Erwin Dekker, historian of economic thought and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, joins Henry Oliver to discuss his book, The Viennese Students of Civilization. They explore the intellectual world that shaped F. A. Hayek, how Austrian liberalism differs from rights-based, utilitarian, and libertarian traditions, why markets and law should be understood as evolved cultural institutions, what Vienna's café culture contributed to modern social science, how American individualism reshaped Austrian economics, and much more.
Transcript
HENRY OLIVER: I am here with Erwin Dekker. Erwin is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, where he works on the history of economic thought. He’s currently working on a new project about the history of The Chicago School, but we are going to discuss his book, The Viennese Students of Civilization. Erwin, hello.
ERWIN DEKKER: Great to be here. Hello, Henry.
OLIVER: I am going to start by reading out a small quote from your book.
DEKKER: OK.
OLIVER: And then you can discuss that for us.
DEKKER: OK.
OLIVER: Because I think—
DEKKER: Sounds good.
OLIVER: —one of the things you’re trying to do is to make us think differently about Hayek and the Austrians.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: So, this is from near the end:
Hayek acknowledges that what he believes is true liberalism has died away in most places, and he finds himself in disagreement with both rationalistic liberalism and the English utilitarian liberalism. He expresses some discontent with the label “libertarianism,” but that is the label now commonly associated with Austrian thought. That association is understandable.
Both Hayek and Mises put forward policies while in the United States that are very much in line with a government that is as minimal as possible. But this book has tried to demonstrate that the more constant element of the Viennese tradition has been a reluctant belief in progress, an outlook that thinks of freedom as a tradition, that has respect for institutions that have proven their worth, but that is at least willing to critically examine the existing and to change it wherever necessary.
Are we getting Hayek wrong? Is he really a conservative?
COUNTERPARTS TO HAYEK’S LIBERALISM
DEKKER: Is he really a conservative? Well, this is a very good question. Right, what I do in that passage is contrast it with a bunch of other more famous liberal traditions. And, of course, the ultimate question would become, is there a third or a fourth liberal tradition of which he really is part? This is how he understood it himself, which is why he wrote the famously “Why I’m Not a Conservative.”
But, from these other traditions, he might well look more like a conservative because this fourth liberal tradition, which is more continental, which, like I emphasized there, has a lot of attention to civil society processes, gradual growth, is anti-revolutionary in spirit as one of its outlooks, which is, of course, really quite different if you compare it with libertarianism, which is very anti-socialist, but that’s not the main opponent.
On the other hand, in its context, it is anti-aristocratic. That it shares with other liberal traditions very, very strongly. But what sets it apart mostly is that it’s—and this is why it’s sometimes related, I think rightly so, to the Scottish Enlightenment—it just doesn’t have a very firm belief in reason leading to progress, and so it runs up against more rationalistic versions of liberalism wherever it finds them.
These can be rights-based, they can be utilitarian, or they can be other forms of perfectionistic liberalism as we know them, say, around John Rawls. But it runs up against them all the time as unsatisfactory or too ambitious. And so, this liberalism isn’t so ambitious and is very much rooted in traditions, which gives it a very conservative flavor, that’s for sure.
OLIVER: Let’s just clarify what these different traditions are. Rights-based liberalism is John Locke.
DEKKER: John Locke, yes.
OLIVER: Utilitarian liberalism, at least in England, is John Stuart Mill. Are there any other schools against which we should be placing Hayek and seeing him differently?
DEKKER: Yes. With John Stuart Mill, obviously, you want to also put Bentham in there. And you probably would want to say something about modern economics, which—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Its very foundations are the utilitarian—
OLIVER: The neoclassicals.
DEKKER: Yes, the neoclassicals.
OLIVER: Marshall and everyone.
DEKKER: And they are, of course, very relevant as an interlocutor and critical counterpart to Hayek’s thought. And then, yes, in that passage, I somewhat, perhaps most provocatively, suggest that it’s also not American libertarianism.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Which, you know—
OLIVER: Which is what Hayek’s become in popular imagination.
DEKKER: Absolutely. His teacher, Mises, gives even more grounds for it because Mises’s system of praxeology, as it’s called, is very rationalistic—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: —in the sense that it starts from an axiom and then believes it can derive both very fundamental truths in economics, but then also very fundamental truths about politics from this one axiom. I think the debate is ongoing, but I’m very skeptical of this whole project. I think Hayek, by the time he gets further away from Mises, also physically, he seeks that distance very, very clearly.
And so, those are the three counterparts. The rights-based one seeks to justify things based on the rights that the individual has and seeks to derive from that the limits of political power. The utilitarian one is already quite a bit more ambitious because it seeks to achieve the best state that is possible in the world. It proposes a calculation between people of how we trade off some people being worse off versus everybody being at a somewhat higher level of civilization, as the book suggests. It’s a kind of formula. It’s very consequentialist in its thinking, which is obviously very different from the rights-based one, which, as the philosophers would say, is deontic.
This one is somewhere in between because it’s tradition-based. It doesn’t say there’s a clear starting point from which we can derive very obvious rights. Instead, the starting point is historical, and it’s imperfect. The end point is undefined. To the extent that they might think of an end point, they would think of it as a—they wouldn’t think of end points. They would think of processes. Right? So, if the one liberalism is about starting points and the other liberalism, the utilitarian tradition, is about end points, then somewhere they emphasize processes in the middle.
OLIVER: If someone is listening to this and they’ve got The Road to Serfdom in mind—
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: —and what you’re saying does not sound very much like the polemical Hayek of popular imagination, which of Hayek’s works is this most evident in? The essays?
DEKKER: No, it’s not just the essays because that I think is—there’s a sort of snobbism, obviously, that comes to every intellectual, and I can’t escape that fully in answering your question. But I think the obvious one is The Constitution of Liberty, actually, where a lot of this comes out in the first couple of chapters.
Then if you really want my favorite essay or favorite part of a book, it’s in Law, Legislation, and Liberty toward the very end. There’s a postscript, and it’s called “The Three Sources of Human Values.” I think that is where it’s most obvious. He really, really clearly sets up this idea about human nature, human artifice, and then culture in the middle as being the thing that he cares most about.
But it’s there very obviously in the essay that I think everybody reads but never quite grapples with, “Individualism: True and False,” in which he just says, “The individualism of both the rights-based people as well as the libertarians is misguided. In fact, my individualism has something to do with Tocqueville,” which, for a liberal thinker, is not a natural point of reference at all.
AT THE CROSSROADS OF FREE MARKETS AND TRADITION
OLIVER: So, how does this work with Hayek being laissez-faire? The idea is that he’s the cheerleader of free markets and the champion of deregulation and all this stuff, but you have this vision of Hayek as a—he’s rooted in tradition and custom. What’s the balance on that? Because we think of the free market as the slayer of tradition.
DEKKER: Yes. Well, first of all, it would suggest that actually markets—and the anthropologist, who I draw on quite repeatedly in the book—would, I think, support this claim. Markets are everywhere. They’re not a modern invention, right?
OLIVER: Sure. [chuckles]
DEKKER: There’s no magic moment in 1750 when we all of a sudden start trading. Trade seems to be quite fundamental to humans interacting, and so they are a tradition. His major argument in the 20th century against the planners is, “You want to destroy this tradition.” Now, obviously, once something is destroyed, there are difficult questions to be asked about whether they can be reintroduced—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Right? And what this reintroduction would mean, what it would draw upon. A question that I think—especially given that the book is quite geographically oriented in situating all of it in Vienna, the Habsburg Empire extending far into Eastern Europe—the obvious question is what do you do after, say, the fall of communism, which had tried to abolish markets quite seriously? Is there then enough of a tradition on which we can build to reconnect new traditions of markets? Even there, I think the deregulation Hayek is really a caricature—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: —because it suggests that you could do something like shock therapy, or it suggests that you could just move away from all the interventions and be OK. I think that would really be not his vision at all, right? And so this is the—
OLIVER: But there are—
DEKKER: —yes, the double aspect. He doesn’t think you can get rid of the aristocracy overnight, which—
OLIVER: Sure.
DEKKER: —makes him look fairly conservative in the 19th—
OLIVER: Yes, yes. [chuckles]
DEKKER: —century, when those questions come up in the Habsburg Empire. But it also makes him look fairly conservative in the 1990s when he is asked, and everybody sees the fall of communism as his triumph, and he is cautious. He’s like, “Yes, I don’t know whether we should expect these societies to turn around overnight—or we shouldn’t.”
OLIVER: But there are instances, aren’t there? He wrote to Margaret Thatcher and said, “You should push these policies further.”
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: “You’re not doing enough.” And she said, “Well, it’s a democracy. I can only do as much as the voters will allow or tolerate.” There is a sense in which he had a radical involvement in politics, is there?
HAYEK’S LIBERALISM: BUILDING ON TRADITION
DEKKER: Yes, but there are two things I would say against that. First, when he thinks of Germany after the war, he gives a lecture to—
OLIVER: This is after the second war.
DEKKER: This is after the Second World War.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Yes. There’s the question of reconstruction, right?
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: He says to the historians, “If you’re going to reconstruct liberalism in Germany, you have to construct a liberal past on which this new Germany is going to base itself.” You can’t just say, “OK, from now on, we’re going to be English. We’re going to have British liberalism in Germany, and we’re just going to shed our own past.” [laughter]
He goes to some length by pointing out various people. I think the whole exercise [chuckles] seems maybe somewhat artificial to reconstruct this German liberal tradition, although I genuinely believe there is one. But, he does that. And then, the same thing—
OLIVER: But he sees that the kind of liberalism that a country will have will evolve naturally out of the culture and the history of that country. You can’t just template—
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: —an international version.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Yes, absolutely. And so, the reason that The Road to Serfdom, I think, actually looks the way it looks is it’s very much written with the British audience in mind. You see this in all the epigraphs, the little quotations at the start of every chapter. You see it in his references, in which he’s trying to hide all his German reference points [laughter] and substitute them for English reference points.
He’s trying to say, “Look, I’m one of you guys,” which is, obviously, also an important point to make, right? If you come from continental Europe, you’re writing a book warning the British about their own mistakes, you’re up against it. Your rhetorical position is fairly weak because you come from one of the suspicious countries that actually gave in to fascism, while the British are protecting free societies, and then you’re telling them that they’re not doing it in the right way. This is a steep, steep hill to climb. [laughter] He goes the length to actually—you could say “whitewash,” but I think the better way of saying it would be “contextualize”—what sort of liberalism that the Brits always had.
OLIVER: He’s not so far away from Churchill’s position in that sense.
DEKKER: No.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: No, not at all.
OLIVER: Where does his advice to Chile fit into this?
DEKKER: I don’t think he gives much advice to Chile.
OLIVER: OK.
DEKKER: I think the historical studies really now show that to the extent that there’s extensive, actual advice to Chile, it comes from people affiliated with Chicago—not actually Milton Friedman, who does give a lecture but does little beyond that. Hayek’s own involvement and actual comments on the situation take the form of opinionating about the developments in Chile rather than—
OLIVER: Telling them what to do.
DEKKER: Yes, telling them what to do.
OLIVER: OK.
DEKKER: But certainly, I think every time a major transition comes up, whether it’s currently Milei or so in South America, there’s—I think the Hayekian question would be, “What sort of tradition are they going to build on?” What sort of liberalism do they envision, and what sort of narrative can they tell that this is, in fact, a return or a continuation of local traditions of freedom.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: And that would, I think, at least be the consistent Hayekian position. Whether he always acted exactly according to these principles, I don’t know.
OLIVER: Sure, sure. That’s certainly true in the British context. The Thatcher governments are often called radical, but Nigel Lawson said, “We thought of ourselves as going back to Gladstone—”
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: “—going back to the original liberalism of England. Everyone else had made the great departure. We were trying to return.”
DEKKER: So, this is, interestingly, what he does. Some reviewers have commented on a bit of abuse of language I do in the book, but Hayek has a book called The Counter-Revolution [of] Science. It’s a funny thing, because if you think that the other people have been involved in a revolution to overthrow traditions and conceived wisdom, then there is a call or a necessity of doing something like a counterrevolution. Right?
Now, this is not exactly the way he uses the term and why he picks the title. I think that is true, but I think this ethos of being a counterrevolutionary and returning to an older, good version of the country that obviously even modern reform movements, I think, in Britain, in one way or another, appeal to—
OLIVER: Oh, very strongly.
DEKKER: —that there was an age in which Britain was right. I think, actually, the fairer critique of that point is: What did those liberalisms actually look like?
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Right? Which, especially if you come from the Habsburg Empire, is a fairly relevant [laughter] question. Is there an Austrian or a Habsburg moment to which one can return as being a good form of liberalism? And here, I think the Austrian answer has something to do with these gradual processes. So, it’s not so much that it’s conservative in restoring, but it’s conservative in saying, “Well, we overthrew too much of the stuff that was naturally growing.” This leads both to backlash, but also to a forgetting of what the project was about.
STUDENTS OF CIVILIZATION
OLIVER: Now, we’re talking a lot about Hayek, but you put him in the book as part of this bigger school.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: We think of them as economists, but you have this idea that they are students of civilization, and the economics is part of the way that they work as intellectuals, to try and understand what is civilization, how do we preserve it, how does it work, questions of that nature. You focus on the idea of culture. Can you tell us, though—economists love talking about culture, and I never know. What do they mean? What is culture?
DEKKER: Modern economists have taken a bit to talking about culture. I’m not sure what they mean when—
OLIVER: [laughs] It’s not just me.
DEKKER: It might just be that, in econometrics, you have the “error” term, and you want to pull things out of the “error” term, which is the stuff you’ve left unexplained. “Now we’ve put all the socioeconomic factors in there, so now the next set of variables must somehow be cultural.”
OLIVER: It’s a sort of miscellaneous category.
DEKKER: Yes, I think for a lot of current researchers it is. There are a few more serious attempts, but let me try to say what I suggest that it—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: —was to them. I think the most modern way of saying what it is, it’s a set of cooperative technologies. Hayek has this phrase, “law, language, and money.” And so they are, you could say, general-purpose social technologies. They can be used for many, many different things.
As Hayek says it in one of the essays in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, it’s [that] they’re means-connected, not ends-connected. They allow for cooperation of people with quite different ends. Right? This also makes them, you could say, “imperfect language.” You’re a great—
OLIVER: Indeed.
DEKKER: —student of it. It’s used for poetry, but it’s also used for communication. It’s used for warning. It’s used for persuasion. It serves many, many different purposes.
This is true for markets, too, in the Austrian understanding, and it’s true for law. Law is also one of those general-purpose technologies that has evolved to serve, in fact, many different purposes, many different individual ends. Originally, this wasn’t the case.
This is the story of evolution that Hayek tells us. They were—and this is very congruent with, say, Georg Simmel or so, the sociologist. They were—first, the rules that societies come up with are very ends-directed, but as societies grow more complex, the rules become much more general, and they move away from ends, and they are about the justness of the process itself.
And so, these cooperative technologies are what they consider culture. They consider them absolutely vital to making societies run, but the unique thing about them is that nobody came up with them.
OLIVER: Yes, yes.
DEKKER: They were never designed, which is a reason he’s also not too fond of constitutional traditions, because the constitutional traditions of liberalism actually suggest that there’s a moment of design during which you come up with the set of rules that is going to govern society successfully. Here, once again, I think he sides with tradition. He emphasizes the common law—so, this part of England he likes a lot, the common law tradition.
OLIVER: This is slightly different from norms, manners, customs—
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: —general—because when we say culture, we think of the way people talk to their neighbors, the sorts of lifestyles. You’re getting at something slightly different, I think.
DEKKER: I believe I do, but the question of norms is difficult in the following sense: that a lot of these legal rules and also language emerge out of smaller forms of interaction. In this conception, laws are not very different from norms that, at some point, have become written down and generalized. They are rooted in these everyday interactions, but they are the most generalized versions of them.
Now, is this very different from others? In the book, I try to argue that this was a fairly shared view of what culture was doing. I cite Bronisław Malinowski a couple of times. I draw quite heavily on Norbert Elias’s idea of the civilizing process. They all use the word “civilization” for it.
I think reading the book again in preparation for this and a while ago, I feel that the whole book is quite defensive about the concept of civilization—
OLIVER: [chuckles] Yes.
DEKKER: —like, “Oh, it’s not this, and I don’t mean to imply that,” and so on. But this is the concept that they used at the time, so that they find useful. It is different, at the very least, from the actual expressions of culture. So, it’s different from literature and art. Those are the things that result from it. It is not science itself. Those are enabled by these cooperative technologies.
COLD FISH IN RED VIENNA
OLIVER: Yes. One of the most striking things is that they’re very passionate about civilization. You tell this wonderful story. I think it’s Mises walking down the street and saying, “This will all be grass. We’re going to let civilization fall. This is so terrible.” But they’re actually not very interested in the symphony or the novel. They’re living at a time of wonderful, wonderful high culture, and they seem almost not to notice.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Civilization is all around them, [laughs] and they don’t care. Yeah. Are they philistines?
DEKKER: Are they philistines? Let me first elaborate a bit on that anecdote about Mises walking on the Ringstrasse, because the best cultural history of Vienna is fairly old now, but it’s written by Carl Schorske, and he uses the Ringstrasse, which is this ring street around the center of Vienna. If you’ve ever been, you can’t have missed it. Used to be a military encampment, so it was used for the protection of the city. Carl Schorske, in his wonderful cultural history, uses the fact that it was transformed into the Ringstrasse as the ultimate bourgeois victory—
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: —because the Ringstrasse is now populated by the university, the parliament, the theater, the opera.
OLIVER: The shops.
DEKKER: Yes, the shops.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: And so, it replaced the old aristocratic and maybe also somewhat defensive idea of what this empire was, and it now became open and governed by the bourgeois with all these bourgeois institutions.
But yes, it is true, and we talked about this before: They don’t seem to be particularly excited about the culture that is happening around them, right? So, this is how the book starts a bit, that everybody was there, the best philosophers of the age, the best composers of the age, maybe the best visual artists, although that’s debatable, but with Klimt and Schiele and so on.
OLIVER: It’s clearly an innovative and exciting time in the arts.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: And that’s happening all around them. They never engage either with the content or with the fact that all of this is happening, which I think is puzzling. What I do argue in the book—and I hope this is somewhat convincing—is that they actually grapple with some of the same major cultural problems that have also made—well, especially the novelists in Vienna famous—but I would also think motivate some of the inventions around modern art.
They typically go in a different direction, which is maybe part of the reason that they appear somewhat uninterested. A lot of the artists either embrace the new coming world. This is most clear in the architecture of the city, which is associated also with the political project of what is sometimes called Red Vienna. There, they strip the world of ornaments, and they make it functional, and this is exactly what they oppose because they rightly associate this with planning the economy.
It is also different from modern art traditions that seek to find new forms because, in some sense, they’re trying to say, “We have to build on the old forms.” Maybe that explains a little bit why their sensibilities are not attuned to it, but even so, my book would have been all the richer if they had either critiqued it or engaged with it in one way or another. They haven’t, which is somewhat disappointing.
OLIVER: When you read people like Mises, though, he is a bit of a cold fish. He’s a bit dry.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Is part of their ability to study civilization the fact that they are naturally detached from it, and that they have personality that keeps them somewhat removed, and so they can observe it and document it in a way? Is it somehow a business—
DEKKER: They’re not caught up.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: They’re distant observers.
OLIVER: The fact that they don’t feel in response to the art and the music necessarily is maybe an important part of their ability to understand how it is able to be produced.
DEKKER: Yes, and I make quite a bit in the book too of the theme of restraint and self-restraint in their book, which maybe also makes—
OLIVER: Yes, we should say that’s the definition of societies.
DEKKER: Yes. All of that is true, but Hermann Broch’s book, The Sleepwalkers, talks about people being—“dancing on the volcano,” I think, is one of the expressions. I don’t know how well that works in English, but in Dutch we certainly say this is a decadence of partying on while the world is in decline.
Hermann Broch sees this world in decline very, very sharply. So, in some sense, they could have aligned themselves, I think, with expressions like that. In fact, there’s one book to which Mises refers, which, in a more historical sense, has very much the same theme. I’m not sure whether that explains all of it, because I think they could have found in cultural expressions various forms, and—yes.
LIBERALISM AS APPLIED ECONOMICS
OLIVER: In Mises’s book, Liberalism, he says somewhere in the back—it might be in the notes or something—but he says, “Liberalism is applied economics.” And you’re sort of, “That’s quite a desiccated,—”
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: “—astonishing thing for him to have said.” Presumably, he didn’t quite mean it or it was a moment of excess or whatever, but there’s some feeling of that when you read these people that—
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: —they can see it, but they can’t really get involved in it somehow.
DEKKER: This is absolutely true, right? It’s also how Mises responds to World War I, which I think is an earlier instance of this. He says, “All this fighting, this heroism, this romantic longing to struggle for something higher than oneself, all of this is irrational [laughter] and atavistic. It belongs to the 19th century, but no longer to the 20th century.” So, if we could only take the position that maybe you describe as them having themselves, I think that there might be a lot of truth to it. I want to—
OLIVER: In a funny way, that’s what the Bloomsburys thought.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: They’re inverse of each other.
DEKKER: Yes. The Bloomsbury [group], though, to me, appear[s] more decadent.
OLIVER: Oh, much more.
DEKKER: They are more the ones dancing on the volcano.
OLIVER: Yes, yes.
DEKKER: I think the interesting transition that actually happens to Hayek more so than Mises—or, maybe I should make it more a generational argument, but it’s always easy to talk through individuals rather than through generations. But they feel that they cannot simply analyze the decline. They also, at some point, have to become involved in the process. They cannot merely be onlookers. So, you’re absolutely right in emphasizing the perspective of the onlooker. I compare it in the book also to the anatomist.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Somebody died. Let’s now figure out—
OLIVER: Let’s cut them open.
DEKKER: —what the causes of death were. [laughter] Yes, cut them open. They feel that that is unsatisfactory in response to the civilizational crisis that they’re experiencing. Or maybe they see new glimmers of hope to which they want to catch on, and so then they transform their project into one that tries to reestablish rather than merely observe. In the book, I use both Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies as well as Hayek’s work around The Road to Serfdom as exemplary for this kind of move.
THE ROMANTIC AUSTRIANS
OLIVER: Now, you mentioned Mises’s aversion to Romantic ideals. When this school moves to America, the Austrian school of thought does become more Romantic.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: How does this break occur, and how has it affected the way we look back at Hayek and Mises and the others? Should we keep a distinct idea in mind that there’s the Romantic Austrians and the un-Romantic Austrians?
DEKKER: Well, mow, you’re making quite a lot of “Romantic.” I think what happens it does fuse with American individualism. It’s just undeniable that if you go to the 1974 meeting of Austrian economics, which [is] often pointed out as the Austrian revival. It’s the moment in which really a new generation of American economists and other social scientists come together and rediscover and form a community that is going to cultivate these ideas.
They’ve all read Ayn Rand. They all now have an image of heroic individuals, and they like this self-image too. In fact, Mises, I think, in his own self-presentation, contributes to this self-image, that they’re fighting the world and fighting all the major developments of the 20th century. Ocourse, Ayn Rand as being from the communist world and now coming to the West to tell them what is really great about them. I think they share this ethos.
This gives everybody there already a Romantic self-image because they are now the ones who see right through all the illusions that have gripped the others, and they are going to defend something that’s bigger than theirs. To that is added American individualism, which I always like to trace back to the American Romantic poets, Emerson and Thoreau and so on. An idea that it’s ultimately the individual who makes their own lives and ultimately makes the world around them, which is, I think, almost 180 degrees opposite from Hayek arguing that for civilization to work, we have to submit to social rules, to conventions, to morals.
OLIVER: Completely un-Emersonian.
DEKKER: Yes, because the very actions and ethos of Emerson are, “I am the individual who is able to break these conventions.” You just brought up Bloomsbury.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: This is how Hayek ultimately also morally condemns Keynes, right?
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Keynes is the breaker of conventions, and this is ultimately what makes him suspicious and also unreliable. Because tomorrow, he might decide to break a new one, [laughter] and then he’s no longer in his old position. Which is much a shared position, by the way, abroad about Keynes, is that every five years, he changes his position based on who’s in government and what the current social problem is. Taking up the mantle of tradition is also an interesting rhetorical move against the flip-floppy nature of Keynes’s newest book.
FROM DOCUMENTERS TO DOERS
OLIVER: You talked about how, in response to the decadence, they see the need to not just document or anatomize but do something—build new institutions, try and change the course of history, as it were. What is it that they do, and how successful are they?
DEKKER: That is a very, very complicated question. “How successful are they?” puts me in a place to evaluate where they had successes and where they did not have successes. I think they’re successful on this most important level: Their legacies have lived on, and their particular perspectives on what went wrong in the 20th century in terms of diagnosis have become some of the most discussed diagnoses of what went wrong and maybe also the most widely accepted diagnoses of what went wrong. After that, I’m not very sure.
I don’t think their positive programs maybe were either as developed as one might wish for them to really leave very obvious legacies. But the other part of it is just that there’s mostly contestation over what their positive program would look like. You just talked about this more heroic or Romantic individualism that gets added to it in America. I would add to this something that I don’t think people think about at all but they thought about the entire time, is European peace. Both Mises and Hayek were proponents of federal institutions at the European level.
OLIVER: Something like what we have in the E.U.
DEKKER: Yes, something like what we have in the E.U. Now, if you’d ask any Ameri—
OLIVER: Which we should just pause and say it’s remarkable to think of Hayek as pro-EU.
DEKKER: Yes. No, I suppose so, but he was. His own students contributed quite a bit to the formation of the World Trade Organization, which, maybe, because it’s focused on trade, feels a bit more in line, but again, it’s inventing a new level of government.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: Right? Let’s not underestimate how much they’re thinking of that. This is how they look back at the Habsburg Empire. It governed at least eight, but by some counts 28 nations, and it kept them together and prevented internal war between them. It gave them a limited but significant set of political institutions that were overarching and that prevented this thing from collapsing.
So, this is the first worry they have after World War II, is, “How do we somehow ensure that Eastern”—sometimes they call it Southeastern—“Europe is developed and is pulled into these institutions?” And of course, it isn’t. I think this is another thing that is easily forgotten, if you take a Western European perspective, is Europe and America gave up on Eastern Europe. They just decided that it wasn’t worth fighting anymore. The Russians had liberated Eastern Europe, and now Eastern Europe was, for all intents and purposes, Russian.
OLIVER: Yes. Left to its fate.
DEKKER: Yes, left to its own fate. This, I think rightly so, by some in Eastern Europe, is still seen as a fatal betrayal. But it certainly hit home for these people from Vienna. Obviously, Vienna now is just right on the border of where the Iron Curtain was, but it excluded large parts of what they considered to be part of their home, including Poland, where Mises was born, if we take current geographical borders as being relevant; Ukraine, over which, of course, we’re currently still fighting—that was an important part of the Habsburg Empire.
To them, it’s not at all obvious that even that is the right institutional setup. They would have been much more ambitious about what this new world should have looked like also in terms of international governance. I think this is a very different legacy that’s not typically associated with them. They haven’t been at all successful, one could say, in finding that language. Also among, I think, modern liberals, this kind of international imagination largely lost.
HOMESCHOOLING, THE ALPS, AND THE SCHOLARLY ART OF LOAFING AROUND
OLIVER: Hayek and the others are very interested in institutions. They think institutions are very important. There comes a point when most of them begin working in it. Hayek goes to the LSE. New York University becomes an important school of Austrian thought. But in the early part, a lot of what you discuss in the book, it’s not an institutional movement. They’re just in the café.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: And there’s an interesting—I don’t know if it’s a contradiction or not, but what you call “therapeutic nihilism,” which is the intellectuals just lamenting over things and not doing anything useful. Hayek’s opposed to that, and he wants institutions to fight back. But actually, it was outside of the institutions that they developed and emerged, and in a way, you could say, did their best work. Are they too keen on institutions? Is there some contradiction in the way they lived and what they propose?
DEKKER: This is a great question because I think the word “institutions” doesn’t feature heavily in my book. I don’t think it features heavily in their own writings. Now, I think you can be nuanced about this, right? We just talked about international cooperation. Certainly, institutions were not off the radar, but they thought of the most important things as springing from tradition and customs.
The custom that explains Vienna’s intellectual life was homeschooling. [laughter] All these aristocratic families were all homeschooling their kids in one way or another, and they developed a scientific culture in the home. It’s unimaginable for us now, but a lot of them were amateur scientists or quite serious scientists. If you go—
OLIVER: It was also a philosophical culture.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: The interest in mathematics, yes.
DEKKER: Yes. It’s absolutely amazing if you hear Hayek talk about his childhood because then he just happened to know one of the most important biologists from later on, [laughter] Karl von Frisch, who is very famous for his experiments with bees.
There’s a thing that this all happened in the home. There’s another great book by Deborah Coen that talks about one of these families, the Exner family. She also emphasizes how important the summer retreat into the Alps was. This, in fact, for Hayek’s personal life, later becomes very relevant because essentially they missed the summers, so he’s always reimagining academic positions that allow him to have a summer in the Alps.
But, yes, it’s practices. That’s how I try to capture it in the book. I think one of the subheadings is “The conversation as scholarly practice,” and I emphasize the social circles in which this happens. The very informality of these allowed discipline-crossing and boundary-crossing, and maybe also a bit of this crossing of what you do, whether it’s normative or positive or intellectual or scientific and so on. All these lines were less fixed than they would have been in a more institutional setting.
OLIVER: Yes.
DEKKER: I argue toward the end of the book that, in fact, Hayek was always trying to recreate this very setting, so whether it’s in the Mont Pelerin Society or in his dreams to bring back all the great intellectuals to Vienna, which goes absolutely nowhere, but they’re attempts to recreate this culture. There’s also when he comes to the University of Chicago, he sets up a seminar on the scientific method the first year, and he’s absolutely delighted that he gets Enrico Fermi, a very famous physicist, to come, and other intellectuals from various disciplines, because this is what he imagined scholarly life to be: It’s that the best people from various disciplines come along. They’re very attracted to these institutes for advanced study that, for instance, Princeton is famous for, that has cultivated some of this.
But this gets largely crowded out. Social science becomes governed by the foundations that set up large-scale social scientific projects as team projects in which a lot of people become scientific workers rather than generalists and so on.
OLIVER: The bureaucratization.
DEKKER: Yes, but also empirical social science just has a very different logic of organization that comes with it. It just requires a data collection analysis of [an] almost mechanical kind. Of course, it never becomes quite mechanical, though maybe now it might become—
OLIVER: No, but you can’t do it by sitting around with coffee and talking for three hours.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Yes, it’s—yes.
DEKKER: But yes, weirdly, even some of the people who establish art history as a discipline in the United States come out of this Viennese culture, which just happened to be incredibly rich and invigorating and indeed happened outside of institutions. Maybe this is a liberal point that liberalism is actually not about defending the institutions that are, or perfecting them, but is actually a critique of institutionalization. But this is hard with the other sides of Hayek in mind. If we think that the institutions are restraining, then it is actually fairly compatible with his kind of liberalism. Maybe this is something we have to think more about it.
The one thing I would say is that for him, freedom, conversations, but also things like science are just outgrowths of these microphenomena. They cannot be designed or even stimulated top-down. The conversations have to happen for a scientific seminar to be of good quality. What you cannot do is tell everybody to come together once a week and then have a good conversation. Even there, the Hayekian perspective, I think, would be you need all those good conversations, and that makes the seminar at the end of the week especially fruitful.
OLIVER: Should modern intellectuals—we’re very institutional these days.
DEKKER: Yes.
OLIVER: Should there be some loosening of strictures, more time in the café, just less monitoring, less measuring, just a greater sense that you should be loafing around a little bit?
DEKKER: Absolutely. [laughter] Absolutely.
OLIVER: If our managers are listening. [chuckles]
DEKKER: Just before we were starting, one of the producers of the show actually commented on this loafing because our current fellowship programs include lunches, dinners, and an open bar into the evening, and they’re, I think, meant to stimulate exactly this. They also embodied something else, is that people come from disciplines ranging from biology to the arts and rhetoric and communication now, and everything in between. I think we’re rebuilding something of that sort.
Now, of course, the question is, how do you sustain it? Part of the lament, maybe in the book, is that once they go to the United States, it is hard to sustain because somehow the context is missing. Everybody competes for a university position somewhere, somehow, because they miss the family and social context that allowed for all of this conversation to happen. Some of them, obviously, also lose a lot of the inherited wealth that made some of it possible. The constraints are more severe.
Also, when you now try to set it up again, I don’t know whether it can compete with the incentives in broader academia. But yes, absolutely, loaf around. Read outside your discipline. I never know quite what discipline I’m in. [laughter] This is great, and it helps.
DEKKER’S UPCOMING BOOK PROJECT
OLIVER: Now, we should say you’re working now on a totally different place. This book is very Viennese. They’re all in Vienna walking around together, and there’s some influence of place that creates the particular ideas they have. You’re now studying Chicago, which is obviously [chuckles] a very different place. How does that change the way they work and the sorts of conclusions they come to?
DEKKER: I hope it changes nearly everything. You live with your own books for a while, and then you become estranged from them, maybe, during certain periods. One way in which I’m estranged from this book is that they are not quite aristocratic but very well-off intellectuals from deep philosophical traditions, and you can point to what other great thinkers they were next to.
I come from a working-class background, went through schools in which I was the odd one out, then later discovered how big this intellectual world was. But I’ve always felt that whatever I do, I somehow have to explain at a family reunion or so on what I’m doing. This is hard, and that book is of no help whatsoever. [laughter]
But I was working in Rotterdam for quite a number of years. Now, Rotterdam—you’re from Britain—is a bit like Liverpool or maybe Manchester. It’s a harbor town with lots of blue-collar workers. We say, “Don’t talk about it; be about it,” or something of the sort, or the Dutch equivalent of that. And so, I thought, “I have to somehow capture this kind of intellectual atmosphere much more,” and that will also counter even more strongly this idea that somehow cultures are shaped by the intellectuals in the coffee shops, and then somehow the ideas trickle down.
Instead, I wanted the opposite. I wanted somehow what—I don’t know—my parents were talking about at the shop floor to somehow shape the ideas and the attitudes of a city. And so, I looked around. Chicago is a very important place for American social science, both in sociology and in economics. I now know it also has a very rich literary tradition, which, by labels, is mostly called “realist” or something of the sort. I think it’s a very bad label to think about it, but it is always concerned with underdogs.
It is very focused on usefulness because if your ideas are not useful, they’re merely talk or speculation or something of the sort, which already captures some of what exactly my family would say at a family reunion, like, “What is the use of this? Are you even working?” They also question whether I’m doing it, if it should even count as work, whether it’s worthy of earning a salary, especially one that’s higher than maybe some of them are earning. It’s all of those things, and all of those things come together in Chicago, and then what gets added in Chicago, I think, is migration.
One of the themes I actually regret in this book as not emphasizing more: Vienna was a hub for especially Jews who were persecuted in the rest of Eastern Europe to go. More generally, Vienna was rapidly growing during this period of time, and this is even more obvious in Chicago. It’s a city of new ideas, new people trying to make a new world. What especially sociologists are very good at is just describing. What are these new worlds that are coming about?
It’s first captured by the journalists in the newspapers. It’s captured by confessionals and low-quality or maybe low-prestige sort of literature, confessionals of a thief that just tells what kind of cons he used to run on the streets of Chicago. That then inspires the sociologists to think, “Well, let me see how these cons are doing at the moment, how people make a living, how they justify conning other people out of their money, what is considered legitimate.”
I think all of those things now are starting to come together in my project on Chicago, and they’re a way to, I think, counter this particular element of the Vienna book that—I’m not sure whether it’s completely guilty of it, but it’s ultimately a trickle-down model of intellectual influence. I want the grassroots version or the percolating from the bottom to the top. How are intellectuals? Also, how do they justify to the people around them that they’re doing all this speculative stuff? What’s the use? Why all these books? Why all this reflection on life? Why not simply do it? I think those tensions are perfectly captured in Chicago.
OLIVER: I look forward to reading it. Erwin Dekker, this was delightful. Thank you very much.
DEKKER: Wonderful. Thank you, Henry.
