Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason

Text and Documents

F.A Hayek, Bruce Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415573832
• eBook ISBN: 9781136604362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

"The studies of which this book is the result have from the beginning been guided by and in the end confirmed the somewhat old-fashioned conviction of the author that it is human ideas which govern the development of human affairs," Hayek wrote in his notes in 1940. Indeed, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason remains Hayek's greatest unfinished work and is here presented for the first time under the expert editorship of Bruce Caldwell.

In the book, Hayek argues that the abuse and decline of reason was caused by hubris, by man's pride in his ability to reason, which in Hayek's mind had been heightened by the rapid advance and multitudinous successes of the natural sciences, and the attempt to apply natural science methods in the social sciences.

Part I

Scientism and the Study of Society

Systems which have universally owed their origin to the lucubrations of those who were acquainted with one art, but ignorant of the other; who therefore explained to themselves the phenomena, in that which was strange to them, by those in that which was familiar; and with whom, upon that account, the analogy, which in other writers gives occasion to a few ingenious similitudes, became the great hinge upon which every thing turned.

—Adam Smith, Essay on the History of Astronomy

[An initial version of “Scientism and the Study of Society” was published in three parts in Eco-nomica, n.s., vol. 9, August 1942, pp. 267–91; vol. 10, February 1943, pp. 34–63; and vol. 11, February 1944, pp. 27–39. A slightly revised version, which serves as the basis of this edition, was published in F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952; reprinted, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979), pp. 17–182. Most of the differences between the two involve either Hayek changing phrasing to make a passage more clear, or the addition of new citations of pieces that appeared in the intervening period. Any significant differences between the two versions are noted in bracketed comments.—Ed.] [Adam Smith, “The History of Astronomy”, reprinted in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, vol. 3, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, p. 47.—Ed.]

One

The Influence of the Natural Sciences on the Social Sciences

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.¹ 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,² 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,³ 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 Sciences⁴ 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.⁵ Just as Francis Bacon opposed Copernican astronomy,⁶ 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.⁷

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.⁸ 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,⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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’.

¹ This is not universally true. The attempts to treat social phenomena ‘scientistically’, which became so influential in the nineteenth century, were not completely absent in the eighteenth. There is at least a strong element of it in the work of Montesquieu and the Physiocrats. But the great achievements of the century in the theory of the social sciences, the works of Cantillon and Hume, of Turgot and Adam Smith, were on the whole free from it. [French social and political theorist Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) is remembered today not for the elements of scientism in his work, but for enunciating in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) the idea of the inevitability of conflict among interests in democratic and monarchical regimes, and hence of the importance of the separation and balance of powers for their survival. François Quesnay (1694–1774), the leader of the physiocrats, was also the court physician for Louis XV, and in his economic writings drew analogies between the circulation of money and the circulation of the blood. While serving as the comptroller-general of finance from 1774–76 under Louis XVI, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–81) attempted to reduce barriers to trade among the French provinces and to abolish privileges of corporations, but these reforms were so unpopular among the upper classes that he was removed from office. The Irishborn French economist Richard Cantillon (c. 1680–1734) was author of Essai sur la nature du com-merce en général (1755). Though influential in eighteenth-century France, his work had to be rediscovered in the nineteenth by William Stanley Jevons, who lauded his book as the first treatise on economics. For a translation of an early essay by Hayek on Cantillon, see chapter 13 of his The Trend of Economic Thinking.—Ed.]

² The earliest example of the modern narrow use of the term ‘science’ given in Murray’s New English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888–1928) dates from as late as 1867. But John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1896) vol. 1, p. 89, is probably right when he suggests that ‘science’ acquired its present meaning about the time of the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831).

³ E.g., John Dalton’s New System of Chemical Philosophy (Manchester: S. Russell for R. Bickerstaff, London, 1808); Jean Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (Paris: Dentu, 1809); or Antoine-François de Fourcroy’s Philosophie chimique (Paris: Levrault, Schoell et cie, 1806).

⁴ We shall use the term Science with a capital letter when we wish to emphasise that we use it in the modern narrow meaning.

⁵ [English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) advocated in his Novum Orga- num (1620) an experimental and inductive approach for the sciences, and Auguste Comte (1798– 1857), who coined the term ‘sociology’, propounded a positivist approach to the study of social phenomena. For Hayek’s views on Bacon see “Francis Bacon: Progenitor of Scientism (1561– 1626)”, chapter 5 of The Trend of Economic Thinking; and on Comte see this volume, chapters 13 and 15–17. Otto Neurath (1882–1945), the social science representative of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, was perhaps the most prominent advocate of physicalism, the doctrine that factual scientific knowledge is formulated in statements about observable physical objects and activities. Hayek criticises the doctrine, along with behaviourism in psychology, in chapter 5 below.—Ed.]

⁶ See Morris R. Cohen, “The Myth about Bacon and the Inductive Method”, Scientific Monthly, vol. 23, December 1926, p. 505 [pp. 504–5].

⁷ [This entire paragraph was added in the 1952 version. It reflects Hayek’s acceptance of Karl Popper’s criticism that the procedures actually followed in the natural sciences are different from those that scientistically inclined writers ascribed to them. For more on this, see the editor’s introduction, this volume, pp. 36–37.—Ed.]

⁸ [The “historical studies” are contained in “The Counter-Revolution of Science” and “Comte and Hegel”, parts 2 and 3 of this volume.—Ed.]

⁹ Murray’s New English Dictionary knows both ‘scientism’ and ‘scientistic’, the former as the “habit and mode of expression of a man of science”, the latter as “characteristic of, or having the attributes of, a scientist (used depreciatively)”. The terms ‘naturalistic’ and ‘mechanistic’, which have often been used in a similar sense, are less appropriate because they tend to suggest the wrong kind of contrast.

¹⁰ See, e.g., Jean Fiolle, Scientisme et science (Paris: Mercure de France, 1936), and André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 4th ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1932), vol. 2, p. 740.

¹¹ Perhaps the following passage by a distinguished physicist may help to show how much the scientists themselves suffer from the same attitude which has given their influence on other dis-ciplines such a baneful character: “It is difficult to conceive of anything more scientifically bigoted than to postulate that all possible experience conforms to the same type as that with which we are already familiar, and therefore to demand that explanation use only elements familiar in everyday experience. Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy, which might be expected to have exhausted their pragmatic justification at a lower plane of mental activity”. See Percy W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 46 [pp. 46–47].

Two

The Problem and the Method of the Natural Sciences

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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editorial Foreword
• Introduction
• Prelude Individualism: True and False
• PART I Scientism and the Study of Society
• PART II The Counter-Revolution of Science
• PART III Comte and Hegel
• Appendix: Related Documents
• Acknowledgments
• Index