Abstract

Austrian social theory and associated social epistemology provides a well-needed corrective to the overly rationalistic tendencies of liberal social theory, namely the positing of abstract individualism and the inherent paradoxes of so-called social justice. This said, what is of concern is that some self-avowed Austrians seem to have taken a “hard” libertarian turn: that is, the market is viewed as the sole source or arbiter of moral, political and other values. They seem to be committed to a form of abstract individualism manifest as social atomism, and in conceiving the market as the summum bonum, promote a substantive theory of the good, unwittingly abandoning a truly skeptical position regarding government and its engagements. Analogously, many self-avowed “conservatives” have also uncritically embraced the market seemingly unaware that the spontaneous order that the market generates may well be incompatible with the social values they wish to preserve. Aside from the tension between market spontaneous order and the socio-political imperatives conservatives embrace those socio-political imperatives are clearly an instance of promoting a substantive theory of the human good – again, in effect, anti-liberal. The master argument offered in this chapter is that any liberal position worthy of the name must surely emphasize its skeptical roots and as such be cognizant of the hardwon achievements of free societies. The greatest achievement, arguably, is the independence of spontaneous orders such as science and the market from epistemic monopolies, including the theocratic state or the expansive and centralized state, or indeed corporate monopolies. Liberality or the modern civil condition exists at the nexus of science, religion, politics, markets, art and more besides. On offer is not an anti-market critique. On the contrary, we wish to preserve the integrity of the market, and also science and other forms of experience, but it needs to be understood that each realm with its own criteria of objectivity, standards and teleology, cannot be answerable to (or reducible to) another order’s teleology or metric. Furthermore, it is the sine qua non of the liberal condition that there will always be tensions between orders: to reduce one realm to another is thus anti-liberal. The body of the discussion seeks to: (a) unpack the notions of individualism and individuality; (b) examine the idealized tensions between modes of association, what Oakeshott termed civil vs. enterprise association. The former constitutes an understanding of the state as a non-purposive; the latter is an understanding of the state in which the members are related in terms of a common, substantive purpose, whether it be religious salvation, moral virtue, or economic productivity or redistribution; (c) examine Hayek’s somewhat related (though not coextensive with Oakeshott) idealized distinction between cosmos and taxis. The former connoting spontaneous order; the latter connoting an order that is constructed with conscious aforethought; (d) critically filter marketocrats of both varieties through the lens of a methodological individualist (Hayek) and a liberal modal critique (Oakeshott); and finally, (e) offer some concluding remarks