Hayek’s neo-Roman liberalism
| Author | Sean Irving |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117718370 |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(4) 553–570
Hayek’s neo-Roman
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117718370
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Sean Irving
University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
This article argues that Hayek employed a neo-Roman concept of liberty. It will show
that Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that provided by Philip Pettit and Quentin
Skinner, respectively the chief theorist and leading historian of the neo-Roman concept.
It will go on to demonstrate how the genealogy of liberty Hayek provides is also the
same as that offered by Pettit and Skinner. This is important, as the neo-Roman concept
is not regarded, either by Hayek or by neo-republicans led by Pettit, as a product of
political theory. Instead it is viewed as underpinning a historical tradition. Hayek’s self-
conscious association with this tradition reinforces the article’s prior claim that Hayek’s
conceptual writing on liberty is neo-Roman. Finally, the article considers how the neo-
Roman nature of Hayek’s work complicates the historical narrative and political claims
the neo-republicans make for the neo-Roman concept. It concludes that it is open to
use by another, very different, political tradition: free market liberalism.
Keywords
Berlin, Hayek, liberalism, liberty, Pettit, republicanism, Skinner, Whigs
Introduction
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) was at the forefront of an intellectual movement that
sought to advance free market ideas and encourage a reduction in the economic
role of government.1 Hayek is primarily remembered as an economist. In fact, his
most influential writings were produced from the middle of the Second World War
onwards, when he had ceased to work in economics, and he spent the majority of
his career as a political and social philosopher. This transition was occasioned by a
number of factors, not the least being that the economics profession was coming to
rely on the sort of mathematical models Hayek regarded as being of limited use.
Moreover, it increasingly sought to employ those models in the service of
Keynesian theory, to which he was steadfastly opposed. Most important however
Corresponding author:
Sean Irving, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13
9PL, UK.
Email: sean.irving@manchester.ac.uk
554
European Journal of Political Theory 19(4)
was that Hayek’s economic theory had itself led him to consider the broader con-
texts, legal, political and cultural, in which economic action takes place.
The central feature of Hayek’s economics was his insistence that the individual is
best placed to make use of his or her own knowledge, and that any attempt to plan
the economy is irrational. Hayek’s fundamental concern was to preserve what can
best be described as free market action. Over the course of the 1930s he came to
define freedom in this economistic way. Those who thought about freedom in terms
of self-realisation or as freedom from want were simply mistaken. What he called
‘freedom in economic life’ was paramount and any attempts to limit it for the
greater good were liable to lead to tyrannies that were as much intellectual as
they were economic.
This position informs Hayek’s argument in 1944’s The Road to Serfdom, his
most famous work. The book is defensive in tone and Hayek calls for the preser-
vation of free market action and warns of the danger of economic planning which
is both irrational and injurious to freedom.
During the war, Hayek had begun to work on intellectual history. While evident
in The Road to Serfdom, it was in the years after the war that his engagement with
Whiggism came to the fore and it was in the work of Whig authors that he encoun-
tered the neo-Roman concept of liberty. In this concept he found a more positive
expression of the conditions necessary for people to enjoy free market action, the
preservation of which he had been arguing for in the preceding decade. By 1960,
and The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek had taken up and developed the neo-
Roman concept in a manner that suited his free market vision. Moreover, he
used the concept to situate his work within a longer historical tradition. The first
section of this article will demonstrate how Hayek’s definition of liberty should be
understood as neo-Roman by showing how it conforms to the description of the
neo-Roman concept provided by its chief theorist, Philip Pettit. The second section
will draw out the near identical narrative, down to the 19th century, of the history
of liberty that Hayek, Pettit and Skinner, the leading historians of the neo-Roman
concept, provide. This is important, as, for all these authors, the concept is not a
product of political theory but an ancient juridical understanding that underpins a
historical tradition. That Hayek associates himself with this tradition further
underlines the neo-Roman nature of his thought. However, Hayek was a free
market liberal and as such his use of the neo-Roman concept poses significant
difficulties for neo-republicanism, the intellectual movement associated with
Pettit and Skinner, which advocates generally leftist political and economic pos-
itions. Moreover, Hayek’s use of the concept in the 1950s would seem to contradict
their historical narrative that maintains the concept dropped out of use from the
early 19th century only to be recovered in the late 20th century. The final section
will consider these issues.
Hayek and the neo-Roman concept
In a 1956 broadcast for the BBC, Friedrich Hayek defined liberty in neo-Roman
terms.2 After discussing the importance of the rule of law, he continued: ‘differently
Irving
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expressed the aim of all this is to prevent arbitrary coercion. After all, a man is free
if he need not obey the arbitrary will of any other person’ (Hayek, 1956). We can
describe this definition of liberty as neo-Roman because it conforms to the require-
ments for neo-Roman liberty as defined by the concept’s leading theorist, Philip
Pettit.3 The similarity is apparent when we compare Hayek’s statement about
‘arbitrary will’ with Pettit’s own formulation. In his 1997 work, Republicanism:
A Theory of Freedom and Government, Pettit argues that neo-Roman liberty
requires the absence of domination. He defines domination as the state that per-
tains when one is subject to the arbitrary will of another. He writes that ‘the
republican tradition is unanimous in casting freedom as the opposite of slavery,
and in seeing exposure to the arbitrary will of another, or living at the mercy of
another, as the great evil’ (Pettit, 1997: 32). If unanimity on the incommensurability
of liberty with exposure to arbitrary will is a condition of belonging to the repub-
lican tradition, Hayek could certainly claim to belong. However, later I will argue
that not all who think in these terms can be considered republicans.
While Pettit uses the term ‘non-domination’ to denote the absence of the arbi-
trary will of another, Quentin Skinner is much happier to write, in similar terms to
Hayek, of will. Yet both non-domination and the absence of arbitrary will are, as
Skinner recognises, the same. In addition, while Pettit uses the term republican,
Skinner (2008b: 83–84) had hoped to popularise the term neo-Roman, given that
all those associated with the concept were by no means anti-monarchists; however,
Pettit’s terminology won out. Given that Hayek was deeply suspicious of the popu-
lar sovereignty associated with republics, sought to demonstrate the classical pedi-
gree of his logic and was in no way anti-monarchical, Skinner’s term will be
employed here. Aside from these differences in nomenclature, Pettit and Skinner
are in agreement on the nature of the republican tradition and the way in which it
defines liberty.4
Both Pettit and Skinner take care to define the republican neo-Roman concept
and to distinguish it from both the positive concept of liberty that prizes self-
realisation and the liberal negative concept of liberty whose criterion is non-inter-
ference, both of which were outlined by Isaiah Berlin (1969). Pettit (1997: 721) is
clear that:
The negative conception of freedom as non-interference and the positive conception of
freedom as self-mastery are not the only available ideals of liberty; a third alternative
is the conception of freedom as non-domination which requires that no one is able to
interfere on an arbitrary basis – at their pleasure – in the choices of a free person.
This is a much more exacting definition of liberty as it demands not simply the
absence of interference, but even that individuals are protected from potential
interference (Pettit, 1997: 47). Moreover, domination can be conceived of in a
variety of ways and it can occur in the domestic sphere as well as the public, in
the economic as well as the political. While non-interference is essentially about
action, insisting one must not interfere bodily or act in breach of contract, non-
domination is about status. It insists that one individual should not find herself
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European Journal of Political Theory 19(4)
exposed, as a result of her relational status, to the domination of another.
Republicans hold that one can be secured against entering into a position of
being dominated, or becoming in potestate domini, by the law.
We can see how Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that outlined by Pettit
and Skinner, and differs from the nominally liberal negative concept, most clearly
in his 1960 work The...
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