popper,weber, and hayek
TRANSCRIPT
Jeffrey Friedman
POPPER, WEBER, AND HAYEK:
THE EPISTEMOLOGY AND POLITICS
OF IGNORANCE
ABSTRACT: Karl Popperâs methodology highlights our scientific ignorance:hence the need to institutionalize open-mindedness through controlled experi-ments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsementof âpiecemeal social engineering,â Popper assumes that the social-democraticstate and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessingthe results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of experimenta-tion analogous to that of natural science. But we are not only scientifically butpolitically ignorant: ignorant of the facts that underpin political debate, whichare brought to our attention by theories that, as Max Weber emphasized, canbe tested only through counterfactual thought experiments. Public-opinion andpolitical-psychology research suggest that human beings are far too unaware, il-logical, and doctrinaire to conduct the rigorous theorizing that would be neces-sary to make piecemeal social engineering work. F.A. Hayek realized that thepublic could not engage, specifically, in piecemeal economic regulation butfailed to draw the conclusion that this was due to a specific type of political ig-norance: ignorance of economic theory.
The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, themore conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of whatwe do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.
âKarl Popper (, )
Critical Review (), nos. â. ISSN -. www.criticalreview.com
The author thanks Stephen Earl Bennett, Peter J. Boettke, John Bullock, Bruce Caldwell,Bruce Canter, David Gordon, Greg Hill, Kristin Roebuck, Jeremy Shearmur, NancyUpham, and Shterna Wircberg for comments on previous drafts, and the Earhart Founda-tion for financial support.
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Karl Popper, Max Weber, and F. A. Hayek have in common a relent-less focus on human ignorance. The methodological views of Popper,Weber, and Hayek are grounded in a radical awareness of the igno-rance of human scientists. If extended to the conduct of human citi-zens, this awareness provides a new understanding of the modernstate. An ignorance-based view of the state is fully consistent with amountain of political-science research that only awaits integrationfrom this radically new perspective.
I. REMEDIES FOR IGNORANCE INNATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Whether we are dealing simply with a conceptual game or with a sci-entifically fruitful method of conceptualization and theory-construc-tion can never be decided a priori.
âMax Weber (, )
At the moment, the role of ignorance in politics is studied primarily byempirical public-opinion researchers, on the one hand, and on theother by ârational-ignoranceâ theorists who take their cue from eco-nomics. In principle, the notion of rational ignorance accommodatesthe recognition of ignorance within a broadly economic approach topolitics. But the principle is flawed: political ignorance is not usually ra-tional (or so I will argue). And even if the rational-ignorance hypothe-sis were in principle true, economistic approaches are in practice aliento new (and clear) thinking about ignorance, because they tend to re-duce politics to narrow self-interestâthe very thing that is, without anyscholarly assistance, already widely deplored in democratic culturesunder the rubric of corruption.
Thinking of politicians as corrupt may be satisfyingâsomething forwhich I will try to account. But it is not the whole story. A focus onlogrolling, larceny, and lying leaves out the passion, ideology, misunder-standing, and sheer mistakenness that so often characterize politics.Corruption involves deliberately dissembling about oneâs ends or oneâs be-havior. The corrupt actor, in short, knows what heâs doing. The igno-rant actor does not.
A focus on corruption is, in its cynical way, wildly hopeful: if politi-cal evils are the result of intentional deceptions, then with enough hon-esty or transparency (or enough district attorneys), things could be setright. This naĂŻvetĂŠ is matched by the crackpot tendencies inherent in
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the corruption theoristâs insistence that what seems not to be self-awareand narrowly self-interested behavior always really is. The crackpot in-sists that he knows allâand that the people about whom he knows allalso know all. This is not a perspective that is well suited to understand-ing the behavior of fallible human beings, whose hallmark is inadvertenterror.
Cynicism is not necessarily realism. Cynicism is a worldview, as falli-ble as any other.
James Buchanan (, ), a pioneer in the economic or âpublic-choiceâ approach to politics, recognizes this. He emphasizes that public-choice theory is not based on universal laws, predictable a priori:
The economic model of behavior, even if restricted to market activity,should never be taken to provide the be-all and end-all of scientificexplanation. Persons act from many motives, and the economic modelconcentrates attention only on one of the many possible forces behindactions.
Still, just as in Western âeconomiesâ Homo economicus makes very fre-quent appearances, such that instances of instrumentally irrational oraltruistic behavior do not nullify the value of economic theory, in poli-tics, people frequently display instrumental rationality and self-interest-edness. Therefore, instrumentally irrational voters, altruistic voters, fa-natics, nationalists, political activists, and symbolic political appealsâfalsifyâ rational-choice and public-choice theories only if these theo-ries are treated like the laws of physics, which a single contrary eventwould disprove. If we renounce the quest for universal laws of socialscience, we can accept with equanimity the less-than-universal truths ofrational- and public-choice theory in many particular casesâas well asaccepting that in many cases the theories do not seem apt.
The well-known oscillation of rational- and public-choice theoriz-ing between bold but false claims and true but inconsequential or eventautological ones (Green and Shapiro ; Friedman , ân)stems from the assumption that science, including social science, is amatter not so much of testing the applicability of a hypothesis in a partic-ular case as it is a matter of using particular cases to test for, or against,universally valid laws. When data that would falsify such a law arefound, the temptation is to redefine the âlaw,â often to the point ofemptiness, such that, for instance, all political behavior gets classified as
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance iii
self-interested because even the most pointless self-sacrifice must beâpleasingâ to the one making it (as vs. Olson , n).
But insisting that either instrumental rationality or self-interestednessmust be a lawlike regularity contradicts the open-mindedness that is thetouchstone of science, according to Popper. Even in natural science, theuniformity of the universe is but an assumption (Popper , ).The uniformity of political motives is a logical possibility (a priori), tobe sure; and to the extent that they are able to screen out cultural varia-tions in the effects that they observe, experimental psychologists, in-cluding behavioral economists, may already have discovered such uni-formities (a posteriori). But they have not discovered either a universallaw of instrumental rationality or a universal law of self-interestedness,and there is no reason to think that they will. Indeed, they have discov-ered many exceptions to both ârules,â and only a misunderstanding ofthe role of self-interest in human evolution, or a myopic focus on whatsometimes happens in markets, could make such exceptions seemanomalous.
If rational- and public-choice theorists would treat their theoremsnot as universal predictions but as fallible hypotheses about particularcases, the theorems could be as useful when they turned out to be falseas when they did not. As Popperâs friend Hayek (, ) put it,âAll ofthe statements of theoretical science have the form of âif . . . , then . . .âstatements, and they are interesting mainly insofar as the conditions weinsert in the âif â clause are different from those that actually exist.â Ra-tional-choice avatar Mancur Olson (, ) carefully noted at theend of his Logic of Collective Action that âwhere nonrational or irrationalbehavior is the basisâ of the phenomena modeled in the book, rational-choice theory does not apply, and âit would perhaps be better to turn topsychology or social psychology than to economics for a relevant the-ory.â Since we know, for instance, that the millions of voters in largeelectorates in which a single vote virtually never affects the outcomecannot be voting out of (well-informed) instrumental rationality, we canseek out other explanations for their behavior.
To their credit, rational- and public-choice theories spread partly ascorrectives to positivism in political scienceâwhich can degenerateinto mindless data gathering if its practitioners are unaware of the the-ories they are implicitly using to prioritize and understand data. Non-ra-tional-choice empirical research often proceeded (and still proceeds) as iffindings about, say, legislative behavior in a not-especially significant timeand place are valuable because some unidentified force of nature ensures
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that the data are typical, and thus cast light on legislative behavior every-where and always. NaĂŻve positivism, then, can suffer from the same ten-dency that sometimes mars rational- and public-choice theorizing: treat-ing particularistic hypotheses as if they were universal laws.
Unlike naĂŻve positivists, rational- and public-choice theorists recog-nize that theories are necessary, and that our only real choice is whetherto use tacit and possibly self-contradictory theories, or else to be ex-plicit and rigorous about them. Unfortunately, sinceâunlike Buchananand Olsonâthey also tend to assume that scientific theories must stateuniversal laws, rational- and public-choice theorists often replace thesometimes-tacit positivist assumption that there is some homogenizingforce at work in politics with the claim that this force is either instru-mental rationality simpliciter, or instrumental rationality in the pursuit ofself-interest. This is, if anything, more objectionable than positivism be-cause it presumes to know a priori what the universal causal force is.1
In what Nimrod Bar-Am and Joseph Agassi () characterize inthese pages as the prescriptive interpretation of Popper, his fallibilismenjoins scientists to take account of their ignorance by trying to falsifytheir own theories. As Boris Maizel () emphasizes below, this is atask poorly suited to real human beings, who become emotionally at-tached to their theories. (Popper himself was hostile to criticism of histheories.) But as Bar-Am and Agassi and Fred Eidlin () note below,Popper can also be interpreted descriptively. According to this interpre-tation,âscienceââa set of practices centered on potentially falsifying ex-perimentationâis a functional equivalent to open-mindedness. Scien-tific practices transcend, if imperfectly, the proclivity toward dogmatismlikely to be displayed by any given scientist. The scientific norm of re-spect for the results of controlled experimentation relieves scientists ofthe inhuman burden of detachment that would be placed on them bythe norm of self-criticism.
We need to control our theorizing through experimentation onlybecause, and to the extent that, we cannot know, a priori, how accurateour theories are. We need to produce theories, in turn, only because,and to the extent that, the world is too complex to be self-evident tous. Experiments test the applicability of theories; theories direct our at-tention to certain âfactsâ among the âblooming, buzzing confusionâ ofphenomena in the world. Theories are interpretations of which factscause other facts, and interpretation is necessary only if the facts andtheir interconnections do not speak for themselvesâas they seem to doin the self-interpreting world of the naĂŻve positivist. As Hayek (,
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) argued in his seminal paper, âThe Facts of the Social Sciences,âwhen we are dealing with
a language or a market, a social system or a method of land cultiva-tion, what we call a fact is either a recurrent process or a complex pat-tern of persistent relationships which is not âgivenâ to our observationbut which we can only laboriously reconstruct. . . .What we call his-torical facts are really theories which, in a methodological sense, are ofprecisely the same character as the more abstract or general modelswhich the theoretical sciences of society construct. The situation isnot that we first study the âgivenâ historical facts and then perhaps cangeneralize from them.We rather use a theory when we select from theknowledge we have about a period certain parts as intelligibly con-nected and forming part of the same historical fact.We never observestates or governments, battles or commercial activities, or a people as awhole.When we use any of these terms, we always refer to a schemewhich connects individual activities by intelligible relations; that is, weuse a theory which tells us what is and what is not part of our subject.
Theory is necessary only if the truth is not obvious. So it hardly makessense to insist that the rigorous corrective to naĂŻvely atheoretical posi-tivism is to model political action on the alleged obviousness of instru-mental rationality or of rational self-interest as the prime mover of allhuman behavior. This metaphysics of the obvious merely pushes theerror of naĂŻve positivism back a step. Theories are no more self-evidentthan the phenomena they are supposed to explain.
Weber and Ignorance in Social Science
Jonathan Eastwoodâs essay below on Weberâs theory of religion (East-wood ) exemplifies how fallibilist social science is encouraged byWeberâs methodology of âideal types.â According to this methodology,a theory such as rational choiceâor, in Eastwoodâs case, Weberâs owntheory of actions that are instrumental to the âsearch for meaningââistreated as a hypothesis that might explain some part of a given social re-ality: none of it, a little of it, a lot, or possibly all of it (although Weber[, ] unaccountably denies the last possibility).
Weber (, â) divides human motivation into four types ofârationality.â In addition to the economistâs instrumental rationality,there is âaffectiveâ rationality, which at the extreme results in emotional
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reflex behavior; âtraditionalâ rationality, which at the extreme results inrote inflexibility; and âvalueâ rationality, which results in actions takenfor their own sake (as duties), rather than as means to other ends. Thefour forms of rationality are ideal types that may or may not explainany particular instance of human behavior.While Weberâs schema is notthe only way of dividing up human motives, it has the advantage ofopening the social scientistâs mind to the possibility that people will be-have in ways that areâfrom the perspective of someone who adheresto another of the four typesââirrational.â Weber is reminding us thatinstrumental rationality (let alone the selfish variety of instrumental ra-tionality) has to be both (a) present as a motive, and (b) acting upon theagentâs behavior unalloyed by any of the other three ideal types, if it is toproduce the behavioral results predicted by rational-choice theorists (orthe Homo economicus results modeled by public-choice theorists).
Condition (b), which is captured in the ceteris paribus clause routinelygestured at by social scientists, is enough of a limit on natural science tobuild the scientistâs ignorance of some parts of nature into his overallmodel of it if we assume, meta-theoretically, that natural causal forceswhich seem to have been established as regularities thus far (by virtueof not being falsified) are everywhere and always present. The cet. par.clause makes us notice that these forces might, in principle, be presentbut counteracted by other universal forces, such that in the aggregate,uncontrolled by experimentation, we may well be unable to makeâpoint predictions.â This is to say that, lacking Laplacean omniscience,we can, at best, make rough weather forecastsânot predictions of theexact size and trajectory of a specific raindrop (see Upham ).
But in social science, we need to add, to the cet. par. restriction, con-dition (a), which repudiates the a priori assumption (as opposed to thehypothesis, to be tested a posteriori) that any given force, such as instru-mental rationality or selfishness, is present in a particular time andplaceâeven if we do hold countervailing conditions in that time andplace constant. The narrow lesson for rational- and public-choice theo-rists is that we should treat as an open question whether in any givencase, people will act from instrumentally rational or self-interested mo-tives. We need not homogenize our understanding of âhuman actionâsuch that we ignore, deny, or define away instrumentally irrational ornon-selfish motives. Nothing scientific is gained by doing so: the sim-plification inherent in all empirical theorizing does not license closingour eyes to evidence against a hypothesis about a particular event.
The larger lesson is that the empirical task of the social scientist is to
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investigate which particular parts of reality are best explained, and towhat extent, by a particular ideal type.
The complexity of social phenomena means that a posited force may not be present in a given time and place or that even if it is, its ef-fects may be too small to be visible upon gross inspection, because theposited force is counteracted by other forces. Thus, a social-science the-ory can
never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. All that we can and must verify is the presence of our assumptions in the particularcase . . . The theory itself, the mental scheme for the interpretation,can never be âverifiedâ but only tested for its consistency. (Hayek ,.)
Hayekâs remarkable dictum is justified by the fact that our theorymay prove to âbe irrelevant because the conditions to which it refersnever occur; or it may prove inadequate because it does not take ac-count of a sufficient number of conditionsâ (ibid.).When dealing withcomplex social phenomena, then,âwe do not ask whether the hypothe-ses we used are true or whether the constructs are appropriate, butwhether the factors we have singled out are in fact present in the par-ticular phenomena we want to explain, and whether they are relevantand sufficient to explain what we observeâ (Hayek , ). Since (a)the applicability and (b) the magnitude of a given ideal type cannot beknown in advance by human beings who are ignorant of most of theparticular âdataâ of the social universe, and who would be over-whelmed if they tried to assimilate all of it, social science has to be his-torical, not predictive (except in a hypothetical way), if it is to avoiddogmatism. That is, if we cannot know a priori and therefore ex antewhether a particular causal force will be present and potent in a givencase, we must discover this ex post.
It would seem . . . that the conception of law in the usual sense has lit-tle application to the theory of complex phenomena [such as biologyand economics]. . . . Though we possess theories of social structures, Irather doubt whether we know of any âlawsâ which social phenom-ena obey. It would then appear that the search for the discovery oflaws is not an appropriate hallmark of scientific procedure but merelya characteristic of the theories of simple phenomena [such as physics].(Hayek , â.)
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Why canât we know the truth about the empirical world a priori?This question is equivalent to asking why we should we fallibilists inthe first place, or why open-mindedness is the essence of science. Weshould be fallibilists only because, and to the extent that, we are notomniscient.We should be open-minded only because, and to the extentthat, the world is complicated (to us). If we were omniscient, wewouldnât need to investigate the world, and we wouldnât need eithernatural or social science to help us do it. The first reason for politicalscientists to pay attention to Popper, Weber, and Hayek is, therefore,methodological.
By putting our ignorance at center stage, Popper,Weber, and Hayekdiscourage the conflation of science with a dogmatic insistence thatthere must be lawlike regularities in the social world. They also discour-age the conflation of science with the positivist data gathering that, innatural science, might be justified as part of ânormalâ Kuhnian intra-paradigmatic progress. In social science, as Liah Greenfeld () notesbelow, data gathering proceeds within âresearch traditionsâ that areoften shaped by now-forgotten or incoherently remembered normativeconcerns, and are overturned not by the revolutionary falsification ofolder theories through controlled experimentation, but by the faddishprofessional desire for something new to do.
II. THE INTRACTABILITY OF POLITICAL IGNORANCE
If it is true that in subjects of great complexity we must rely to a largeextent on . . . theories that are difficult to disprove, the elimination ofinferior rival theories will be a slow affair, bound up closely with theargumentative skill and persuasiveness of those who employ them.There can be no crucial experiments which decide between them. . . .It is . . . because of the refractory nature of certain subjects that thesedifficulties arise.
âF.A. Hayek (, )
Politics is more difficult than physics.âAlbert Einstein
(in Neuman , )
The second reason for scholars of politics to follow Popperâs, Weberâs,and Hayekâs focus on ignorance is less methodological than substantive.So far, only a handful of political theorists, including David Ciepley(), Tom Hoffman (), Reihan Salam (), Ilya Somin (),
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance ix
and Matthew Weinshall (), have noticed that one of the âresearchtraditionsâ in political scienceâthe tradition of public-opinion re-searchâhas accumulated an ocean of findings about political ignorancethat are potentially lethal to the pro-democracy normative consensus inpolitical science, in economics, and in our culture at large.
As John Ferejohn (, ) has put it, ânothing strikes the student ofpublic opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of in-formation most people possess about politics.â Indeed, public-opinionresearchers sometimes seem to compete with each other to come upwith the best adjective to describe the breadth and depth of public ig-norance: is it âjaw-droppingâ (Luskin , )? Or merely âastonishingâ(Converse , )? In one instance, two out of three Americans failedto recognize the Bill of Rights when it was read to them (Sniderman,Brody, and Tetlock , ). At any given time, about one in four donâtknow who the vice president of the United States is (Luskin , ).Two in five were found to believe that Israel is an Arab nation (ibid.).Meanwhile, âthe most commonly known fact about George [H. W.]Bushâs opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli.During the presidential campaign . . . percent of the publicknew that the Bushesâ dog was named Millie, yet only percent knewthat both presidential candidates supported the death penaltyâ (DelliCarpini and Keeter , ).
Whether the topic is the absence of weapons of WMD in Iraq; whois on the Supreme Court; which side Russia led during the Cold War(Page and Shapiro , â); or the meaning of such elementaryconcepts in political discourse as liberalism and conservatism (Converse), the publicâs political ignorance is so immense that one cannothelp wondering how effective democratic politics can be at achievinggood ends, and at avoiding the inadvertent achievement of bad ones.
The usual measures of public ignorance might be dismissed as reveal-ing only ignorance of political trivia, but it is difficult to imagine thatanyone who is thinking deeply about politics could fail to pick up thebasic information that the public lacks (cf. Bennett ). And publicignorance extends to matters that are directly relevant to public policy.For instance, âAmericans grossly overestimate the average profit madeby American corporations, the percentage of the U.S. population that ispoor or homeless, and the percentage of the world population that ismalnourishedâ (Delli Carpini and Keeter , ). âFewer than aquarter could define terms like fiscal policy or monetary policy or describewhat is meant by âfree trade between nationsââ (ibid., ). Out of
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questions about economics asked in public-opinion surveys between and that were examined by Michael X. Delli Carpini andScott Keeter, âless than percent were correctly answered by at leastthree-quarters of the publicâ (ibid., â).
The situation is particularly worrisome if we consider the source ofpolitical ignorance: the inherent complexity of politics. The citizens ofa modern democracy are trying to be well informed about social-sci-ence questions that confound even social-science professionalsâbe-cause of the difficulty of using controlled experimentation to answerthem. Oneâs suppositions about the likely effects of the various publicpolicies âdebatedâ in the political arena will determine which facts onepicks out of the blooming, buzzing confusion of that debate as rele-vant, and it will determine how one interprets those facts. But withoutcontrolled experimentation to anchor its theoretical suppositions, thepublic is largely at sea.When public-opinion researchers enumerate theshocking levels of factual ignorance displayed by members of the pub-lic, they are really cataloguing the haphazard and often incoherent theo-rizing in which we, the people engage in our capacity as amateur socialscientists.
Political Epistemology
Not that professional social scientists are much better off. They mustuse, in place of laboratory experiments, a different form of controlledexperimentation: experimentation through counterfactual thinking.This entails imagining what is, by definition, difficult for us to âseeâ:what is (to us) complex.While all causation is, of course, ultimately in-visible, a laboratory experiment makes the effects of an otherwise invisi-ble cause visible by conforming (or failing to conform) to a predictionabout how such a cause would change visible phenomena, cet. par. Asimperfect as even laboratory experimentation is in making the unseenseen, and as subject as laboratory experiments are to varying interpreta-tions of what has been seen, it is at least the case that by taking the ce-teris paribus clause seriously enough to exclude potentially countervail-ing forces, the laboratory experiment can often show us whether ahypothesized force is really present and potent.
But where laboratory experimentation is not possible, science getsmore difficult.
First of all, as Greenfeld () points out, the behavior being exam-
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ined by social scientists is often governed by ideas generated by âcre-ativeâ (in the sense of unpredictable) processes of analogical association.These ideas are impressed, albeit imperfectly, upon relatively passive so-cial actors (who inevitably, however, contribute their own creativetwists) by various cultural media, taking on a path-dependent life oftheir own. Without laboratory experimentation by either the origina-tors of these ideas or their recipients, there will be few logical constraintson what ideas people will invent and will come to believe are true.
The founding document in the tradition of modern public-opinion research, Philip E. Converseâs âThe Nature of Belief Systemsin Mass Publicsâ (, ), points out that packages of politicalideasâideologiesâare crafted âinto apparently logical wholes thatare credible to large numbers of people [through] an act of creativesynthesis characteristic of only a minuscule proportion of any popu-lation.â Since even acts of creative synthesis synthesize previous actsof creative synthesis, the course of ideologies may,âover time . . . de-pend in a vital way upon currents in what is loosely called âthe his-tory of ideasââ (ibid., ). This is to say that the political theoriesused, in whole or in part, by even the best-informed members of thepublic are historically variable. Historians, however, can understandthem only by making difficult comparisons between what did hap-pen in historical fact and what, counterfactually, might have hap-pened if not for the presence of the âindependent variablesââin thiscase, the previous ideasâthat, they hypothesize, caused what did hap-pen to happen. This, too, was a point Weber emphasized (cf. Ringer, ).
Anyone who has attempted the careful analysis of, say, Rousseauâs So-cial Contract will be familiar with the difficulties of counterfactual theo-rizing. This accounts for the wide disparity in scholarly interpretationsof such texts. Yet because of the relatively restricted universe of textualevidence, the counterfactual analysis of the aims or errors of aRousseau is much easier, in principle, than is counterfactual thinkingabout which hypothesis best explains political behavior by masses ofpeople acting upon their own theories, derived in turn from the cre-ative syntheses of which they have been partly informed by their cul-tures. In the counterfactual interpretation of such political behaviorthere is even more division among the âexpertsâ than there is over theinterpretation of a single authorâs text. It is utterly fantastic, then, to ex-pect members of the general public to have theories about, say, the na-ture and causes of the diverse theories that motivate those we call âIs-
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lamist terroristsâ that are sound enough to be adequate for makinggood policy judgments about how to respond to the terroristsâ deeds.Yet that is exactly what democracy expects citizens to do.
A second barrier to good social-scientific theorizing, apart from theinherent difficulty of counterfactual thinking, is the fact that every socialscientistâincluding every member of the public who is compelled, bydemocracy, to act as a social scientistâhas himself been shaped by ideasof the sort that are so difficult to decipher in other people. These ideascan be expected to play a significant role in our own theorizing aboutother peopleâs theories.
Yet, as the example of professional social scientists depressingly remindsus, most people find it hard to take seriously the implications of theirown cultural determination. Even when one does become aware of oneâsown cultural determination, it is exceedingly difficult to subject oneselfto sufficient self-scrutiny to identify, let alone test, culturally ingrained as-sumptions that one treats as self-evident truths. Similarly, the theoriesthat inform the judgments of democratic decision makers are likelyto be unwitting repetitions of whatever ideas they have beentaughtâwhich, again, will be unchecked by anything like controlledexperimentation. Expecting cultural self-awareness among membersof the mass public, then, is akin to expecting natural scientists to tryto falsify their own theories, as under the normative interpretation ofPopperâbut without even being aware of what their theories are.
A third barrier to the formulation of âreality-basedâ public policyblocks our path even when cultural variations are relatively smallâas inthe behavior of Homo economicus, however peculiar to the modernWestern âeconomyâ that behavior may be. Most social institutions andmost social problems, including economic institutions and problems,arenât intended by anyone. This creates complexities that cannot fullybe untangled simply by investigating peopleâs deliberate motives or cul-turally conditioned ideas.We need to be able to understand patterns ofinterpersonal interaction that are different from the aims of any partyto them. This entails seeing something other than intentions behind theaggregated results of those interactions.
Yet in politics, as too often in the social sciences, aggregate data aretreated as if they âspeak for themselves.â Converse found, for example,that one of the most commonly used proxies for information employedby poorly informed voters is âthe nature of the timesâ: if prosperityreigns, then vote for the incumbent party. The problem, of course, isthat it is difficult even for âexpertsâ to determine whether the policies
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xiii
adopted by the incumbents are really responsible for the aggregate endproduct, prosperity. That determination requires difficult counterfactualreasoning such as is performed by economists (who often disagree witheach other). Nature-of-the-times voters are making the classic social-science mistake of conflating correlation with causation. Causation isproperly reduced to correlation only when the hypothesized causalvariable has been isolated, which cannot easily be done at the aggregatelevelâsay, in determining the causes of unemploymentâthat is sooften demanded by political decision making.
Rational vs. Radical Ignorance
Political decision makers ignore the cultural, spuriously visible, interac-tive, and thus un-obvious nature of âthe facts of the social sciencesâ notbecause there is some rational payoff in doing soâignorance is not itsown rewardâbut because it is hard to discern the concrete implicationsthat follow even if we recognize in the abstract that the world is com-plex. It is in the nature of ignorance that we donât know what we donâtknow. And it is in the nature of the theoretical lenses through whichwe see a complex world that, since we think of them as justified (oreven as nonexistent, if we believe positivistically that we are seeing theworld as it âobviouslyâ is)âotherwise, we would not use themâwetend not to know what their blind spots are. Likewise with the strongpoints of othersâ theories, and the variables that make what seems âob-viousâ to one person ridiculous to someone else. The opacity of theworld may thus introduce error into our understanding of it. The prob-lem is not just gaps in our knowledgeâthe absence of enough infor-mation. The deeper problem is the presence of information that, even ifaccurate in the sense tested by surveys of political âtrivia,â may mislead.
Applying this conception of ignorance to politics does not sit easilywith the tame hypothesis of ârational ignoranceâ: the notion that inmass democracies, since people know how insignificant their votes areamidst a huge electorate, they decide to be ignorant of politics becausethey calculate that becoming well informed would be a waste of time.
Of the millions of people in mass democracies who donât vote, thereare surely some who realize that their votes are unlikely to count, andtherefore remain deliberately ignorant of all other things political. Therational-ignorance hypothesis might apply to them. But millions ofpeople do vote, and a great many of them make onerous efforts to be-
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come well-informed enough to justify voting one way rather than an-other. Even cursory attempts to become politically informed are instru-mentally irrationalâif one knows, as the rational-ignorance hypothesisassumes, that the odds of one vote deciding an election are infinitesi-mally small. People who try to become well informed despite the mi-nuscule chance that their opinions will matter (by way of their votes)must be doing so either for instrumentally irrational reasons, such asperceived civic duty; or because they are ignorant of the odds of theirvotes making a differenceâmeaning that they cannot have rationallyweighed those odds against the costs of being well informed.
The rational-ignorance hypothesis explains too much. It would ac-count for public ignorance only if the publicâs ignorance were complete.But while public political knowledge does reach scandalously low lev-els, it does not reach zero, so it cannot be the result of the publicâs cal-culation that it isnât worthwhile to be informed. There is no in-be-tween: either one thinks it is instrumentally irrational to vote, andtherefore to be at all well informed about politics; or one doesnât, andone tries to understand politicsâas many people do.When people trybut fail to achieve the objective of being well informed, the problemmust lie elsewhere than in a deliberate decision to be ignorant.
More importantly, the rational-ignorance hypothesis explains too lit-tle. Democratic politics is as much an arena of passion as of apathy.Millions of people care deeply about politics, devoting and sometimessacrificing their lives to it in many cases; in even more cases, remon-strating, demonstrating, organizing, rioting, and terrorizing in the nameof their political ideas. These are not the behaviors of people whoknow that their ideas are grounded in ignorance. One cannot sancti-moniously proclaim the truth of opinions that one is aware are baseless.One cannot work oneself into a fury at the mendacity of those withwhom one disagrees if one recognizes that oneâs disagreement is basedon scant and dubious information that is not even worth the effort toacquire. Political idealism, political fanaticism, political vilification, po-litical self-righteousness are irrationalâindeed, impossibleâas out-growths of a rational decision to be politically ignorant. Rational-igno-rance theory domesticates what is actually the wildest of humanbehaviors. (If only the theory could so easily tame the reality!) It air-brushes from the picture the immense political power of the unwit-tingly deluded, and that power is the most fearsome thing on earth. Atheory that treats political ignorance as deliberate is destinedâone canonly hopeâfor irrelevance.
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xv
The more disturbing view of political ignorance, but the more rea-sonable one, is that it is usually unintentional.With the limited time, in-telligence, and logic at our disposal, ignorance is our natural state, oneinto which we are thrust by the limits of our minds when confrontingthe vastness of a world that we would prefer knowing, at least in all itsgermane details. Political ignorance is, in this view, a cognitive prob-lemâa problem of human finitudeânot a motivational or strategicone. This kind of ignoranceâradical, as opposed to rational2âopensup the possibility that what we know is not only an incomplete pictureof reality, but a blinkered one.
Inadvertent ignorance, the stuff of everyday life and certainly ofeveryday politics, has potentially fatal consequences both for rationalpolitical discourse and for rational policy making. To see why, considervery briefly the main line of political-psychology response to Converse.
Heuristics: Bad Proxies for Knowledge
The initial shock attending Converseâs discovery of the publicâs igno-rance was unfortunately absorbed by a long debate over one of hismost extreme suggestions: that most peopleâs political attitudes may beso ungrounded that, over time, they are better seen as random ânonatti-tudes.â Those who contested the nonattitudes thesis seem to have beenworried that the thesis, if correct, threatened the very possibility ofdemocracy: without political attitudes, there would be no âwillâ of thepeople to be enacted. (Similar concerns explain the attention long paidto Arrowâs Impossibility Theorem.)
By the time the dust of the ânonattitudesâ debate had settled, the re-maining participants were for the most part subspecialists familiar withthe proper coding of the National Election Survey data on whichConverse had drawn. The technical nature of the debate in which theyhad been engaged with Converse had, it seems, obscured the largernormative significance of his article: namely, that even if populardemocracy is possible because voters have stable enough âattitudesâ toconstitute (in the aggregate) a public âwill,â the legitimacy of that will isdubious if it is as poorly informed as Converse had showed it to be.3
Such issues have not gone unaddressed by subsequent empirical (asagainst normative) research, however. The most prominent branch ofthe literature has focused on the âheuristics,â or proxies for knowledge,that allow people to make political decisions based on scant informa-
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tion. This research, especially when supplemented by impressionisticdata, suggests that peopleâs political reasoning is no more logical than itis well informedâalthough this has not generally been recognized bythe researchers.
For example, Samuel Popkinâs revealingly titled book, The ReasoningVoter (), begins by recounting a political gaffe that contributed toGerald Fordâs defeat by Jimmy Carter in . Fordâs mistake, during acampaign stop in Southern California, was to try to eat a tamale with-out shucking it first (as any Mexican-food adept would do). This culi-nary error cost Ford dearly among Hispanic voters. To Popkin, how-ever, that fact is not cause for despair. Instead of worrying aboutwhether Fordâs familiarity with tamales was a good proxy for the effectsof policies of the sort that he had, as president, already implemented,Popkin views the tamale heuristic as something to celebrate: the voterswho used it, after all, were reasoning (along the following lines: a presi-dent who doesnât know how to eat a tamale wonât promote the inter-ests of Hispanic-Americans).
Given the unfathomable depths of ignorance revealed by the post-Converse survey research in which such scholars as Popkin are im-mersed, one should not be surprised if they are easily impressed bymere signs of mental activity among votersâno matter how poorly in-formed or illogical the âreasoningâ in question is. In reflecting onwhether votersâ heuristics are sound, however, a darker view of politicalreasoning emerges.
The most profound observer of political ignorance, Walter Lipp-mann, tackled in two pages of his opus, Public Opinion, a heuristicwith more significance, I think, than all the others uncovered by politi-cal scientists since. Lippmann was trying to explain the commonplaceaccusation that oneâs political adversaries have evil motives. This is nei-ther a charitable accusation to make nor one that, when the heat of thedayâs political battles dissipates, stands up to empirical testing. Yet it is animmensely important political phenomenon that unfolds regularly.
Lippmann attributes it to the inherently contestable nature of acomplex worldâespecially one that we (like the tamale voters) tendnot to see as particularly hard to fathom. We typically fail to realizethat the (political) world is complex, and thus that our perceptions ofit amount to anything but âthe factsâ speaking for themselves. Coun-terfactual experimentation appears to be unneeded, even if we weregood at it.
Once our political opinions seem to us to be self-evident reflec-
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xvii
tions of the facts, it becomes mysterious (to us) why anyone wouldhold different opinions than we do. As Lippmann ([] ,â) puts it,
He who denies my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien, dan-gerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to beexplained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he seesa different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it sapsthe very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen lifesteadily and seen it whole. . . .
So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrivetheir own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible forthem to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their experi-ence at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpreta-tion. They look upon it as âreality.â
Someone who does not share my interpretation of (obvious) âreal-ity,â Lippmann ([] , ) continues,
presents himself as the man who says, evil be thou my good. He is anannoyance who does not fit into the scheme of things. Neverthelesshe interferes. And since that scheme is based in our minds on incon-trovertible fact fortified by irresistible logic, some place has to be foundfor him in the scheme. Rarely in politics . . . is a place made for him bythe simple admission that he has looked upon the same reality andseen another aspect of it. That would shake the whole scheme. . . .
âOut of the opposition,â therefore, âwe make villains and conspira-cies.â
If we allowed that those who disagree with us just see the facts dif-ferently, we would have to conclude that either they, or we, must bemistaken about the facts. That would undermine the obviousness ofthe reality that we find solidly anchored in âself-evident truths.â Wesidestep the disconcerting possibility that we may be mistaken aboutthese truths by attributing not a mistaken understanding of the facts,but bad motives, to our political opponents. It is far easier to reassureoneself about the purity of oneâs own motives than about the infalli-bility of oneâs own perceptions, so people persistently tend to see aworld that is in fact so complicated that its interpretation generateshonest disagreement as, instead, so simple that only evil people coulddisagree with themâmalevolent people who deliberately ignore the
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obvious truth.4 Thus, ignorance of the real possibility oneâs own ignoranceboth enables and is reinforced by ignorance of the possibility of oneâspolitical antagonistsâ ignoranceâsuch that malevolent intentions, notdifferent perceptions, must be responsible for their antagonism.
Popper (, â, emph. added) has a theory of the source of politi-cal demonization that almost exactly duplicates Lippmannâs:
The conspiracy theory of ignorance . . . is a curious outgrowth fromthe doctrine of manifest truth.
By the doctrine that truth is manifest I mean . . . the optimistic viewthat truth, if put before us naked, is always recognizable as truth. Thustruth, if it does not reveal itself, has only to be unveiled, or dis-cov-ered. Once this is done, there is no need for further argument. . . .
But how can we ever fall into error if truth is manifest? . . . Ignorancemay be the work of powers conspiring to keep us in ignorance, topoison our minds by filling them with falsehood, and to blind our eyesso that they cannot see the manifest truth. . . .
The conspiracy theory of ignorance is fairly well known in its Marx-ian form as the conspiracy of a capitalist press that perverts and sup-presses truth and fills the workersâ minds with false ideologies. . . .
The theory that truth is manifestâthat it is there for everyone tosee, if only he wants to see itâthis theory is the basis of almost everykind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuseto see the manifest truth.
I will call the attribution of bad motives to those with whom onedisagrees the âcynicâs heuristic.â It is one reason that, in politics, peopleclose their minds to other points of view, regardless of the content of thosepoints of view. Anyone can use the cynicâs heuristic to dismiss chal-lenges to their own beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are.
But the focus on motives that is so pervasive in politics does not stopat this general level, which would be bad enoughâsince the prevalenceof cynicism about oneâs interlocutorâs motives renders the ideals of ra-tional political âdiscourseâ and even rational political âthoughtâ hope-lessly optimistic. Peopleâs focus on motives has a similarly lethal effecton the ideal of rational political policy making (which is, after all, sup-posed to be the end product of rational political discourse and thought)when it takes the specific form of what I will call the âintentions
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xix
heuristic.â This is the assumption that from good intentions flow goodresults, and from bad intentions, bad results.
Like all heuristics, the intentions heuristic is unstated âcommon sense,âbut it is sound only if one ignores the possibility that the world is compli-cated enough to produce unintended consequences. The intentionsheuristic is not a rational response to ignorance: nobody would want toignore the unintended negative consequences of the policies they favor,or the unintended positive consequences of the policies they oppose.Theintentions heuristic, far from being a deliberately chosen method of cop-ing with ignorance, is itself an unwitting manifestation of ignorance.
That it is utterly inappropriate as a basis for policy making in a com-plex worldâby which I mean a world in which the truth is not mani-festâis suggested by its similarity to Converseâs nature-of-the-timesheuristic.What is the latter heuristic but the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propterhoc (Lippmann , )? And what is the intentions heuristic but a bas-tardized version of the argumentum ad hominem? Conflating correlationwith causation, and conflating intentions with results, do seem to becommon forms of political âreasoning,â but they are no less fallacious forthat.
Like the rational-ignorance hypothesis, the optimistic, Popkin-styleview treats the heuristic-wielding victims of ignorance as if they knowthat they are using proxies for what they donât know. But even if peo-pleâs uses of heuristics were deliberate forms of reasoning, they couldnot conceivably be good forms of reasoning. How could people possiblyknow which proxies for what they donât know are accurate proxiesâwithout knowing what they donât know?5 Like the rational-ignorancehypothesis, then, the optimistic view of heuristics overlooks the inadver-tent errors that necessarily mar the groping in the dark that is politics.The list of the sources of error that I have set forthâignorance oflogic, of unintended consequences, of the possibility of honest mistake,and of oneâs own ignoranceâmay, for all I know, merely scratch thesurface (given my own inadvertent ignorance).
Unlike scientific theories, which cope with our ignorance throughcontrolled experimentation, the cynicâs and intentions heuristics aggra-vate our ignorance. Like scientific theories, they simplify the world (cf.Upham ); but they do so by falsifying it, with no prospect of beingfalsified by it. To the extent that these heuristics are fallacious, theyshould no more govern public policy than a rational agent would delib-erately choose to be guided by them (unless it could be shown that thepolitical worldâs complexity happens to be such that these particular fal-
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lacies somehow tend to track reality). And yet they seem to dominatethe conduct of democratic politics.
Witness, as a hybrid of the intentions and cynicâs heuristics, the re-lentless tendency in political discourse to use peopleâs financial interestsas proxies for the merit of their political positions. One error in suchreductionism, as Lippmann ([] , , ) pointed out, is that it
usually omits altogether the cognitive function. So insistent is it on thefact that human beings finally refer all things to themselves, that it doesnot stop to notice that menâs ideas of all things and of themselves arenot instinctive. They are acquired.
Thus,
There is no fixed set of opinions on any question that go with beingthe owner of a factory, no views on labor, on property, on manage-ment, let alone views on less immediate matters. . . . There is no magicin ownership which enables a business man to know what laws willmake him prosper.
Here is a deeper problem for public-choice theory than those I havealready noted. Even were the premise of universal self-interest true,the manner in which people pursue their self-interest in the world ofpolitics depends on their tacit or explicit (heuristic or cultural) theo-ries about which acts of legislation would benefit them. These theo-ries, then, are the causal variables that determine peopleâs political be-haviorâeven if everyoneâs motives are selfish.
The second problem with the âfollow-the-moneyâ heuristic is thateven if âfinancial self-interestâ explained political actorsâ behavior, pe-cuniary movtives are not necessarily inconsistent with good publicpolicy.
The Hobsonâs Choice of Democracy
I have been discussing the logical defects of the heuristics used by thegeneral public. The picture painted by Converse, however, distinguishesa broad mass of heuristics-dependent, politically inattentive voters froma tiny elite who are politically engaged enough to score well on tests ofelementary political âfacts.â How do members of this elite manage to
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxi
be well informed if, as I have been claiming, ignorance is part of thehuman condition?
The short answer is that they manage to be well informed only com-pared to most everyone elseânot compared to the complexity of theworld they are trying to understand. This they accomplish by usingmore comprehensive heuristics than most people useâi.e., by using ide-ologies.
If one wants to observe the uncontrolled, Frankenstein-like march ofpreconceived notions through the political world, unchecked by falsifi-cation, the best place to look is the behavior of ideologues. Indeed,Converseâs most disturbing and under-remarked finding is that the rela-tively well informed compensate in dogmatism for their greater knowledgeability.Ideologies appear to be the most effective lenses for making sense ofpolitics, since their scope lets one screen in more information than cansomeone using a simpler heuristic. The ideologue almost always knowswhat to think, while the nature-of-the-times voter (for instance) doesnot. But screening in information that confirms oneâs ideological pre-conceptions means screening out information that does not. The firsttype of screening enables the ideologue to be better informed than thenature-of-the-times voter. But the second type of screening ensuresthat the ideologueâs fact-rich grasp of the world is biased and rigid, andindeed that many of the things he âknows for a factâ are untrue. Theideologue rarely has ânonattitudes.â But Converse points out that theattitudes the ideologue has are heavily âconstrainedââby ideology, notreality.
The selective (constrained) ideological perception and retention dis-played by the well informed would seem to confront us with a Hob-sonâs choice. We can be ruled either by a mass of ignoramuses orâtothe extent that the ignorant public takes its cues from relatively knowl-edgeable elites (Zaller ), or is simply ignorant of the policies thatelites enact (DeCanio )âwe can be ruled by a coterie of the doc-trinaire.
Popper believed that democracy could minimize ignorance-based er-rors relative to other political systems. His answer to such criticisms ofdemocratic policy making as I am suggesting, an answer echoed by Bar-Am and Agassi () and, especially, Eidlin (), is that social democ-racy, at least, is a procedure of trial and error through which decisionmakersâfor all their ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and dogmatismâmay, nonetheless, incrementally solve social problems.
Popper calls the procedure by which social democracy achieves this
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feat âpiecemeal social engineering.â The scientistic language should notdistract us from the innocent substanceâwhich is, all too much so, sim-plicity itself. First, someone (perhaps a social-science âexpertâ) thinksup a public policy designed to solve a social problem. Then the stateimplements it, and the public observes its results. If the policy isnâtworking, the electoral mechanism ensures that the state will respond tonegative public feedback. The state will then go back to the drawingboard and try a new policy.
The simplicity of piecemeal social engineering stems from the factthat it treats as âmanifest truths,â evident to the public without culturalor genetic mediation, such eminently contestable mattters as what con-stitute real social problems, and what actual effects the implementedâsolutionsâ have. These, no less than any issue in natural science, aretheoretical questions that require hypothetical answers before a social-science âexpertâ or a member of the electorate can even begin to de-cide which âfactsâ are relevant to answering them. In the absence oflaboratory experimentation, piecemeal social engineering would, to bean error-correction process, require rigorous, informed counterfactualreasoning about social problems and the effects of putative political so-lutions to them. The public-opinion literature, and the poor record ofthe social sciences, give us every reason to think that such reasoning isdifficult to do wellâif it is done at all.
As Eidlin () points out, piecemeal social engineering is less aproposal by Popper than it is a description of the experimental proce-dure that, in effect, goes on in Western democracies already. As we studypolitical decision making in such democracies, do we see evidence ofrigorous counterfactual reasoning; evidence of awareness that the factsand theories that one takes to be âobviousâ may seem that way only be-cause of cultural indoctrination; evidence of partisansâ awareness of al-ternative hypotheses and the evidence that would support them, or ofevidence against their own hypotheses; or evidence of awareness thatthe interaction of multifarious forces, embodied in the ceteris paribusclause, prohibits the inference of policy conclusions from aggregateoutcomes, post hoc ergo propter hoc?
To ask such questions is to answer them. What we find in the realworld of social democracy is not Popperian or Weberian science in ac-tion, but a cacophony of confident voices that unwittingly express fac-tual ignorance, theoretical ignorance, ignorance of logic, ignorance oftheir own possible ignorance, ignorance of their opponentsâ possible ig-
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxiii
norance; and, in consequence, dogmatism, demagoguery, and demoniza-tion.
That is just my view, culturally conditioned and fallible. So let meput the matter into a less contentious formula. If instead of self-aware,open-minded, logically rigorous, and methodologically sophisticatedreasoning, political decision makers (under any regime, not just democ-racy) employ such heuristics as those I have mentioned, uncontrolledby tests of the theories these heuristics tacitly embody, then we can say,prima facie, that what passes for error correction in the political systemwill likelier be just the type of insulation from error detection that Pop-per made the distinguishing mark of pseudo-science. The cynicâsheuristic used by real-world political decision makers âinformsâ theirinterpretation of the results of piecemeal social engineering only in thesense of confirming their misconceived, preconceived notions by dismissing al-ternative interpretations as badly motivated. The intentions heuristicobscures the very possibility that well-motivated policies could gowrong. Nature-of-the-times and, more generally, post hoc ergo propter hocreasoning will infer conclusions from aggregate âfactsâ that may becontradicted by the operation of subtler (âinvisibleâ) factors. In all ofthese cases, the Popperian theory of social democracy overlooks thevery thing to which Popperâs theory of natural science should mostalert us: the theory-ladenness of politics, and the absence from politicsof anything like the checks on bad theories that are produced by con-trolled experimentation.
A theory simplifies the world of which we are (partly) ignorant byfocusing our attention on a small part of it, which the theory targetsas germane. But unless it is possible for a controlled experiment tofalsify the theory by shifting our attention to aspects of the worldwith which the theory may not fit, the theoryâs narrowing of ourfocus will go unbalanced, even while its simplifying lens enables us tospot confirming evidence that persuades us that we are âseeing lifesteadily and seeing it whole.â The voter heuristically evaluating theeffects of a policy experiment is like a social scientist who thinks heis observing the world unassisted by possibly defective theoreticallenses. The relatively well informed but ideological policy expertwho proposes the next political experiment is like the dogmatic pro-ponent of a pre-scientific theory of nature. In the real world of socialdemocracy, we get both sides of the Hobsonâs choice: rule by ideo-logues is validated by the votes of ignoramuses.
Those who disagree with this assessment will almost invariably be
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those who agree with the policies actually adopted in social democracies.Their burden is to explain to someone who reserves substantive judg-ment on those policies how the policies could be sound, except by hap-penstance, if the truth is not manifestâgiven the lack of controlled ex-perimentation in the policymaking process.
The challenge for the defender of social democracy is to show notjust that political actors âreason,â but that they reason well, using appro-priate information and logical inference. Otherwise, his defense of so-cial democracy will have to deny, at least implicitly, that the politicalworld is complex enough to require theoretically mediated perceptionand careful reasoning. (In the light of Converseâs findings about thetendency of the best informed to be the most doctrinaire, how cansuch a defender of social-democratic policies avoid the possibility thathe himself is not just ideologically attached to those policies?)
One might respond to this challenge to social democracy asChurchill did in proclaiming democracy itself the worst system exceptall the others. The defects of social democracy might be admitted asreal, but defended as unavoidable. But if one is interested in exploringwhetherârather than just assuming thatâthere really is no better alter-native than social democracy, one must undertake a relative assessmentof various means of coping with human ignorance in areas that resistcontrolled experimentation. This is a project that has not interested po-litical theoristsâpreoccupied as they have been, ever since Plato, withgetting political motives right (political theorists use the intentions heuristicas much as anyone). But it is a project that, ironically, an economistâHayekâdid attempt.
III. COPING WITH IGNORANCE
Such orders as that of the market do not obtrude themselves on oursenses but have to be traced by our intellect. . . .We cannot see, or oth-erwise intuitively perceive, this order of meaningful actions, but areonly able mentally to reconstruct it.
âF.A. Hayek (, )
Hayek helped arrange for the publication of Popperâs Open Society andIts Enemies in , and from Hayekâs own writings it is clear that hewas thoroughly familiar with Popperâs defense of piecemeal social engi-neering. Yet while one can make a case for seeing Hayekâs ideas as aninfluence on Popper, as Bruce Caldwell () does below, Popperâs
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxv
ideas and, in particular, his politics had little apparent influence onHayek (cf. Caldwell ).Why not?
Hayekâs political theorizing, I believe, got its impetus from thesame factor that both fueled and then quickly ended his own youth-ful socialismâwhich had been grounded in âbroadly humanitarianconcernsâ for âsocial justice and the alleviation of the misery that hesaw about him in post-First World War Viennaâ (Shearmur , ).Hayekâs utilitarian socialism led him to study economics, but histraining as an economist of the Austrian school, founded by CarlMenger, then persuaded him that anything beyond minimal state in-tervention in capitalism would produce far worse problems than itwould solve.
This judgment was based on an implicitly comparative theory ofeconomic and political processes. Hayekâs conviction seems to havebeen that harmful tendencies in modern politics would eventuallyproduce pernicious results by interfering with relatively, albeit notcompletely, benign tendencies in the economy. This was the messagethat he spent the rest of his life trying to formulate into a persuasiveargument for limiting democracy. In the end, he only partly suc-ceeded.
The Austrians are now far enough outside of the mainstream ofeconomics that even to call Hayek a member of the Austrian schoolâofâ economics would be anachronistic. But this was not the case untilthe end of the s. At the beginning of that decade, Hayek had beenrecognized as an economist to contend withâso much so that theLondon School of Economics imported him from Vienna to do battlewith Keynes, who was teaching at Cambridge. The proximate cause ofHayekâs reputational eclipse after the mid-s was the perception thatKeynes won the confrontation. The subtler cause, as Peter J. Boettke() has argued in these pages, is that Hayek and the Austrian schoolhad unwittingly moved away from the neoclassical orthodoxy by payingmore than lip service to ignorance as an economic phenomenon.
That is what Hayek did in papers published in the s, mostprominently âThe Use of Knowledge in Societyâ () and âTheMeaning of âCompetitionââ (). These articles called into questionone of the working assumptionsâperfect knowledgeâthat make pos-sible the mathematicized economics in which the academic mainstreamis still engaged. An astute observer of Austrian economics has written,of Hayekâs mid-century economic works, that although they âwerewidely read and respected, they were by no means fully understood. It
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was not so much that [Hayekâs] colleagues thought he was wrong. . . .They just did not see how what he said matteredâ (Vaughn , ).
As Boettke (, ) emphasized, what Hayek was saying is that eco-nomic ignorance cannot just be assumed away for the sake of precise,mathematical modeling. Any economic theory that ignores ignorance hasgained precision at the price of a fatal disconnect from reality.
The simplicity of the word Use in the title of Hayekâs paperdisguises its theoretical imporance. Hayek was arguing that marketprices allow knowledge to be âusedâ even though, for the most part, itis not known. Each buyer and seller contributes, to the price of a prod-uct, a small bit of knowledgeâthe knowledge of what she is able tosupply to others, or of what she is willing to buy from them (although,since Hayek maintains that this knowledge is often âtacit,â knowledgemay be a misnomer). Once consumersâ and producersâ dispersed knowl-edge of the supply and demand conditions of a product takes the formof a price through their buying and selling of it, nobody needs to ana-lyze the dispersed âknowledgeâ reflected by the price in order to makeuse of it. I need not know whether the higher price of oil (Hayekâs ex-ample was tin) is due to a rise in its demand or a decline in its supply inorder to consume less of itâeven unwittingly, by buying fewer prod-ucts that I donât even realize are made from oil, but that I do know aresuddenly more expensive than competing products. All I need toâknowâ is that the products have become more expensiveânot why.
Market prices, in Hayekâs view, are ways of coping with ignorance.But unlike the heuristics used in political âreasoning,â market prices aresound proxies for relevant information, proxies that every day allow bil-lions of people to make adjustments to new supply and demand cir-cumstances of which they may be entirely ignorant.
Hayek had unlocked the secret of marketsâ success: not the low moraldemands that they make, but the low cognitive demands.
The soundness of the market-price proxy stems from precisely whatdifferentiates it from the heuristics people use in politics: it simplifies acomplex reality, but without the help of our chronically defective powers ofcounterfactual reasoning. To the degree that those powers must fall backon heuristics of the sort that we have examined rather than on some-thing akin to prices, we do not effectively diminish our ignorance of acomplex world, even though we accumulate self-confirming âfactsâ thatmake the world seem simple.
Prices may also be compared favorably to the experimental results ofPopperian natural science. Like scientific findings, prices result from a
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxvii
process of trial and errorâas any businessman will discover if he setshis price too high. But prices are even better than science as a way ofoperationalizing our (now purely figurative) awareness of ignorance,because they do not require anyone consciously to think up a soundcausal theory to explain them, as a natural scientist must try to do. Theresults of the experimental process that produces market prices are putto use âin societyâ without having to be grasped by anyone in the formâof knowledge.â
A successful restaurateur may possess no theory to explain his suc-cess. Or he may be thoroughly convinced of the following theory: thereason he has been able to charge high prices for the food he serves isthe extraordinary talent of his chef. But in reality, the reason for therestaurantâs success may be the extraordinary ambience of the room. Ifthe restaurateur inadvertently conducts an experiment that proves histheory false, by adding extra tables that ruin the ambience, the prices heis able to charge may start to sink too low to keep him afloat. Yet, evenas he is going bankrupt, he may never realize why. The restaurant cango out of business with nobody the wiser about the true cause of itsfailure, or of its previous success. The restaurateurâs causal theory hasbeen falsifiedâwithout the need for anyone, including him, to deploysound reasoning, or any reasoning at all.
This view builds on Hayek in treating the way the market âsystemâoperates (not merely the way it arises) as requiring little consciousawareness on the part of market participants.What makes the system aseffective as (or, arguably, more effective than) science in coping with ig-norance is not, in principle, the matter of motivation to which Part Ipaid so much attention (because of the motivational preoccupations ofrational- and public-choice theory and of democratic politics). The en-trepreneurâs self-interested desire for profit cannot guarantee that hewill hit upon an effective theory of how to make a profit (cf. Vaughn, ; in contrast, Hayek , ),6 any more than what makesscience an effective means of coping with ignorance is the scientistâsdedication to finding the truth. Plenty of nobly motivated scientiststurn out to be wrong, and plenty of selfishly motivated entrepreneursgo bankrupt. Conversely, many a scientific discovery has been the for-tuitous byproduct of myth, accident, or a stray thought, while many afortune got its start as a hobby or had some other non-pecuniary inspi-ration.
In neither science nor the economy can appropriate motives guar-antee progress against ignorance. Economists do themselves a disser-
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vice when they summarize the heart of their teaching as âincentivesmatterâ (even though, in the delimited âeconomiesâ of the modernWest, where the motive of self-interest is legitimated in a way that isnot true in Western âpolities,â incentives do matter a great deal). Tothe extent that, as Hayek maintained, the advantage of capitalism iscognitive, the mechanism of economic progress cannot be the incen-tives capitalism âoffersâ people, but must instead be the use in capital-ism of some equivalent to the controlled experiments that falsify er-roneous scientific theories. Exactly what is this equivalent?
It is the consumerâs ability to unwittingly undertake trial-and-errorexperimentation. Inasmuch as business enterprises embody, in effect,competing theories of how to satisfy consumers, consumers can, ineffect, falsify such theories by âexitingâ (to use Albert O. Hirschmanâsterminology) from the continued purchase of products that they findunsatisfactory. This drives down the prices that can be charged forthose products and, eventually, drives their producers out of businessif they fail to respond in a way that enhances consumersâ subjectivewell-being. Nobody (not even consumers or economists) needs to bewell informed or logically sophisticated for this process to work.
Can piecemeal social engineering somehow, similarly, bypass thedefective reasoning capacities of human beings confronted with acomplex society? It seems unlikely. Another Austrian economist,Joseph Schumpeter (, , emph. added), addresses the issue inci-dentally while comparing commercial advertising and political propa-ganda. In politics, he writes,
the ways in which issues and the popular will on any issue are beingmanufactured is exactly analogous to the ways of commercial advertis-ing. We find the same attempts to contact the subconscious. We findthe same technique of creating favorable and unfavorable associationswhich are the more effective the less rational they are. We find thesame evasions and reticences and the same trick of producing opinionby reiterated assertion that is successful precisely to the extent towhich it avoids rational argument and the danger of awakening thecritical faculties of the people. And so on. Only, all these arts have infi-nitely more scope in the sphere of public affairs than they have in thesphere of private and professional life. The picture of the prettiest girlthat ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain thesales of a bad cigarette. There is no equally effective safeguard in thecase of political decisions. Many decisions of fateful importance are of a na-ture that makes it impossible for the public to experiment with them at its
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxix
leisure and at moderate cost. Even if that is possible, however, judgment is as arule not so easy to arrive at as it is in the case of the cigarette, because effects areless easy to interpret.
Both of Schumpeterâs explanations for the inferiority of politics tomarkets are worth considering.
Politics is, first of all, slow and expensive. It may cost years, and theilliteracy of many children, to figure out if some new pedagogical regi-men is the solution to the ongoing crisis of public education.
Schumpeterâs second point, however, goes deeper. Interpreting thefeedback from public policies is difficult, because the effects of publicpolicies do not present themselves to us (whatever we commonlythink) as self-interpreting âdata.â The facts do not speak for themselves.In contrast, a consumer gets from his purchases direct feedback that re-quires no interpretation in order to move him to exit from an unsatisfac-tory product. Or more accurately,7 only limited additions to the in-stinctual interpretive logic displayed by lower animals, and preserved inthe human subconscious, are needed if a consumer is to classify a nega-tive stimulus as being of a certain type (âbad-tasting cigarette BrandXâ), such that in response to that stimulus, the consumer is moved toexperiment with a different stimulus (âBrand Yâ) within the same class,or to abandon that class of stimuli altogether.
Just as the restaurateur need not know why he cannot maintain thehigh prices on his menu, the consumer need not know why the ciga-rette tastes bad. All he needs to know is that it does.
Information received through physical senses creates emotions, whichthen serve as the basis for our future decisions by providing a sense ofwhat is good and bad, and what causes pleasure or pain, on the basis ofprior learning and experiences. . . . By and large, these emotional con-nections serve individuals well later in life in determining quickly, effi-ciently, and nonverbally which people and events are likely to lead togood outcomes and should be approached, and which should beavoided. (McDermott , .)
This is a somatic description of the imperfect, animalistic, effectivemeans by which we make beneficial (happiness-conducive) exit deci-sions in both our personal and our economic lives. Our reactive behav-ior allows us to navigate life largely without knowing what we aredoing; it lets us leave bad situations behind without figuring out whythey are bad.
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But when, as in politics, one âsolutionâ to a problem is imposed oneveryone by the sovereign, the only forms of exit in case that solu-tion fails are either costly emigration or a long wait for rotation in of-fice (which may bring about a more successful policy by pure luck).There is indeed, then, common to markets and democracy, a trial-and-error ability to exit from bad situations without needing to figure outwhat has gone wrong. But such experimentation takes so long in pol-itics that except when it is used to get rid of a monstrous tyrant, itmust be supplemented by non-reactive, explicit human reasoningabout what has gone wrong if it is expected to satisfy the ambitionsof the social democrat.
Under social democracy, the piecemeal social engineer must con-sciously theorize about the source of the problem he is trying to solve,consciously theorize about what policy might plausibly correct it, andthen âVoiceâ these hypothesesâto invoke the mechanism Hirschmancontrasts against Exitâpersuasively enough that political decision mak-ers will enact the preferred policy solution. But as Schumpeter pointsout, âthe effectsâ of a social policy imposed on a complex society arefar harder to interpret than the effects of buying Brand X or Brand Y.The theoretical interpretation of these effects, whether by (ideological)âexpertsâ or (ignorant) members of the public, will be subject to dis-tortion by the cultural sources of information about the effects of theexperiment, and by the cultural and possibly genetic sources of theories(heuristics) about social causation that govern our selection and analysisof that information.
Given the pessimistic inferences to be drawn from the fact that in-formation about politics is âmediatedâ to us by cultural personnelwhose own culturally and genetically acquired biases select whatânewsâ is worth reporting, one can perhaps understand how Schum-peter (, ) could have written that successful political propa-ganda blocks the arousal of âthe peopleâs critical faculties.â As hehimself notes, however, these faculties, even when aroused, are unreli-able outside âthe ordinary run of often-repeated decisions,â whereâthe individual is subject to the salutary and rationalizing influence offavorable and unfavorable experience.â Such experience tends to im-pose a sort of reality principle on the area of life that is âfamiliar.âBut when it comes to the unfamiliar world of politics, about whichone must trust âwhat [oneâs] newspaper tells himâ (ibid., ), mattersare not so easy:
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The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental perfor-mance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzesin a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within thesphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinkingbecomes associative and affective. (Ibid., )
That is not a bad description of what can be derived from the pub-lic-ignorance and heuristics literature. Schumpeter (, ) even an-ticipates Converse:
The ordinary citizenâs ignorance and lack of judgment in matters ofdomestic and foreign policy . . . are if anything more shocking in thecase of educated people and of people who are successfully active innon-political walks of life. . . . Information is plentiful and readilyavailable. But this does not seem to make any difference.
Hayekâs Turn to Non-Public-Choice Political Theory
In Hayek and After, Jeremy Shearmur () meticulously examinesHayekâs career as a political theorist with the following question alwaysin mind: Why did the initially socialist Hayek oppose piecemeal socialengineering, continuing to drift rightward after he repudiated the out-right communism that was at issue in the âsocialist calculation debateâof the s and s?
This debate, Boettke () argues, convinced Hayek and hisAustrian-school mentor, Ludwig von Mises, that their ignorance-based brand of economics departed sharply from the neoclassicalmainstream of which they had thought themselves members in goodstanding. Mises (; [] ) had begun the debate by askinghow communist central planners could allocate capital goods if, de-prived of market prices for them by the nationalization of the meansof production, the planners could not numerically assess the relativeefficiency of the infinite combinations of resources that could beused to meet consumer needs. Mises contended that the resultingwaste of resources would have made âsocialismâ (what we wouldnow call communism) âimpossible,â if socialists wanted to maintain alarge population at above-subsistence levels of prosperity.
Hayek contributed much to the later rounds of this debate, butwhen it was over, the consensus of the neoclassical mainstream wasthat, as in the debate with Keynes, Hayek had been bestedâthis time,
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because he failed to concede, to the âmarket socialists,â that the sup-ply-and-demand âdataâ that central planners would need in order toset capital-goods prices could be inferred from consumer-goodsprices. Reflection on the unrealistic assumptions standing behind thisconsensus spurred Hayek to deepen his theory of real-world econo-mies, in which there is no actual knowledge of supply and demandcurves. This led him to such breakthroughs as are contained in âTheUse of Knowledge in Society.â But Hayekâs subsequent defense oflimits on social-democratic experimentation could not be sustainedby the purely economic considerations he had adduced in either thesocialist-calculation debate or in the theory of prices that grew out ofit.
The social democracy against which Hayek was now arguing, afterall, need not nationalize the means of production or tamper with mar-ket prices. One can be a piecemeal social engineer by regulating capi-talist business conduct, redistributing wealth, and leaving prices alone,free to respond to government interventions as they respond todroughts and floods. This is a point upon which Shearmur justly insists.It is true that, by eschewing price controls (such as minimum wages),such a regime would be less heavy handed than is any current socialdemocracy, including our own. But Hayek opposed not only price con-trols, but most regulation of the economy and redistribution of itswealth.
As Shearmur (, ) writes, once our attention âshifts from so-cialism in the sense of economic planning and instead becomes con-cerned with what should be the scope and agenda of a non-marketwelfare state, things get much more messy.â If I may compress Shear-murâs argument, Hayek the political theorist never did produce a con-vincing account of this messy reality that would provide good reasonsto oppose the non-communist yet interventionist, redistributive state(especially an account that made due allowances for the public goods,redistribution, and regulation that Hayek did deem appropriate). In-stead, Hayek moved from one inadequate political position to another,each designed to constrain state power: inter alia, an argument againstâcoercionâ that substituted, for the philosophical problems of negativeliberty, equally serious problems stemming from Hayekâs new criterionof freedom, the âgeneralityâ of legal rules (Hayek ); a book-lengthverbal quibble about the inapplicability of the term âsocial justiceâ toâspontaneous orders,â such as markets, that have no designer who canbe called âunjustâ (Hayek c); and a semi-irrationalist defense of
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spontaneous orders (not only markets but languages and social tradi-tions yet, curiously, not welfare states) that have survived an (unspeci-fied) process of group selection (Hayek ). Some of these positions,Shearmur points out, are in line with the utilitarian premises of bothHayekâs youthful socialism and his subsequent turn toward capitalism;others are not; but none provide a plausible objection to social democ-racy Ă la Popper.
Such an objection would have to compare the likely outcomes ofpiecemeal social engineering to those of a more unrestrained capitalistorder. This is the challenge that, in effect, Hayek tried to meet in his ca-reer as a political theorist. But by emphasizing the ignorance of partici-pants in capitalism, Hayek the economist had underscored the absurdityof thinking of markets, for all their beneficial âcoordinatingâ properties,as achieving the mathematical economistâs equilibrium stateâParetooptimality, based on perfect knowledge (Shearmur , ch. ). Thatmakes the task of comparing Hayekian markets to politics messyenough. It gets even messier, though, because, of the two imperfect or-ders being comparedâreal-world markets and real-world govern-mentsâHayek never came up with a convincing picture of the nega-tive tendencies at work in the latter. Without such a picture, then inlight of the imperfections of even the freest of markets, what reasonhave we to follow Hayek in thinking that political interventions inmarkets will, after a certain point, cause more problems than they solve?
As Shearmur often points out, Hayek nibbled at, but ultimately didnot swallow, what must have been a tempting answer: public-choicetheory.
Public-choice theory would seem to have just the attributesneeded to round out the comparative picture Hayek was trying topaint. For one thing, it is comparative, beginning as it does by object-ing to the double standard that infers from market imperfections theneed for state intervention, but rarely infers from public-policy im-perfections the need for marketization. Two crucial public-choicecontributions were to note this double standard, and to attribute it topeopleâs assumption that state officials are trying their best to servethe public (unless they are corrupt), while businesses are just trying tomake money for themselves. Moreover, although broadly utilitarian(in the confused, preference-based fashion of neoclassical economics,with a dash of deontological social-contract theory thrown in), pub-lic-choice theory does not indulge the fantasies of act-utilitarianism;it pitches its theorizing at the âconstitutionalâ level that Hayek
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needed if he was to make a systemic argument against piecemeal socialengineering.
And yet while making limited public-choice arguments, as wellone should, Hayek never treated public-choice theory as a lawlikeregularity or as a blanket reason to prefer markets to politics. This wasnot only because Hayek rejected any social-science laws, I think, butbecause an indiscriminate use of public-choice theory to condemnstate action would have been at odds with the most distinctive andvaluable part of Hayekâs teaching: his focus on the cognitive, not mo-tivational dimension of social problems. The Mises-Hayek objectionto the possibility of socialist price calculation was not, after all, a pub-lic-choice condemnation of badly motivated planners, but an argu-ment against the possibility that even planners with the best inten-tions would know what they would need to know if they were toavoid economic chaos. And throughout Hayekâs career, he admirablyresisted the tendency to demonize his opponentsâ motivesâas public-choice theory does, in effect, when it is grounded in the assumeduniversality of Homo economicus. To condemn public policies by dog-matically inferring the selfishness of âpublic servantsâ from that al-leged universal is to correct the usual double standard merely byusing the cynicâs heuristic to even out the application of the inten-tions heuristicâinstead of by abandoning these heuristics altogether.
Hayekâs own contributions to both micro- and macro-economics,by contrast, were entirely cognitive. His business-cycle theory pivotedon the tendency of currency inflation to distort the âinformationâsent, by means of interest rates, to entrepreneurs about the likelyprofits to be made from long- versus short-term investments. And histheory of prices, of which his business-cycle theory may be consid-ered a subset, held that prices are proxies for knowledge that obviatethe need for anyone to know the overall conditions of supply anddemand.
While Hayek used Homo economicus in the exposition of both hismacro- and his micro-economic theories, that little monster plays noimportant role in either of them. As long as consumers buy whatthey prefer, and as long as the degree to which they prefer goods thatrequire relatively slow means of production are not distorted by infla-tionary interest rates, consumer preferences for how to use thosegoods could be altruistic and the price system would work just aswell (cf. Hayek b, â). Producers, too, could be altruists (asthey sometimes are): as long as those who sell below cost will tend to
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxxv
go out of business, the prices charged by the surviving producers willtend to reflect supply conditions. (This is different from my sugges-tion that subconscious stimulus-response behavior tends to guideconsumersâ Exit decisions in genuinely happiness-inducing directions.If that is true, then prices will tend to reflect not only consumersâpreferences, but their real needs, which the founder of the Austrianschool, Carl Menger [() , â), called âreal goods.â)8
Hayek was also an accomplished historian of economic thought,and it could not have escaped his notice that economics itselfânotjust the Austrian variantâwould have been impossible without a de-cisive break from the common assumption that peopleâs actionsshould be judged by their intentions. Mandevilleâs paradox of âpublicbenefits, private vices,â and Adam Smithâs observation that âit is notfrom the benevolence of the butcher . . . that we expect our meat,âare not admonitions to be selfish, but recognitions that beneficentconsequences may flow from actions that do not âaim at doing a visi-ble goodâ (Hayek a, , emph. added). On the flip side, Hayekemphasized that economists specialize in identifying wishful think-ingâas when good intentions are assumed to produce beneficent re-sults. The socialist-calculation argument not only granted the goodintentions of the planners, but those of the advocates of planningâbut deemed these motives irrelevant. Mises and Hayek were saying:You, the communists, intend to improve the world, but the achieve-ment of your aims will be made impossible by the cognitive effects ofthe means you support.
The nexus between rejecting universalist public-choice methodol-ogy and rejecting intentions-based political reasoning should be ap-parent. If catastrophic consequences such as those that Hayek foresawfrom the adoption of communism could unintentionally flow frombenevolent intentions, surely the actions of self-interested politicalactors might unintentionally produce beneficial consequences. Thesocialist-calculation argument turns its back on the reductionism pur-sued by Marx and revived by public-choice theoristsâa reductionismthat also dominates contemporary political discourse: the reduction,that is, of outcomes to motives.
Seen from this angle, public-choice theory risks a retrogression notonly to pre-Austrian but to pre-Smithian economics. Since when, aHayekian might ask the public-choice theorist, has it been the econ-omistâs task to infer bad consequences (undesirable laws and regula-tions) from bad intentions (selfishly motivated voters, interest groups,
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politicians, and bureaucrats)âor, for that matter, to psychologizeabout motives at all? Public-choice theory easily morphs into thekind of primitive, ad hominem reasoning that had to be overcome bythe likes of Smith in order to produce economics itself; the kind ofprimitive reasoning that reduces the underside of politics to âcorrup-tion.â As Sanford Ikeda (, , emph. original) puts it, âFor PublicChoice it is the divergence between announced and actual intentionsâ that isthe starting point of political analysis. âBy contrast, the point of de-parture for Austrian political economy is the divergence between intendedand actual outcomes,â caused not by âdeceptionâ but by âerror.â
âThe cognitive turnâ could be the subtitle of the next biographyof Hayek;âThe data are not givenâ could have been his motto. To thepublic-choice theorist, however, the cognitive dimension is irrelevant,because the political action dictated by oneâs allegedly causal self-interest is a datum that the theorist treats as self-evident to the actor.From a cognitivist perspective, by contrast, even if politics is moti-vated by self-interest, no behavioral consequences follow, because (asLippmann suggested) the question of which political policies wouldserve oneâs interests is intellectual, not motivational. Only if the polit-ical world is transparent, its truths manifest, would public-choice the-ory matter, even if it were methodologically sound and even if its as-sumptions were universally true. But if there is enough opacity to theworld that people may treat as true what are actually unsound theo-retical conclusions, then patterns of political action will show noconsistent correlation with peopleâs true, as opposed to perceived, po-litical self-interest. And political intentions will not, in any event,show a consistent correlation with political outcomes.
In passing up the chance to let public-choice theory paint his pic-ture of politics, Hayek remained true to the cognitivism that drovehis economics.
IV. A COGNITIVIST CRITIQUE OF POLITICS
There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect are obvi-ous at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted years,let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage movements, orthe migration and assimilation of peoples, or the diplomatic purposeof foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed to have opinionson these matters. . . .
âWalter Lippman (, â)
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxxvii
The simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by.âKarl Popper (, )
Nowhere do we find in Hayek a passage that so elegantly comparesmarkets and politics as does Schumpeterâs commentary on cigaretteadvertising versus political propaganda. But like Schumpeter, Hayekviewed âthe publicâ as descending to a lower level when it came toreasoning about politics. This is why the public did not appreciate theeconomistâs dash of cold water on the political âviews which are heldby most people of good will.â âWhatever his theoretical beliefs maybe,â Hayek (a, ) wrote, when the economist
has to deal with the proposals of laymen the chance is that in nine outof ten cases his answer will have to be that their various ends are in-compatible and that they will have to choose between them and tosacrifice some ambitions which they cherish. . . . The economistâs taskis precisely to detect such incompatibilities . . . and the result is that hewill always have the ungrateful task of pointing out the costs. Thatâswhat heâs there for and it is a task from which he must never shirk,however unpopular or disliked it may make him.
In an early lecture, Hayek (, ) characterizes the public rejec-tion of economistsâ advice as repudiating âa body of reasoning whichprevented people from following their first impulsive reactions.â Atone point, Hayek portrays the impulses in question as affectual: âthenecessityâ represented by economics is therefore that âof controllingemotions by difficult reasoningâ (ibid., ). But elsewhere in the lec-ture, Hayek places affect at the motivational levelâthe level of thepublicâs humanitarian endsâand notes that the economistâs quarrelwith the public concerns the cognitive question of the most effectivemeans. Economics
consists essentially in the demonstration of inconsistencies in a kind ofordinary reasoning which everybody employs and the validity of whichno one would ever doubt were it applied to simple cases where it caneasily be understood. The difficulty really arises from the fact that thesame kind of reasoning from familiar and undoubted facts, which eventhose who are most scornful of theoretical reasoning cannot avoid ap-plying to simple cases, becomes suspect and calls for empirical confir-mation [which, in a complex world, Hayek did not think could besupplied] as soon as it is applied to somewhat more complicated phe-
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nomena where it cannot be followed without some effort, or evenspecial training. (Ibid., â, emph. added.)
Although he is far from clear on the point, prioritizing appears to bethe familiar âkind of reasoningâ to which Hayek refers. As a mone-tary theorist his position, against Keynes, was that business cycles arethe product of distortions in investment patterns caused by govern-ment inflation of the currency. So Hayek seems to be saying thatwhat the public has to be told by the economistâif only the publicwould listenâis that government spending on programs the publicdemands, but that it is not willing not pay for through taxes, will cre-ate deficits that, when monetized, will cause malinvestments that mustbe liquidated in a recession.
In any case, the form of Hayekâs argument here is Schumpeterian:there is something about the largely invisible, complicated world ofthe economy that makes peopleâs instinctive cognitive judgmentsabout it dangerous. I will call this Hayekâs âcognitive-psychology ar-gumentâ against political control of the economy. He did not developit thoroughly enough to suggest how serious he thought its conse-quences were likely to be. But since he made the argument at theheight of the Great Depression, there is reason to think that heviewed those consequences as extremely grave.
Alongside his cognitive-psychology argument, unfortunately,Hayek issued an early warning against what he later called âthe plan-ning mentality,â âthe engineering mentality,â âscientism,â or âcon-structivist rationalismâ: the assumption, which Hayek thought waswidely shared on the left,âthat all social institutions are, and ought tobe, the product of deliberate designâ (Hayek , ) because of âthebelief that nothing which has not been consciously designed can be useful oreven essential to the achievement of human purposesâ (Hayek ,, emph. added).
At one point Hayek ([] ) became convinced that this al-leged belief had historical roots in Napoleonic France. Later in hiscareer, he suggested that it was a genetically transmitted predisposi-tion (Hayek b, , ). But neither version of the âconstructivistrationalismâ thesis has any discernible relevance to the anarchist andantinomian tendencies that have dominated the left from its incep-tion right on through the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, and fem-inism. Whether Rousseau or (as Hill shows) Rawls, Marx orMarcuse, Sinclair or Steinbeck, Habermas or Horkheimer, Fourier or
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xxxix
Foucault; whether liberal or communitarian theorists, street activistsor social scientists, mass movements or intellectuals, scholars or novel-ists or journalistsâit is simply not true that the left can be character-ized as yearning for âorderââi.e., the conscious direction of men (bymen!). Rather, the left yearns for freedom and an end to the exploita-tion of man by man.9
Hayek well understood, unlike the public-choice school, that theobjectives of the left are humanitarian. What he failed to seeâpre-sumably because of the planning mania that gripped some in theWest between the world wars (Hayek having been born in )âisthat, to the extent that there are commonly accepted left-wing meansto humanitarian ends, they are usually democratic, not technocratic.Democratic equality and self-governanceâself-governance as op-posed to tyranny, not as opposed to chaosâare in fact so cherishedon the left that they sometimes become ends in themselves. Whatunites leftist democrats and technocrats, moreover, is a shared hostilitynot to capitalist disorder but to the suffering they attribute to unre-strained capitalism. They do tend to assumeâlike Popperâthat ifcapitalism creates bad consequences, state intervention is the obviousalternative. They do not, however, generally believe that the sufferingis caused by capitalism being unplanned. Hayek never seems to havenoticed the leftâs embrace of spontaneity, of nature, of the irrational(or of such postwar theorists as Karl Polanyi, who claimed that capi-talism was plannedâyet bad).
On the rare occasions when Hayek (e.g., , ) actually names aâconstructivist rationalist,â it is always a prewar figure such as BertrandRussell or H. G. Wells. His unending polemic against âscientismâ onthe left lost any relevance once the reaction against the Holocaust andHiroshima set in; the persistence of this polemic even after the adventof the New Left must have seemed to any left-wing reader of Hayeklike a well-honed obsession, as it completely ignored the postwar leftâsrevulsion against authority, planning, and âconscious control.â Hayekâsnotion that the left favors intervention in (or even the replacement of)markets by governments because it has transferred âto the problems ofsociety habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with tech-nological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist andthe engineerâ (Hayek b, ) long ago shifted from being quaint tobeing bizarre. Seen through a wider lens than that of Hayekâs Fabiangeneration, the enemy of the left has almost always been unequal powerin all its manifestations, including the economic. From this perspective,
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Hayekâs dependent variable, the âeffectâ for which he spent much ofhis career describing various possible causes, tends to vanish. By thetwenty-first century, it has long been untrueâhowever much it mighthave been true a century agoâthat even the most state-friendly left-ists believe that âorder in human affairs requires that some should giveorders and others obeyâ (Hayek , ).
It is true that people on the left sometimes still couch their objec-tions to capitalism in terms of its âanarchy.â But the specific thingsthat these people think of as anarchic boil down, not to an absence ofâorderâ per se (of the sort that could be remedied by âconscious con-trolâ); but to the presence of an unjust orderâor, to take account ofHayekâs quibble about the phrase social justice, the presence of an un-desirable orderâan order of poverty and economic instability and un-happiness and inequality. Beneath the layers of sophisticated theorythat have built up over two centuries, the fundamental orientation ofthe left remains hostility to capitalism (or, nowadays, âneoliberalism,ââimperialism,â and âglobalizationâ) because it is thought to be inegali-tarian and inhumaneânot an embrace of government because it isthought to be orderly.
Hayek confuses the issue by shifting the burden of proof. He pro-ceeds as if he is in a lifelong debate in which the default position ishis own, such that, when he moves from argumentative into explana-tory mode, it is his opponents, not he, who represent the anomaly tobe explained. âScientismâ is his explanation. In reality, of course, it isHayek who isâas an economist, as an Austrian economist, and as afree-marketeerâthe anomaly; if there is a dependent variable thatneeds explaining, it is him. And the explanation is clear: when he wasyoung, he read Menger and Mises. Otherwise he, too, would have re-mained a socialist (cet. par.).
In that light, the desire for visible government action to relieve vis-ible human suffering can be seen not as anomalous, but simply as thehumanitarian default option, in the absence of reasons to oppose itârea-sons such as those that Hayek found in the works of Menger andMises and, later, Smith. To insist, as Hayek did, that there must besome additional reason for those on the left to support state interven-tionâsome reason such as the anthropomorphic assumption âthatthe existing economic system serves a definite function only in so faras its institutions have been deliberately willed by individualsâ (Hayek, )ârather than allowing that leftists simply favor what they as-sume will alleviate the misery that they think is caused by capital-
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xli
ismâis to contradict what Hayek himself suggested about the diffi-culty of grasping the economics of capitalism, and the need for rig-orous intellectual discipline and possibly special training to do so.Without training in economics, one wouldnât have reason to doubt that stateaction is an appropriate remedy for âcapitalist excesses,â by default.
Here are three alternatives to Hayekâs âplanning-mentalityâ expla-nation for the left:
() Most on the left favor state action simply because they have notbeen exposed to economic arguments against it, arguments that claimthat such action tends to have counterproductive effects.
() Many of those on the left who have been exposed to such ar-guments find a reason to reject them in the very thing to which Aus-trians object: the unrealistic assumptions (perfect knowledge, perfectcompetition, etc.) to which such arguments are linked by the neo-classical mainstream.
() Even without understanding that mainstream neoclassical eco-nomics is unrealistic, people of any political viewpoint tend to be un-persuaded upon first exposure to economicsâclassical, neoclassical,or Austrianâbecause economics is counterintuitive.
For an economist to assume that if politics proceeds as if economicsdoesnât exist, it must be because the public understands economic the-ories and rejects them (whether because, as in the public-choice view,the public is venal; or because, as in Hayekâs view, it is gripped by con-structivist rationalism) is parochial at best. The more parsimonious ex-planation, which has the additional merit of being true, is that thepublic is ignorant of economics (and does not find it plausible, even inthe rare event that they have been exposed to it). The âplanning-men-talityâ thesis rests on the very fallacy Hayek the economist so bril-liantly dissected. It assumes something like perfect knowledge amongthose with whom Hayek disagrees: knowledge of economic theories withwhich Hayek agrees. Only given this assumption do we need to invoke acausal force such as âconstructivist rationalismâ to explain why leftistsare on the leftâas if there is something unnatural about being there.
Hayekâs Failure to Answer Popperâs Challenge
I dwell on the constructivist-rationalism thesis for the same reason Idwelt on public-choice theory: it provides a false advantage for thefree-market side of the market/politics comparison.
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âMenâs fatal striving to control society,â Hayek (, ) claimed,âmay well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain hasdesigned but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of indi-viduals.â If the âfatal conceitâ of social democrats, as well as outrightcommunists, which leads to this alleged striving for control per se isâconstructivist rationalism,â then we have little hope of preserving un-designed institutions like markets from being abolished, piecemeal or allat onceâjust by virtue of their being undesigned.Whether taken aloneor added to the cognitive-psychology argument about the difficultypeople have in following economic reasoning, the constructivist-ratio-nalist argument (if it were true) provides what would otherwise bemissing from Hayekâs political theory: a depiction of systemic negativetendencies in politics that would make admittedly imperfect marketspreferable. By empowering the democratic state to intervene routinelyin economic affairs, Hayek believed, one enables people with construc-tivist inclinations to destroy institutions that (being undesigned) havedesirable but, to them, invisible consequences.
Full-fledged communism would therefore seem to be the terminusif piecemeal social engineering is performed by a constructivist pub-lic; and this would, according to the socialist-calculation argument, becalamitous. Thus, Hayek (, ) believed,âthe most crucial problemof political organizationâ is âhow to limit the âpopular will.â âThroughout his career in political philosophy, Hayek had been tryingto compare the non-communist but unlimited state to markets thatwould be left relatively undisturbed by state power, which he soughtto limit. The constructivism argument, on which Hayek placed somuch emphasis in making this comparison, achieves this aim only byleading back to the Austrian âsocialist-calculationâ argument againstcommunism. It boils down to saying that the welfare state, if not aroad to serfdom, is a road to communism.
A better response to the Popperian challenge was open to Hayek.Our ignorance of sound social science is a natural inference from Hayekâsclaim that âour intellect is not capable of grasping reality in all itscomplexityâ (Hayek , ). From this inference, one might con-clude that regardless of whether it leads to communism, social democ-racy will not likely achieve its objectives, since doing so would re-quire sound social-scientific theorizing on the part of the public andits âexpertâ advisers. But Hayek made it clear on numerous occasionsthat he did not draw this inference. He emphasized that âthe incur-able ignorance of everyone of which I am speaking is the ignorance
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xliii
of particular facts which are or will become known to somebody andthereby affect the whole of societyâ (ibid., )âas opposed, say, tothe ignorance of almost everyone of theories such as Hayekâs own(which identified everybodyâs ignorance of the particular facts ofsupply and demand as the problem solved by the price system). Eventhe account I drew from Hayek in Part III, in which business enter-prises embody competing entrepreneursâ implicit hypotheses about howto provide supply that would meet consumer demand, goes farthertoward underscoring entrepreneurial knowledge or ignorance of cor-rect theories (of how to meet consumer demand) than did Hayek(, ), who in âCompetition as a Discovery Procedureâ attrib-utes entrepreneurial âdiscoveriesâ to the fact that prices offer cogni-tive guidance as to âwhat to do.â This suggests that the entrepreneur,rather like the positivist social scientists whose naĂŻvetĂŠ Hayek con-demned, was in Hayekâs view able to read âwhat to doâ from aggre-gate pricesârather than needing to theorize, even if only implicitly,about the causes of prices and, thus, of their profit implications, be-fore those of their theories that are unsound are screened out bybankruptcy.
Without some explanation of why, in contrast, the tendencies ofpolitics would encourage piecemeal social engineers to impose coun-terproductive measures based on bad theories, Hayek has no objec-tion to unlimited piecemeal engineering save () his dubious fear thatit would lead, via constructivist rationalism, to communism; and ()his cognitive-psychology argumentâwhich seems, however, to sug-gest only the inadequacy of peopleâs macroeconomic theories. HadHayek noticed that people tend to be inadvertently ignorant of rig-orous microeconomic theoryâtheory that is not only little known but(as in his cognitive-psychology argument) theory that is difficult tounderstandâHayek could have provided a much more powerful an-swer to Popper.
Hunters and Gatherers Confront Capitalism
Hayek (, , emph. added) did notice that political actors who arenot initiated into economic reasoning cannot see, âor otherwise intu-itively perceive,â how markets work. He regrettably went on to claimthat what is intuitive to them is constructivist rationalism. But con-structivist rationalism does not explain the extremely straightforward
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economic illiteracy of either the mass public or the political eliteswho initiate public policy.
In his intellectual biography of Hayek, Bruce Caldwell (, )asks, âWhat is it about economics that so provokes the distrust of somany noneconomists?â Consider by way of an answer a not-untypicalquestion about economic theory asked by Geraldo Rivera on FoxNews Channel on September , (and not answered, exceptthrough agitated non sequiturs, by Riveraâs interlocutor, business re-porter Neil Cavuto). To paraphrase:
I know that the price of gas may go up because of Hurricane Katrina.Supply and demand, thatâs how capitalism works. But are the oil com-panies taking advantage of the situation to jack âem up even higher?Thatâs not capitalism, itâs grand larceny.
Rivera assumes, apparently, that oil companies can make people buytheir products at any price the companies choose. But if so, then evenwithout the âexcuseâ offered by Hurricane Katrina, nothing but thethreat of legislation could stop the companies from committing grandlarceny all the time (cf. Caplan ). Rivera is trying to reason coun-terfactually, but competition among oil companies, including the abilityof one company to undercut anotherâs arbitrarily high prices, seems tobe invisible in the laboratory of his mind, as does the ability of con-sumers to conserve on gasoline-powered transportation when its pricegoes up.
Yet Rivera, no doubt, displays a relatively enlightened version of themental primitivism Schumpeter had in mind. He may say foolishthings, but he is not stupid. He is simply ignorantâof microeconomics.His suspicion of the larcenous price gouger does not reflect hostility toan âunplanned economic orderâ because it is unplanned (if anything, heseems to think it is more planned than it really is), any more than hisdesire to regulate or abolish profiteering is due to an âengineeringmentalityâ that sees planning as inherently good. The profiteer shouldbe restrained, Rivera thinks, because there is an arrow from the profi-teerâs greed to high consumer prices; the purpose of reining in theprofiteer is to protect consumers from malfeasance, not from disorderli-ness.
The scandal caused by The Fable of the Bees indicates that people justdonât seem to be naturally inclined to understand Mandevilleâs and laterSmithâs point: that intentions do not necessarily correlate with consequences.
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xlv
The widespread animus toward âcorporations,â big business, capitalism,globalization, etc. is the result not only of explicit anti-capitalist teach-ings, but of what does seem to come naturally: applying the intentionsheuristic to economicsâproducing suspicion of the profit motive andhostility to any economic theory that defends it. Hence, economic illit-eracy and Geraldonomics.
Should this be surprising? No reproductive advantage would haveflowed to a hunter-gatherer who was a good economist. Economies didnot yet exist when hunters and gatherers were evolving the cognitivedispositions we have inherited from them. But in the face-to-face con-text of a hunting and gathering tribe, othersâ intentions did correlatewith important consequences, so the intentions heuristic would haveserved very well.10 The same can probably be said of the other heuris-tics on which people now draw in making political decisionsâinclud-ing decisions about economic policy.
Hayek had the form of this argument in his grasp by, at the latest,: people () are ignorant of economics, and () would anyway in-tuitively resist its teachings, because economics theorizes about aworld in which cause-and-effect relationships are, to them, largely in-visible. The second, cognitive-psychology part of Hayekâs argumentsuggests a more fruitful approach to âcomplexityâ than he ended uppursuing (e.g., Hayek ).What makes something too complex tobe intuited is that it does not fit the patterns our minds are prepared tonotice. Hayek (, ; cf. Hayek , ), however, came to viewcomplexity much more narrowly, as inhering in the number of thingsbeing comprehended: an economy, therefore, is complex inasmuch asit comprises âmore particular facts . . . than any brain could ascertainor manipulate.â While it is true that this is the type of complexityfacing a would-be central planner (Hayek seems trapped in his long-finished debate over communism), it is not the type of complexityfacing an (amateur or professional) economic theoristâeven a theoristof central planning. After all, what confounded his opponents in thesocialist-calculation debate, in Hayekâs view, was not that they lackedknowledge of the many particular facts of supply and demand thatdetermine a given price, but that their theory oversimplified one fact:how capital-goods prices are derived.
The complexity of theories about economic patterns is differentfrom the complexity of the data composing those patterns, and it isthe former kind of complexity that appears to be counterintuitive.The data of the economy itself may be hard to collate because of
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their numerousness, but theorizing about the economy is difficult fora different reason: unlike economies, what makes economic theorieshard to grasp is the qualities our minds are structured to notice, notthe quantity of computations our brains can perform. It is true thatGeraldo Rivera thinks of only two entities: an oil company and acustomer. But to make his thinking economically literate, he wouldneed to add only one more factor: potential competition from an-other (to him, invisible) oil company. What makes economics com-plex for Rivera is not the difficulty of juggling three ideas instead oftwo. It is that his mind has not been primed, either genetically or cul-turally, to notice the third factor, competition (empowered, we mightadd, by a fourth factor: the consumerâs ability to exit from the firstcompanyâs prices)âwhile it has been amply sensitized to the evil ofgreed. The intentions heuristic makes the oil companyâs selfish mo-tives very âvisibleâ to Rivera. Conversely, the possibility that the con-sumer is not at the mercy of another entityâs motives, but may be ableto choose among competing entities, would have no ready analoguein the hunter-gatherer world in which our intuitions evolved.
Meanwhile, our cultural heritage, far from filling this lacuna by arti-ficially preparing our minds to notice competitive patterns or the pos-sibility of unintended consequences, takes thinking like Riveraâs forgranted and buttresses it. The artists, filmmakers, journalists, and educa-tors who imaginatively renew this heritage day by day have usuallynever seen the world modeled in a different way. And in the rare caseswhen they have, the alternative (economic) model has pointlessly em-phasized unrealistic assumptions such as perfect knowledge and univer-sal self-interestâneither of which are needed for the model to work,and the latter of which triggers the intentions heuristic and its massivecultural reinforcements. In all, the creators of our culture have beenthoroughly indoctrinated in the importance of good intentions; andthe opposite message appears to be not only unnoticed and misstated,but counterintuitive even when carefully presented.
So if, in fact, the likes of Hayek are right about the value of eco-nomic theory, then the ideas and intuitions deployed by piecemealsocial engineers and their popular judges are likely to be counterpro-ductive. They are surely not likely to perform economically literatethought experiments.
One need not fear, then, that democratic intervention in marketswill lead to the outright abolition of capitalism in order to be waryof piecemeal intervention that can (and, arguably, has) inadvertently
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xlvii
blocked the progress of the âleast advantagedâ from poverty, and thathas inadvertently made peopleâs lives unnecessarily difficult. Given thecultural and genetic constraints on our cognition of society, it wouldbe miraculous if democratic intervention could do otherwise.
Politics as Religion
All things considered, we have no more reason to expect people toreach reasonable political conclusions than we have to expect themto reach reasonable religious conclusions. In politics as in religion,we are at the mercy of our ill-adapted and congenitally closedminds. In the economy, by contrast, we have the assistance of pricesthat result from peopleâs exit decisions, which spares us much needto know what we are doing. Natural science requires from re-searchers more self-consciousness about the hypotheses being testedthan capitalism requires of entrepreneurs, but at least scientificprogress does not depend on scientists being good philosophers ofscience.
In politics (as in religion) it is very different. There, we need to begood metaphysicians to recognize that we are employing hypothesesabout cause and effect that require testing, but that cannot be testedpost hoc ergo propter hoc. We need to be good logicians to test those hy-potheses counterfactually, in the laboratories of our minds. We needto be good epistemologists to recognize the cultural and genetic bi-ases that may taint our reasoning, and to avoid cynically attributingother theoristsâ biases to evil motives or simple self-interest.We needto be able to recognize our instinctive resistance to the likes of Hayekas possibly originating in misleading intuitions and cultural indoctri-nation, and then have the patience to work through the theories ofsuch âreactionariesâ with open minds. In short, we need to be theparagons of self-critical rationality embodied in the normative inter-pretation of Popperian fallibilism.
There is no reason to think that such angelic cognitive qualitieswould have been selected for by either genetic or cultural evolution,and in the public-opinion literature we find ample reason to thinkthat they have not. Therefore, we are ill advised to follow Popper inanalogizing politics and science. The analogy is far too complacentabout democracy to fit with a Popperian awareness of human igno-rance.
xlviii Critical Review Vol. 17, Nos. 1â2
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper (, ) describes theprogram of the democrat as based on âfaith in reason and on humani-tarianism.â But humanitarian objectives can be achieved only if policymakers have sound theories about the causes of misery under modernconditions. If it is unlikely that people with our genetic and culturalinheritance will be exposed to, let alone accept, such theories, then inendorsing democratic control over the private, exit-friendly sphere,Popper is indeed trusting in nothing but âfaithâ that the results will bebeneficent. If the facts about how to achieve humanitarian ends donot speak for themselvesâif the truth is not manifestâit is difficultto imagine what could sustain such a faith.
APPENDIX: SPECIAL ISSUES OFCRITICAL REVIEW ON RELATED MATTERS
For ordering information,see inside back cover or www.criticalreview.com.
⢠F. A. Hayek: vol. , no. vol. , no.
⢠social-science methodology: vol. , nos. â (rational-choice the-ory), republished with revisions asThe Rational-Choice Controversy: Eco-nomic Models of Politics Reconsidered,ed. Jeffrey Friedman. Yale UniversityPress,
vol. , nos. â (B.U. Conference onthe State of the Social Sciences)
⢠political ignorance: vol. , no. vol. , nos. â (ignorance and state autonomy)vol. , nos. â (ignorance and culture)
NOTES
. It is prima facie untrue that we lack âthe creative power to imagine categories atvarianceâ with instrumental rationality, as Hayekâs mentor, Ludwig von Mises(, ) asserted; Weber had already imagined such categories. In Friedman, ân, I detail Misesâs failure, in his Epistemological Problems of Economics
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance xlix
(), to come to grips with the methodological implication of Weberâs cate-gories when he dealt with Weberâs attack on the universal status of âGreshamâsso-called law.â Mises indignantly maintains that such economic âlaws,â as validinferences from the apodictically certain premise that âman actsâ (in an instru-mentally rational manner), are indeed a priori universals; but, in the samebreath, he unwittingly concedes to Weber that, as in the actual historical inci-dent Weber adduces, the applicability of such âlawsâ in a given case, far frombeing a lawlike universal, cannot be assumed a priori (because man acts in un-predictable, yet understandable, ways).
I suspect that Mises was too much in the shadow of the Methodenstreitagainst which the first âAustrian economist,â Carl Menger, defined his views.Mengerâs opponents in this debate, members of the âyoungerâ German Histor-ical School, maintained that only empirical methods could be applied to a pos-teriori reality. They mistakenly believed that this meant documenting all of re-ality in its infinite variety, without the use of theoretical abstractions. Avoidingtheir mistake, however, does not mean going to the opposite extreme of assert-ing a priori the universal applicability of oneâs theoretical abstractions, such thatthey become âlaws.â Instead, one can treat oneâs theories as a priori hypothesesabout how reality might be, the applicability of which can then be empiricallyinvestigated.
The theory-ladenness of data selection and interpretation does not entailthat the applicability of the interpretations made possible by theories is imper-vious to falsification through controlled thought experiments, at least in somecases.Weberian ideal-type methodology is a middle ground between impossiblyatheoretical positivism, such as that professed by the German Historicists whomMenger fought, and the âapodictic certaintiesâ of extreme Misesian apriorism.As the passages quoted in the text indicate, Hayek seems to have been posi-tioned on this middle ground.
The procedure of Verstehen that Weber canonizedâthe attempt to use intro-spection to help put ourselves in the shoes of those we are trying to inter-pretâby no means limits us to understanding instrumental behavior, to the ex-clusion of emotional, traditional, or value-rational behavior. We can see byintrospection that we are capable of all four types of ârationality.â While asWeber notes, traditional and especially affectual ârationalityâ shade off into theinvoluntary and thus, arguably, may not lend themselves to Verstehen when thatis an attempt to reproduce conscious thought patterns, this is certainly not thecase with âvalue-rationality,â as exemplified in Kantian ethics. One can be fullyconscious when acting out of perceived duty, such that an action becomes anend in itself (indeed, arguably, more so than when employing instrumental ra-tionality, since duties must be consciously perceived as such).
The only escape from recognizing this is to tautologize Misesian âpurposivebehavior,â such that behavior that serves no purpose beyond itself still qualifies(in that it is âinstrumentalâ to fulfilling oneâs perceived duty or to âexpressingâoneâs anger or fealty to tradition). This tautology precludes any specific infer-ences about how people will behave, including the inferences that give rise to
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economic theory, since the minimal requirement of economic theory is thepresumption in a given case of economizing (teleological) rather than dutiful(deontological) behavior. I am simply following Weber in suggesting that thispresumption be treated as a falsifiable hypothesis, not a lawlike assertion.
Putting oneself in the shoes of a voter in an electorate so large that voting isinstrumentally irrational allows us to see that a possible reason one might voteanyway is a sense of civic duty. The fact that one who privileges instrumentalrationality might argue that such reasoning is foolish, as Weber clearly thoughtwas true of Kantian ethics, does not mean that such reasoning is unintelligibleâas Weber recognized by designating it as a distinct form of ârationality.â
. Cf. Ikeda , : âRadical ignorance refers to our unawareness of the exis-tence of the relevant knowledge that we could know at zero cost.â
. Political scientists tend to assume thatâas long as it can be said to existâthewill of the people is legitimately sovereign, regardless of how unwise the deci-sions it makes. This assumption overlooks the crucial challenge posed to anytheory of sovereignty, including popular sovereignty, by Richard Wollheimâspathbreaking article,âA Paradox in the Theory of Democracyâ (). The im-plication of Wollheimâs paradox can be briefly stated. The sovereignâs right tochoose any course of action places the sovereign (whether a king or a voter) inthe position of Buridanâs Ass: ungoverned by any criteria for making thatchoice. Any such criterion would, by virtue of its putative goodness, itself bethe de facto sovereign, constraining the decisions of the de jure sovereign. Anex ante decision criterion would be a norm with which to judge, challenge, andperhaps delegitimate the nominal sovereignâs decisions. Without such a crite-rion, how can the sovereign choose? Yet, if the sovereign chooses in accordancewith such a criteron, then its actions can be judged illegitimate if they fail asmeans to that putatively good end, or if the end itself is illegitimate.
Thus, if the result of public ignorance is that bad decisions are made, thedoctrine of popular sovereignty does not rescue democracy from illegitimacy.
The same line of reasoning can, of course, be applied to liberal theories ofindividual sovereignty, as suggested by the fact that in his reply to Wollheim,Michael Walzer () defends democracy as a matter of human autonomy. ButWalzer dodges Buridanâs bullet only by describing human autonomy as bothprescriptively and descriptively determined by peopleâs âcommunities,â andthus as not autonomous at all. In parallel fashion, liberal defenders of de jureindividual autonomy commonly end up denying de facto autonomy (free will)because the prerequisite of the latter is some criterion of the good, with all itspaternalistic (ârightsâ-violating) implications.
By the principle of sufficient reason, a will that is free in the sense of beingunderdetermined by mechanical (cultural or genetic) forces must be deter-mined by something else. This something else is the chooserâs criterion of thegood. To freely pursue value A rather than B presupposes that A is good in it-self or is instrumental to good ends. The criterion of the good, A, replaces me-chanical forces in constraining the willâs choices. The criterion of the good isthus the de facto sovereign. But if criterion A is sufficiently good to constrain
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance li
the free agentâs own actions, why isnât it good enough to likewise interfere withthe de jure sovereignty (the ârightsâ) of other agents, whose own free actionspresuppose the validity of their criteria of the goodâand whose pursuit ofcriteria B, C . . . N must ipso facto, in the eyes of an adherent of criterion A, bemistaken?
To avoid such conclusions, liberals (fearing paternalism), communitarians(fearing imperialism), and democrats (fearing Platonism) alike are drawn in-eluctably into denying de facto free agency, and with it the free willâs presuppo-sition of normative criteria of the good. The liberal equivalent of a Walzeriancommunityâs âidentityâ is the liberal individualâs âtastes and preferencesâ: bothavoid Buridanâs dilemma only by replacing freely willed axiological sovereigntywith unfree mechanical determination. (Cf. Friedman .)
Not coincidentally,Walzer the democrat, defending a wilful (arbitrary, his-torically determined) Will of the People, was to become one of the maintheorists of communitarianism, defending the identity-based determinationof the good.We have in his reaction to Wollheim, in nuce, the whole liberal-communitarian debate that has shaped contemporary political theoryâwhileleaving regrettably untouched the basic assumptions of the liberals, the com-munitarians, and the democrats. Cf. Friedman .
. Cf. Pronin et al. , : âWe feel that our own perceptions reflect the truenature of things, and thus assume that, to the extent that others perceive eventsand objects of judgment (including âusâ and âthemâ) differently, those others re-veal the impact of various perceptual, cognitive, or motivational biases.â
. Arguably, one can rationally know which categories of information are notworth knowing without knowing the specific information in those categories.But this is true only in the sense that all ignorance is ârationalâ because what-ever one already (thinks one) knows may seem to justify not knowing theother things. Until one actually knows those other things, however, the ratio-nality of not knowing them, grounded in what one already knows, does notrender the ignorance in question logical except in a very limited sense. There isno escaping the fallibility of oneâs rationales for ignorance, and therefore thepossibility that, in navigating an obscure world the best we can (and thereforeremaining rationally ignorant of most of it) from our given starting points, wemight still be completely wrong about what is and what is not worth knowing.While our use of heuristics and any other tools at our disposal to mitigate ourignorance may be rational once we are in a position of ignorance, that positionitself is not rational; and the particular types of ignorance that we strive to cor-rect cannot rationally have been selected by us, rather than being imposed onus by the peculiarities of our individual situation, lest we have been omniscientex ante about what categories of knowledge were relatively worth knowing.
. Karen Vaughn (, ch. ) underscores problems in two extant Austrian theo-ries of entrepreneurshipâthose of Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmannâthatmay be remedied by the emphasis on the accidental (cf. Hayek , ) that Itry to achieve by subtracting the element of deliberateness from Hayekâs anal-ogy of entrepreneurship and science (Hayek ).
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Vaughn (, ) points out that Kirznerâs theory of entrepreneurial alert-ness to profit opportunites allows only for entrepreneurial errors of omission:âError only enters Kirznerâs system as the failure to notice an opportunity thatis available, not through actions based on faulty perceptions.â In this way,Kirznerâs theory ensures that entrepreneurs close previously unnoticed gaps be-tween economic reality and economic equilibrium (as controlled experimentsmove us closer to truth, or as piecemeal social engineering is supposed to moveus closer to the mitigation of distress). But why, Vaughn asks, should we thinkthat entrepreneurs donât make errors of commission (in relying, I would pointout, on their tacit or explicit theorizing, which, if it uses faulty logic and in-complete information, is as likely, cet. par., to go astray as is piecemeal social en-gineering) that move economic reality away from equilibrium? Kirznerâs answeris that entrepreneurs are motivated to avoid such errors by the potential forprofit, but Vaughn (ibid., ) argues that the entrepreneurâs wish does notmake the reality so (any more than do the altruistic intentions of the piecemealsocial engineer).
Lachmann, on the other hand, allows for the possibility of both types oferror, for he sees economic activity as entailing interpretations of the worldâtheories about, inter alia, profit opportunities that may, as a result of the unpre-dictability of the future, be wrong. Indeed, Lachmann analogizes participants inthe economy to conjecturing natural scientists, and interprets profits as âsignposts of entrepreneurial successâ (quoted in Vaughn , ). But becauseLachmann, following Hayekâs student G.L.S. Shackle, grounds error in an en-tirely unpredictable futureâas does another follower of Shackle, Greg Hill(; cf. Hill )âeven these signposts ultimately prove inadequate to steerus away from a âkaleidicâ economy that is as unlikely to be successful as is so-cial democracy (in my depiction of it). But it seems to me evident that whenwe scrutinize the unpredictability of the future (which, after all, merely changesfrom the present incrementally), capitalism has a fair chance of meeting con-sumer needsâas in fact it does, all the timeâif we admit that successful entre-preneurship is not necessarily a matter of deliberate or even conscious theoriz-ing rather than of fortuitous trial and error, where the selection mechanismthat weeds out error is consumer Exit combined with the âhard-budget con-straintâ: entrepreneurial bankruptcy.We need not credit the surviving entrepre-neurs with clairvoyance in order to allow that the competing theories embod-ied in their enterprises must have escaped error, however accidentally. Innavigating the future, moreover, we have the assistance of speculators whosetheories about the future are subject to evolutionary selection through profitand loss. One noted speculator has compiled a -percent annual return since by using such theories as one that relates commodity prices to patterns inBeethovenâs music (Burns ). âWhatever voodoo he uses,â his success showsthat it isnât really magic.
A third Austrian view of entrepreneurship, developed by David A. Harper(), explicitly applies Popperian fallibilism to the entrepreneur, but focuseson the entrepreneurâs conscious theorizing and learning from the mistakes to
Friedman ⢠The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance liii
which his theories may lead. Harperâs view may well provide a cogent descrip-tion of most profit-driven entrepreneurship in the modern West, but cognitiveself-awareness and flexibility among entrepreneurs are not necessary if entrepre-neurs, as a class, are to meet consumer needsâas long as competition weedsout those entrepreneurs whose (implicit or explicit) theories about how to doso are mistaken.
. Challenging discussions with Seb Benthall at www.cr-alumni.org prompted meto make this distinction.
. The founder of Austrian economics, Carl Menger, allowed his appreciation forignorance to extend to the question of whether consumers were ignorant ofthe true means by which their happiness would best be achieved. So he distin-guished between truly good means (âtrue goodsâ) and only putatively goodones (âimaginary goodsâ). Paternalism is, of course, a possible implication ofany such non-preference-based (i.e., any truly hedonic) utilitarianism, wherethe objective effectiveness of means to achieving the end of happiness is assessedindependently of individualsâ subjective preferences. In rejecting paternalisticanswers to this question, Menger ([] , ), had, at least arguably, anoveroptimistic, rationalistic view of how easily people would learn to pursueâtrueâ rather than âimaginaryâ goods.âAs a people attains higher levels of civi-lization, and as men penetrate more deeply into the true constitution of thingsand of their own nature, the number of true goods becomes constantly larger,and as can easily be understood, the number of imaginary goods becomes pro-gressively smaller.â
A reliable judgment about whether nonrational learning from pleasurableand painful experiences can (as suggested by McDermott , quoted in thetext) accomplish progress of a humbler but more realistic sort than Menger en-visioned, within the compass of an individualâs life, is beyond the scope of thispaper. Very roughly, however, to the extent that consumer purchases are repeat-able (rather than, say, being one-time events or long-term investments), onemay say that they will tend desirably to diminish consumersâ reliance on defec-tive conscious reasoning, and therefore to tend toward successful want-satisfac-tion. I owe the parenthetical qualification to discussions with Earl C. Ravenaland to Hill .
None of this should matter to the political theorist if there is no realisticform of politically imposed paternalism that might correct the many errors,conscious and subconscious, that we can and do make in the âprivate sphere.âHowever, even a slight tendency for subconscious human reactive learning overa lifetime to produce happiness, or to reduce unhappiness, because of our abil-ity to exit from negative stimuli and stay with positive stimuli, would seem toproduce a prima facie case against paternalistic, Exit-blocking political regula-tions if, on the other side of the equation, the heuristics that govern the writ-ing of those regulations in the real world of political Voice are, on balance, evenslightly tilted toward the ignorant or illogical. Alcohol and drug prohibition areamong many experiments in paternalism that suggest that this is the case, but
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the question is obviously an empirical one that will, perhaps, be explored byscholars with more psychological expertise.
. It is instructive that Hayek (e.g., ) treats Saint-Simon and Comte as theonly progenitors of socialism who matter, managing to connect his critique ofthem to Marx only by virtue of the fact that the latter (like the former)thought he could predict the future (as, of course, did Hegel and many oth-ers)ârather than by virtue of the (anarchist) nature of the utopia Marx fore-saw as historyâs end, or the (coercive) nature of the exploitation it was to re-place. One really wonders if Hayek (, ) could have read more of Marx than the Communist Manifesto when he calls Marx an âaspiring dictatorââtrulyan egregious slip for a usually careful historian.
. Indeed, âour evolutionary heritage . . . primes us to anticipate intention in theunseen causes of uncertain situations that carry the risk of danger or the promiseof opportunity. . . . Natural selection may have prepared us to induce agency inpotentially important but causally opaque situationsâ (Atran , , emph.added)âsuch as those dealt with by religion.
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