Acerca del autor

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and cowinner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. Bruce Caldwell is a research professor of economics and director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

STUDIES ON THE ABUSE AND DECLINE OF REASON

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Editorial Foreword...........................................................................ixIntroduction.................................................................................1Prelude Individualism: True and False........................................................46One The Influence of the Natural Sciences on the Social Sciences.............................77Two The Problem and the Method of the Natural Sciences.......................................81Three The Subjective Character of the Data of the Social Sciences............................88Four The Individualist and 'Compositive' Method of the Social Sciences.......................99Five The Objectivism of the Scientistic Approach.............................................108Six The Collectivism of the Scientistic Approach.............................................117Seven The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach............................................126Eight 'Purposive' Social Formations..........................................................142Nine 'Conscious' Direction and the Growth of Reason..........................................149Ten Engineers and Planners...................................................................156Eleven The Source of the Scientistic Hubris: L'Ecole Polytechnique...........................169Twelve The "Accoucheur d'Idées": Henri de Saint-Simon...................................187Thirteen Social Physics: Saint-Simon and Comte...............................................201Fourteen The Religion of the Engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians.....................217Fifteen Saint-Simonian Influence.............................................................235Sixteen Sociology: Comte and His Successors..................................................256Seventeen Comte and Hegel....................................................................285Some Notes on Propaganda in Germany (1939)...................................................305Selected Correspondence, F. A. Hayek to Fritz Machlup (1940–41)........................312Preface to the U. S. Edition (1952)..........................................................321Preface to the German Edition (1959).........................................................322Acknowledgments..............................................................................325Index........................................................................................327

Chapter One

In the course of its slow development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the study of economic and social phenomena was guided in the choice of its methods in the main by the nature of the problems it had to face. It gradually developed a technique appropriate to these problems without much reflection on the character of the methods or on their relation to that of other disciplines of knowledge. Students of political economy could describe it alternatively as a branch of science or of moral or social philosophy without the least qualms whether their subject was scientific or philosophical. The term science had not yet assumed the special narrow meaning it has today, nor was there any distinction made which singled out the physical or natural sciences and attributed to them a special dignity. Those who devoted themselves to those fields indeed readily chose the designation of philosophy when they were concerned with the more general aspects of their problems, and occasionally we even find 'natural philosophy' contrasted with 'moral science'.

During the first half of the nineteenth century a new attitude made its appearance. The term 'science' came more and more to be confined to the physical and biological disciplines which at the same time began to claim for themselves a special rigorousness and certainty which distinguished them from all others. Their success was such that they soon came to exercise an extraordinary fascination on those working in other fields, who rapidly began to imitate their teaching and vocabulary. Thus the tyranny commenced which the methods and technique of the Sciences in the narrow sense of the term have ever since exercised over the other subjects. These became increasingly concerned to vindicate their equal status by showing that their methods were the same as those of their brilliantly successful sisters rather than by adapting their methods more and more to their own particular problems. And, although in the 120 years or so, during which this ambition to imitate Science in its methods rather than its spirit has now dominated social studies, it has contributed scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena, not only does it continue to confuse and discredit the work of the social disciplines, but demands for further attempts in this direction are still presented to us as the latest revolutionary innovations which, if adopted, will secure rapid undreamed of progress.

Let it be said at once, however, that those who were loudest in these demands were rarely themselves men who had noticeably enriched our knowledge of the Sciences. From Francis Bacon, the lord chancellor, who will forever remain the prototype of the 'demagogue of science', as he has justly been called, to Auguste Comte and the 'physicalists' of our own day, the claims for the exclusive virtues of the specific methods employed by the natural sciences were mostly advanced by men whose right to speak on behalf of the scientists was not above suspicion, and who indeed in many cases had shown in the Sciences themselves as much bigoted prejudice as in their attitude to other subjects. Just as Francis Bacon opposed Copernican astronomy, and as Comte taught that any too minute investigation of the phenomena by such instruments as the microscope was harmful and should be suppressed by the spiritual power of the positive society, because it tended to upset the laws of positive science, so this dogmatic attitude has so often misled men of this type in their own field that there should have been little reason to pay too much deference to their views about problems still more distant from the fields from which they derived their inspiration.

There is yet another qualification which the reader ought to keep in mind throughout the following discussion. The methods which scientists or men fascinated by the natural sciences have so often tried to force upon the social sciences were not always necessarily those which the scientists in fact followed in their own field, but rather those which they believed that they employed. This is not necessarily the same thing. The scientist reflecting and theorising about his procedure is not always a reliable guide. The views about the character of the method of Science have undergone various fashions during the last few generations, while we must assume that the methods actually followed have remained essentially the same. But since it was what scientists believed that they did, and even the views which they had held some time before, which have influenced the social sciences, the following comments on the methods of the natural sciences also do not necessarily claim to be a true account of what the scientists in fact do, but an account of the views on the nature of scientific method which were dominant in recent times.

The history of this influence, the channels through which it operated, and the direction in which it affected social developments, will occupy us throughout the series of historical studies to which the present essay is designed to serve as an introduction. Before we trace the historical course of this influence and its effects, we shall here attempt to describe its general characteristics and the nature of the problems to which the unwarranted and unfortunate extensions of the habits of thought of the physical and biological sciences have given rise. There are certain typical elements of this attitude which we shall meet again and again and whose prima facie plausibility makes it necessary to examine them with some care. While in the particular historical instances it is not always possible to show how these characteristic views are connected with or derived from the habits of thought of the scientists, this is easier in a systematic survey.

It need scarcely be emphasised that nothing we shall have to say is aimed against the methods of Science in their proper sphere or is intended to throw the slightest doubt on their value. But to preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of 'scientism' or the 'scientistic' prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it.

It would be convenient if a similar term were available to describe the characteristic mental attitude of the engineer which, although in many respects closely related to scientism, is yet distinct from it but which we intend to consider here in connection with the latter. No single word of equal expressiveness suggests itself, however, and we shall have to be content to describe this second element so characteristic of nineteenth-and twentieth-century thought as the 'engineering type of mind'.

Chapter Two

Before we can understand the reasons for the trespasses of scientism we must try to understand the struggle which Science itself had to wage against concepts and ideas which were as injurious to its progress as the scientistic prejudice now threatens to become to the progress of the social studies. Although we live now in an atmosphere where the concepts and habits of thoughts of everyday life are to a high degree influenced by the ways of thinking of Science, we must not forget that the Sciences had in their beginning to fight their way in a world where most concepts had been formed from our relations to other men and in interpreting their actions. It is only natural that the momentum gained in that struggle should carry Science beyond the mark and create a situation where the danger is now the opposite one of the pre-dominance of scientism impeding the progress of the understanding of society. But even if the pendulum has now definitely swung in the opposite direction, only confusion could result if we failed to recognise the factors which have created this attitude and which justify it in its proper sphere.

There were three main obstacles to the advance of modern Science against which it has struggled ever since its birth during the Renaissance; and much of the history of its progress could be written in terms of its gradual overcoming of these difficulties. The first, although not the most important, was that for various reasons scholars had grown used to devoting most of their effort to analysing other people's opinions: this was so not only because in the disciplines most developed at that time, like theology and law, this was the actual object, but even more because, during the decline of Science in the Middle Ages, there seemed to be no better way of arriving at the truth about nature than to study the work of the great men of the past. More important was the second fact, the belief that the 'ideas' of the things possessed some transcendental reality, and that by analysing ideas we could learn something or everything about the attributes of the real things. The third and perhaps most important fact was that man had begun everywhere to interpret the events in the external world after his own image, as animated by a mind like his own, and that the natural sciences therefore met everywhere explanations by analogy with the working of the human mind, with 'anthropomorphic' or 'animistic' theories which searched for a purposive design and were satisfied if they had found in it the proof of the operation of a designing mind.

Against all this the persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to 'objective facts', to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognise the particular as an instance of a general rule. In the course of this process not only the provisional classification which the commonly used concepts provided, but also the first distinctions between the different perceptions which our senses convey to us, had to give way to a completely new and different way in which we learned to order or classify the events of the external world.

The tendency to abandon all anthropomorphic elements in the discussion of the external world has in its most extreme development even led to the belief that the demand for 'explanation' itself is based on an anthropomorphic interpretation of events and that all Science ought to aim at is a complete description of nature. There is, as we shall see, that element of truth in the first part of this contention that we can understand and explain human action in a way we cannot with physical phenomena, and that consequently the term explain tends to remain charged with a meaning not applicable to physical phenomena. The actions of other men were probably the first experiences which made man ask the question why, and it took him a long time to learn, and he has not yet fully learned, that with events other than human actions he could not expect the same kind of 'explanation' as he can hope to obtain in the case of human behaviour.

That the ordinary concepts of the kind of things that surround us do not provide an adequate classification which enables us to state general rules about their behaviour in different circumstances, and that in order to do so we have to replace them by a different classification of events is familiar. It may, however, still sound surprising that what is true of these provisional abstractions should also be true of the very sense qualities which most of us are inclined to regard as the ultimate reality. But although it is less familiar that science breaks up and replaces the system of classification which our sense qualities represent, yet this is precisely what Science does. It begins with the realisation that things which appear to us the same do not always behave in the same manner, and that things which appear different to us sometimes prove in all other respects to behave in the same way; and it proceeds from this experience to substitute for the classification of events which our senses provide a new one which groups together not what appears alike but what proves to behave in the same manner in similar circumstances.

While the naïve mind tends to assume that external events which our senses register in the same or in a different manner must be similar or different in more respects than merely in the way in which they affect our senses, the systematic testing of Science shows that this is frequently not true. It constantly shows that the 'facts' are different from 'appearances'. We learn to regard as alike or unlike not simply what by itself looks, feels, smells, etc., alike or unlike, but what regularly appears in the same spatial and temporal context. And we learn that the same constellation of simultaneous sense perceptions may prove to proceed from different 'facts', or that different combinations of sense qualities may stand for the same 'fact'. A white powder with a certain weight and 'feel' and without taste or smell may prove to be any one of a number of different things according as it appears in different circumstances or after different combinations of other phenomena, or as it produces different results if combined in certain ways with other things. The systematic testing of behaviour in different circumstances will thus often show that things which to our senses appear different behave in the same or at least a very similar manner. We not only may find that, for example, a blue thing which we see in a certain light or after eating a certain drug is the same thing as the green thing which we see in different circumstances, or that what appears to have an elliptical shape may prove to be identical with what at a different angle appears to be circular, but also may find that phenomena which appear as different as ice and water are 'really' the same 'thing'.

This process of reclassifying 'objects' which our senses have already classified in one way, of substituting for the 'secondary' qualities in which our senses arrange external stimuli a new classification based on consciously established relations between classes of events is, perhaps, the most characteristic aspect of the procedure of the natural sciences. The whole history of modern Science proves to be a process of progressive emancipation from our innate classification of the external stimuli till in the end they completely disappear so that "physical science has now reached a state of development that renders it impossible to express observable occurrences in language appropriate to what is perceived by our senses. The only appropriate language is that of mathematics", that is, the discipline developed to describe complexes of relationships between elements which have no attributes except these relations. While at first the new elements into which the physical world was 'analysed' were still endowed with 'qualities', that is, conceived as in principle visible or touchable, neither electrons nor waves, neither the atomic structure nor electromagnetic fields can be adequately represented by mechanical models.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from STUDIES ON THE ABUSE AND DECLINE OF REASONby F. A. Hayek Copyright © 2010 by F. A. Hayek. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.