think about it is that for Hayek planning is a bit like trying to nail down a carpet that doesn't fit. You don't know exactly why it doesn't fit, you don't know exactly where the overlap is going to be. So you bang it down, and you bang it down, and then it pops up somewhere in the corner. And so you have to try and bang down that corner with more nails, but by doing that you force the nails out somewhere else, and it pops up somewhere else. The carpet doesn't fit, the plan doesn't fit the economy, but all you can keep doing is hammering in more nails. And the only way to get the carpet to finally stay in place is to replace the carpet with a bed of nails, just to hammer everything. That, for Hayek, was the fear. His argument about democracy was a bit like his argument about technology. He didn't think it had to be like this. There's nothing predetermined about this outcome. Yes, it was possible that democratic electorates would go down this path, and yes, it was possible that governments would meet them every step of the way. But democracy, like technology, doesn't actually predetermine anything. You could say it's a kind of tool, and it can be used in different ways. And Hayek says explicitly that democracy does not have to mean planning any more than technology has to mean planning. But if you have a government that is determined to plan, then democracy can make it more dangerous, just as new technology can. Because democracy becomes an instrument at the service of the planners. And this is where he borrowed his idea from Tocqueville. This is where he thought the danger of the tyranny of the majority came in. Governments that are determined to plan can say they're doing so in the name of the majority of the people who want it. And then the majority of the people become their instrument of coercion. The majority becomes the means by which they get their way. And there are no limits on what they can do, because democracy has empowered them. And that's why Hayek was a classic liberal. He also said that he was a Democrat. He never claimed that he gave up on democracy. And what he loved about democracy, and he did have a kind of passion for it in a way, was that it was unpredictable. There was a side of democratic life which illustrated the unknowability of the future. Who could foresee that this person or that person would win an election? Donald Trump, as President of the United States, is frankly just as surprising as the existence of the Internet. The great thing about democracy for Hayek is that it provided a kind of security against claims to know the future, because everyone, including politicians, ought to be surprised by democratic outcomes. But the danger of democracy is when it's used to provide a kind of certainty in the control of the market. And that's why Hayek was convinced that only liberal democracies with very robust constitutional limits on the power of majoritarian governments to control economic life, to take on new debts, to inflate the currency, to regulate prices and employment, only that kind of democracy could survive. So throughout his life he was a passionate advocate of constitutional limits on the power of elected governments. These limits could take lots of different forms, from fixed constitutional arrangements that prevented unbalanced budgets, to slightly more quixotic schemes like the one that Hayek embraced later on in his life, when he thought the great danger of democracy was that young people, when voting, didn't understand enough about the long-term consequences of their choices. And much older people, when voting, weren't going to live long enough to care. So Hayek suggested maybe a really responsible democratic constitution would limit the franchise to people aged about 45. But more broadly, Hayek admired the things that many constitutional liberals have admired, including the American Constitution, with its checks and balances, its limits on the power of any branch of government to dominate the others. And he wanted something similar for all democracies, including the United Kingdom. But above all what he wanted was every democracy to understand that its power, its ability to thrive, depended upon the people understanding the limits of their own power. He wanted democratic populations to know that their democracies needed to limit themselves. So there's another image, another extended metaphor, that's often associated with Hayek's conception of politics. It's a classical myth. The idea of Ulysses and the sirens, that story of what happened when Ulysses, sailing home, knew he had to go past that point where the sirens would sing their beautiful song and try to tempt him onto the rocks. And that every sailor and every ship that had gone past the rocks had been unable to resist the beauty of the music and they'd steered themselves to shipwreck and ruin. So what Ulysses did was tell his crew to put cotton wool in their ears so they couldn't hear the song and so they wouldn't be tempted. But he, as captain of the ship, wanted to hear it, wanted to know what it sounded like. But he told his crew to tie him to the mast and not to listen if they heard him shrieking to be untied, because he would want to hear that music and sail closer and he had to be restrained. Constitutional limits on democratic power for Hayek were a bit like tying Ulysses to the mast. The captain of the ship is the majority, that's what a democracy means. The sirens, their sweet song, that is the song of social security, of economic control, of limiting uncertainty, of assuring people of a job or a home or an income. Hayek thought that the majority had to be tied to the mast or else the ship of state would sail onto those rocks. But it doesn't really work as an image, certainly it doesn't really capture Hayek's thought, because the point in the original story is once you're past the rocks you can untie the captain and once you're past the rocks and the song can no longer be heard, the crew can take the cotton wool out of their ears. But in Hayek's view of democracy you'll never pass the rocks. The crisis in a sense is never passed, because the sweet music of social security will always be there, hovering in the background, tempting the electorate and ultimately the ship of state to ruin. And ruin for Hayek means debt and inflation and increasing government control and growing arbitrary power and ultimately the road to serfdom. So in Hayek's version of it, constitutions keep the majority permanently under control and it's never safe to relax the constraints, because there will always be a temptation to do the nice thing, the easy thing. And Hayek knew that human beings will always be tempted to seek more security and more control. And that means that Hayek's account of politics never reached a point where he was able to relax the arguments in the road to serfdom, even after the war was over, even after the crisis was passed. If anything, his life and his thought went the other way. His position hardened. The road to serfdom came early in his career, it was the most widely read of all his writings, but it was not in some ways the one that came to define him. As he got older, he became more strident in his views and more fixed in his certainties. So he went beyond simply saying that the market had to be protected from government interference, and to advocate more forcefully that the market should be allowed into political life. And the market should be allowed to take over those branches of government that elected governments had increasingly taken on for themselves, into education, into healthcare, even into the money supply. Hayek, later on in his life, wanted to privatize everything, money included. No monopoly was safe from Hayek's desire to open it up. He came close to challenging the basic Hobbesian foundations of the state. And he also hardened his views about the kinds of securities that were needed against democratic rule, the kind of protection that was needed against elected governments pursuing what he thought of as ultimately destructive policies. In 1973, in Chile, in Latin America, an elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup. And ultimately, the new government was led by a soldier politician, General Pinochet. And with the help of a bunch of Western trained economists, influenced by the ideas among others of Hayek, he opened up Chilean economic life, at the same time as repressing Chilean society. And Hayek supported him. Hayek was a defender of General Pinochet. Hayek is also, unlike almost everyone else I've been talking about in these lectures so far, a subject of heated contemporary political and democratic controversy. To be called a Hayekian still means something in the political arguments of the 21st century. It's a term of abuse or a term of praise, and people claim Hayek because they think it really matters whether you are or aren't on his side. Hobbes doesn't have that power anymore. He did. It's partly a question of the passage of time. There was a period in English politics when to be called a hobbist, as they were known, really mattered. And if you got on the wrong side of arguments about hobbism, your life might be at stake. To be a Hayekian is not quite as dangerous as being a hobbist, but it still matters. And it was perhaps most evident after the financial crisis of 2008, where the argument in some cases did boil down to the Hayekians making their constant plea not to use the crisis as an excuse for government overreach, to warn, always warn, about the slippery slope, that the things that you adopt now will never be undone, that democracies are terrible at self-restraint, unless the restraints are really tight. And if you open up government control to get you through the crisis, you'll never close it down again. And on the other side, people who tended to call themselves Keynesians, though they are sometimes no more Keynesians than the Hayekians are Hayekians, who were associated with the idea that in a crisis you have to do whatever it takes. Hayek versus Keynes became, in the first decade of the 21st century, one of the central dividing lines of contemporary politics. But that's also a sign of how Hayek's thought evolved through his own lifetime, because one of the earliest supporters of many of the arguments in The Road to Serfdom was the economist John Maynard Keynes, the man who came to be associated with the opposite point of view. Keynes, like Hayek, thought of himself as a liberal, and many of Hayek's liberal arguments, many of Hayek's sceptical arguments in The Road to Serfdom, appealed to Keynes, even if he didn't buy the whole thing. The fact that politics has become Hayek versus Keynes, when in 1944 Hayek and Keynes thought they were on the same side, is an evidence of hardening of positions, particularly on the Hayekian side. But there's another way to think about Hayek's arguments that connects to now. If Hayek had to say the one thing that he was against, and he did often say this, it was what he called fatalism. The idea that you know what's going to happen, that somehow it's preordained by fate. Economists didn't tend to present their arguments as fatalistic arguments, but the kinds of economists that Hayek hated were, in his mind, the fatalists. So Hayek, in his own mind, was on the side of an open future, against the people who thought that the future was closed. In some ways he was proved right, because his slippery slope argument turned out to be wrong. He didn't know that the slippery slope would turn out in the end not to be the problem that he foresaw. It wasn't the case that Western democracies pursued planning and government control until the point that they reached serfdom. Hayek thought they did for decades. Through the 50s, the 60s and the 70s, his warnings became more and more strident. He argued harder and harder for limits on democratic authority, because the wrong people, in his mind, kept winning the elections. And often in elections, he thought, there was no choice at all. It was one group of planners fighting against another, and victory went to the person who just offered the best deal. But by the end of the 1970s, and certainly by the dawn of the 1980s, the argument turned, and the slippery slope stopped being so slippery. Margaret Thatcher got elected in the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan in the United States. Margaret Thatcher, famously, so the story goes, at a shadow cabinet meeting before she was Prime Minister, in the middle of a heated argument about how to regulate the economy, produced from her handbag a copy, not of the road to serfdom, but of Hayek's much bigger, much heavier, much harder to read book, The Constitution of Liberty, slammed it on the table, and said to her male colleagues, this, gentlemen, is what we believe. The neoliberal revolution, as it's sometimes called, was evidence that the slippery slope ends, and that the wheel can turn the other way. But there's another way to think about Hayek's arguments about fatalism. He claimed to be open to an open future. He claimed to be on the side of the people who don't know what's going to happen. He thought that was the foundation of the only security that's possible in political and economic life, to know how little we know. And yet there is, both in Hayek and in the thought of some of his followers, a different kind of fatalism. The fatalism that assumes that we know that an open future is the best future for us, that we know that limiting the power of the state, that we know that never untying the captain from the mast, keeping the majority under wraps, preventing governments from taking on too many powers, too much authority, too much control, will ultimately benefit us all. And there is a case for saying that that argument too presupposes knowledge of the future. So let me finish with a different kind of example, climate change. Again, in contemporary politics there's a deep division between the people who want government action now, who want us to do whatever it takes, who want control and plans to deal with the climate threat, and the people who believe that our best bet in dealing with the threat of climate change is open markets and innovation and technology surprising us with solutions that none of us could imagine because no one knows which mutations are coming. It's again an argument between the Hayekians who are on the side of the open market and technological surprises, and the people who believe that we can't afford to take that risk and we can't afford to wait. And whoever's right and whoever's wrong, I don't think you can say that in that argument the Hayekians are the ones who leave the future open and their opponents are the ones who close the future down. And that's because if you follow Hayek, you believe that you know that it will be better to limit the power of the state. You will know if you follow Hayek that the future favours the open market and the future favours limitations on state control. But how do you know that? How can any of us know that if we don't take action now, technological innovation will save us? How can any of us know that there aren't points at which we need to free the captain and to let the state take control? The democratic state, the majoritarian state, it doesn't matter. It's the power of the state that could prove decisive in this crisis. And this crisis, the climate crisis, is not one that's going to end. This one is with us for the long run. So I think there is the possibility of another deeper kind of scepticism which cuts against Hayek scepticism. You might almost say it's Hobbes' scepticism, the scepticism of the originator, at least in my account, of an idea of modern politics. If we're truly sceptical and we really believe we don't know what the future has in store, we should be open to the idea that the future might require the power of the state to save us. To find where you can read The Road to Serfdom and other writing connected to today's episode, please look for our show notes which come with your download of this podcast. In the next episode, we take a break from the men. David discusses Hannah Arendt on the human condition. you A-Cast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show that we recommend. Look love it or hate it, the advertising and marketing industry is the ultimate broker of power and influence in the world today. And now you can look behind the curtain. 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