Die Irrtümer des Konstruktivismus und die Grundlagen legitimer Kritik gesellschaftlicher Gebilde

Friedrich August von Hayek’s 1970 Salzburg inaugural lecture is a single-author programmatic essay. It links social theory, jurisprudence, economics, psychology, and philosophy of science in order to identify one recurring error—constructivism—and to define the kind of criticism social institutions legitimately permit.

Der Grundgedanke dieses Konstruktivismus läßt sich am einfachsten in der zunächst unverfänglich klingenden Formel ausdrücken, daß der Mensch die Einrichtungen der Gesellschaft und der Kultur selbst gemacht hat und sie daher auch nach seinem Belieben ändern kann.

English translation: The basic idea of this constructivism can be expressed most simply in the initially innocuous-sounding formula that man has himself made the institutions of society and culture and can therefore also change them at his pleasure.

For Hayek this formula is dangerous because it confuses human origin with deliberate design. Social orders are produced by human conduct, but not necessarily by human plans. Against the Cartesian and Rousseauian legacy, he argues that reason itself is not prior to culture, as if it could stand above language, morality, law, and custom and remake them at will.

Denn diese Vernunft war wohl nicht vor der Kultur da, sondern ist mit ihr gewachsen.

English translation: For this reason was surely not there before culture, but grew together with it.

The lecture’s first conceptual move is thus from purposes to rules. People act not only from causal knowledge of means and ends but under rules they often cannot state and did not invent. Hayek distinguishes rules merely followed, rules later formulated, and rules deliberately enacted; constructivism recognizes only the last as rational. Yet social order depends chiefly on inherited constraints—legal, moral, customary—whose effects exceed the understanding of those who obey them.

Hierher gehören die Regeln des Rechts, der Moral, der Sitte usw., kurz die Werte, die in der Gesellschaft herrschen.

English translation: To this belong the rules of law, of morals, of custom, and so on—in short, the values that prevail in society.

These “values” are not mainly positive goals. They are mostly negative prohibitions that allow unknown persons to form reliable expectations. Hayek’s evolutionary account explains how such rules survive: groups whose rule-combinations generate more effective orders persist, imitate, and spread, without knowing why the rules work.

The central sections apply this to law and the market. Law does not have a concrete end in the manner of an organization; its function is to sustain an abstract order within which dispersed actors can coordinate. The market likewise is neither miracle nor natural harmony, but the unintended product of general rules such as property and contract.

Tatsächlich handelt es sich aber bei diesem »Zweck« des Rechts nur um Herbeiführung einer abstrakten Ordnung – eines Systems von abstrakten Beziehungen –, deren besondere Gestaltung von einer Unzahl besonderer Umstände abhängt, die in ihrer Gesamtheit niemand kennt.

English translation: In fact, however, this "purpose" of the law consists only in bringing about an abstract order—a system of abstract relations—whose particular shape depends on an untold number of specific circumstances that in their entirety no one knows.

This is also Hayek’s epistemological argument against planning. Modern science may understand principles of complex orders, but it cannot collect the countless concrete facts of time and place on which those orders depend. A planned substitute for the market would require precisely the centralized knowledge that the market’s rule-governed process makes unnecessary.

Daß eine solche Ordnung, die zur Nutzung von viel mehr Wissen führt als irgendjemand besitzt, nie »erfunden« werden konnte, folgt daraus, daß die Folgen nicht vorausgesehen werden konnten.

English translation: That such an order, which leads to the use of far more knowledge than any single individual possesses, could never have been "invented," follows from the fact that its consequences could not have been foreseen.

Hayek then treats positivism, act-utilitarianism, legal positivism, socialism, and psychologized attacks on morality as variations of the same error: they demand that norms justify themselves as consciously chosen instruments for visible ends. His examples—from psychiatric calls to abolish “right and wrong” to Kelsen’s account of justice as irrational interest conflict—show how scientific prestige can undermine the moral-legal conditions of an open society. Yet the lecture is not a defense of unexamined tradition. Its final movement turns against conservative complacency and defines legitimate critique as immanent rather than revolutionary.

Die Vorstellung vom Menschen, der sich dank seiner Vernunft über die Werte seiner Kultur erhebt, um sie wie von einer höheren Warte von außen zu beurteilen, ist eine Illusion.

English translation: The notion of the human being who, by virtue of his reason, rises above the values of his culture in order to judge them, as it were from a higher vantage point, from outside, is an illusion.

Since reason is itself culturally formed, criticism cannot begin from a blank slate. It must test contested values against other values still presupposed by the society and against the order their joint observance makes possible. Rules may be revised, conflicts exposed, and inherited norms sacrificed, but only within an ongoing order that criticism itself requires.

Wir können die Wertgrundlagen unserer Zivilisation nie von Grund auf neu aufbauen, sondern immer nur von innen heraus entwickeln.

English translation: We can never rebuild the value foundations of our civilization from the ground up; we can only ever develop them from within.

The relevance of the lecture lies in this double warning. Science threatens culture not by inquiry, but by the pretense of knowledge it lacks; politics becomes destructive when it treats society as an organization with a single consciously chosen end. Hayek’s constructive conclusion is a chastened rationalism: social science cannot derive values from bare causal facts, yet it can show which values are conditions for the complex orders on which individual plans depend.