Friedrich August von Hayek, Wissenschaft und Sozialismus (1979)

Wissenschaft und Sozialismus is a single ceremonial lecture, delivered for the 25th anniversary of the Walter Eucken Institut. Hayek uses the occasion to defend political economy as a science of institutional consequences: socialism may be morally motivated, but whether its means can realize its ends is an empirical and theoretical question.

Es ist ein wissenschaftliches Problem, obwohl oder sogar weil ihm moralische Gegensätze zugrunde liegen; denn die verschiedenen Maßnahmen, die verschiedene oder sogar dieselben Menschen für gut halten, sind miteinander oder mit dem, was sie anstreben, oft nicht vereinbar.

English translation: It is a scientific problem, although—or indeed because—it rests upon moral antagonisms; for the various measures that different people, or even the same people, regard as good are often incompatible with one another, or with what they are aiming at.

The lecture’s main thesis is that socialism rests on a mistaken moral anthropology. Hayek argues that civilization depends not on unmediated solidarity but on learned, abstract rules that restrain older small-group instincts. Ethics is neither arbitrary nor timeless; it is an evolved cultural inheritance selected through the success of groups that practiced it.

Wir können uns unsere Ethik gewiß nicht nach Belieben machen, aber sie ist uns auch nicht zeitlos und unabänderlich gegeben.

English translation: We certainly cannot fashion our ethics at will, but neither is it given to us as something timeless and unalterable.

Hayek’s central conceptual move is to oppose “natural” moral feeling to the impersonal morality required by the “Großgesellschaft.” Exchange with outsiders, contract, competition, changing prices, and private property all once violated tribal morality, yet made extended cooperation possible.

In Wirklichkeit war das Sondereigentum natürlich die Grundlage für die Entwicklung einer arbeitsteiligen Gesellschaft.

English translation: In reality, of course, several property (private property) was the foundation for the development of a society based on the division of labour.

The famous example of the Athenian potter illustrates this anti-sentimental moral economy. By exporting pots for grain rather than giving directly to a needy neighbor, he serves strangers and indirectly sustains Athens. The market channels self-interest into service without requiring altruistic intention.

Aber indem er einfach dem Gewinn folgte, tat er mehr, um den Nachbarn vor Hunger zu schützen, als wenn er sich noch so sehr den Kopf zerbrochen hätte, wie er das tun könnte.

English translation: But simply by pursuing profit, he did more to protect his neighbour from hunger than if he had racked his brains ever so much over how he might do so.

The lecture then turns to Hayek’s knowledge argument. Prices are not retrospective moral rewards, as labor theories of value suppose, but prospective signals guiding action amid dispersed knowledge. This is the function of the market order, or “Katallaxie”: it coordinates what no mind or office can survey.

So entstand eine sich selbst regulierende Ordnung von einer Komplexität, die niemand überblicken konnte oder bewußt hätte schaffen können.

English translation: Thus there arose a self-regulating order of a complexity that no one could survey or could have consciously created.

Because prices condense unknowable information, political attempts to “correct” them usually misunderstand their function. Hayek allows that some neglected circumstances may be introduced through market participation, but rejects administrative price improvement as epistemically incoherent.

Aber die Idee, daß wir ein Signal verbessern können, von dem wir nicht wissen, was es bedeutet, ist eine Absurdität.

English translation: But the idea that we can improve a signal whose meaning we do not know is an absurdity.

The final movement diagnoses socialism historically. Industrial organization and bureaucracy detached masses from “kommerzielle Moral,” while rationalist philosophy encouraged suspicion toward inherited rules whose utility could not be fully demonstrated. Socialism thus appears as a revival of atavistic demands for visible solidarity, common purposes, and distributive command.

Wenn die Geschichte der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung im wesentlichen eine Geschichte der Überwindung der staatlichen Versuche ist, alte moralische Regeln noch durchzusetzen, so ist die Geschichte des Aufstiegs des Sozialismus die Geschichte des Wiederauflebens der primitiven Gefühle – Gefühle, die dem Menschen physiologisch angeboren sind und deren Zähmung die Entwicklung der Kultur zu verdanken ist.

English translation: If the history of economic development is essentially a history of overcoming the state's attempts still to enforce old moral rules, then the history of the rise of socialism is the history of the revival of primitive feelings—feelings that are physiologically innate in man and whose taming we owe to the development of culture.

Hayek’s rhetoric culminates in a critique of the word “sozial,” which he treats as a semantic solvent that empties liberal institutions of meaning.

Ich glaube, das Wiesel-Wort par excellence ist das Wort »sozial«.

English translation: I believe the weasel-word par excellence is the word "social".

The relevance of the lecture lies in its compressed synthesis of Hayek’s mature themes: spontaneous order, cultural evolution, the knowledge problem, skepticism toward constructivist rationalism, and the defense of liberal rules against moralized planning. Its stark warning is that replacing evolved market coordination with command would not merely reduce efficiency but undermine the material conditions of modern civilization itself.