Conservatives and Libertarians

Finally found something interesting to post about - yesterday was pretty frustrating. :)

Edward Feser at TCS writes on "Fusionism" or the attempt to combine conservativism and libertarianism into a unified overarching political philosophy. The problem is, the two are pretty hard to combine, particularly on social issues, and he goes on at length with the problems you have in reconciling the two, poking holes in several proposed solutions.

Enter F.A. Hayek, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the 20th century. His main precept is that human knowledge is limited, and no single individual can understand the vast interplay of forces of human social and economic actions. Thus the centralized economic plannning inherent to socialism and communism is impossible to do and thus has diasasterous unforseen consequences, and in the social sphere, radical social experimentation (say, legalizing drugs) as opposed to following more traditional social values also has the same results. Prices in the economic sphere, and tradition in the social sphere, reflect the collective wisdom of humanity.

"The foundation of Hayek's thought is an emphasis on the severe limitations on human knowledge, especially where human social institutions and other complex phenomena are concerned. For Hayek, even the knowledge we do have is dispersed and fragmented, directly available only to scattered individuals rather than to society at large, its governmental representatives, or would-be social-scientific experts; and much of it is embodied in practice, habit, and "know how" which it is impossible to convey in explicit propositional form. The economic implication of this is that central planning of the socialist kind is impossible, for no would-be planner could have the knowledge requisite to doing the job. Only prices generated in a capitalist economy can encapsulate the scattered and otherwise ungatherable information needed for rational economic activity, and individuals responding to price signals in the marketplace ensure the most efficient allocation of resources as is practically possible. But there are moral and social implications as well. For tradition, in Hayek's view, plays a role similar to that of the price system, embodying the inchoate moral insights of millions of individuals scattered across countless generations, and sensitive to far more information than is available to any individual reformer or revolutionary. The radical moral innovator, who falsely assumes he can design from scratch new institutions superior to existing ones, suffers from a hubris analogous to that inherent in socialism."

While Hayek can thus be said to have elements that both ideologies can accept, he would also have a number of elements that trouble them as well. But a philosophically consistent "Fusionist" would at the minimum probably have to accept the Hayekian base premise of limited knowledge. How far one can go in accepting the premise may be as far as one can go reconciling the two ideas. I will definitely have to delve further into this Hayek stuff; I am pretty familiar with libertarian icons like Milt Friedman and Murray Rothbard, but not so much Hayek or Ayn Rand, probably far overdue in this regard for someone who thinks of himself as a libertarian. One thing of note personally is that I've always had an issue with the Libertarian incompatibility with most traditional social values; this Hayekian element has helped me refine my own thinking on the subject.