Friedrich August von Hayek, Leonard Read

Hayek’s Leonard Read, republished in 2013, is a commemorative essay based on a speech delivered on October 4, 1968, celebrating Read’s seventieth birthday and his work at the Foundation for Economic Education. Its structure moves from a definition of the Foundation’s mission through a condensed account of civilisation’s development to a personal reassessment of Read’s intellectual contribution. The tribute supplies an occasion for Hayek to explain both what defending a free society requires and why communicating its principles is itself a demanding intellectual achievement.

Hayek begins by suggesting that the Foundation’s modest institutional name understates its purpose. Economic education concerns more than prosperity, comfort, or growth: its ultimate stakes are the survival of a civilisation whose achievements depend on institutions and values insufficiently understood by those who would reconstruct them.

I believe that what the Foundation for Economic Education, with Leonard Read at its head, and all his co-fighters and friends are committed to is nothing more nor less than the defence of our civilisation against intellectual error.

The phrase organises the essay’s argument. “Civilisation” enlarges the object of concern beyond economic performance; “intellectual error” identifies the danger as a mistaken understanding of social development rather than simply wicked intentions. Hayek insists that this formula is a literal definition of a common task, not ceremonial praise. His tribute to Read consequently rests on an account of the relationship between freedom, inherited rules, and the limits of deliberate planning.

The first substantive section contests the belief that humanity built civilisation according to a preconceived design. Had people confined their development to plans based on the knowledge available at any earlier moment, Hayek argues, they would have remained poorer, less knowledgeable, and less humane. He includes moral improvement—and specifically increased concern for one’s neighbour—among the achievements that planning cannot adequately explain. An essentially free society allowed practices conducive to peaceful and progressive coexistence to prevail without anyone first comprehending their eventual effects.

But our civilisation is indeed largely an unforeseen and unintended outcome of our submitting to moral and legal rules which were never 'invented' with such a result in mind, but which grew because those societies which developed them piecemeal prevailed at every step over other groups which followed different rules, less conducive to the growth of civilisation.

The crucial conceptual move is to make freedom compatible with submission to inherited rules. These rules are not merely restrictions upon an independently existing social order: they help constitute the conditions under which that order can develop. Their emergence is piecemeal, and their persistence reflects the comparative success of societies practising them. Even the values by which people judge civilisation belong to this historical process; they cannot simply be treated as fully formed objectives that preceded it.

Hayek names the opposing outlook “rationalist constructivism.” Associated here with a tendency gaining strength since the Age of Reason, it demands that obligatory rules serve clearly recognisable, foreseeable purposes. The mistake is to infer from incomplete understanding that a practice lacks justification. Hayek acknowledges that knowledge of how traditional rules sustain social order develops only gradually. His warning therefore rests on a disparity between the speed of criticism and the slower achievement of adequate explanation: values can be discarded before their indispensable functions are understood. He describes this danger as the destruction of values through scientific error, directing his criticism at intellectual overconfidence rather than at inquiry itself.

The second movement draws an ethical and argumentative consequence from this diagnosis. If harmful programmes arise from mistaken explanations, their advocates need not have dishonourable ends.

It seems to me that the worst mistake a fighter for our ideals can make is to ascribe to our opponents dishonest or immoral aims.

Hayek does not deny irritation with political demagoguery, but distinguishes such reactions from an assessment of the serious thinkers behind opposing positions. Their ultimate ideals, he maintains, often resemble those of defenders of freedom; disagreement chiefly concerns the means and social mechanisms through which those ideals can be achieved. This shifts responsibility back onto his own side. Failure to persuade may reveal unstated premises or inadequately developed reasoning, not merely an opponent’s obstinacy.

Our chief task therefore must still be to improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests.

The concluding tribute presents Read as especially capable of meeting that obligation. Hayek distinguishes specialists, whose arguments may reach only other specialists, from practical people who perceive defects in prevailing beliefs but cannot necessarily explain them. Read joins intellectual understanding to familiarity with the practical person’s outlook. His accessible language makes difficult arguments usable without reducing their substance.

Hayek then revises his own earlier judgement. When Read was invited to the Mont Pèlerin meeting twenty-one years before, Hayek primarily regarded him as an effective interpreter of libertarian ideas for the public. Experience revealed something more.

But I found also that he was a profound and original thinker who disguised the profundity of his conclusions by putting them into homely everyday language, and that those of us who for a time, and perhaps somewhat condescendingly, had seen in him mainly a populariser found that they had a great deal to learn from him.

This admission gives the tribute its distinctive force: clarity is not evidence of intellectual shallowness, and communication need not be subordinate to discovery. Read contributes to the development of ideas as well as their circulation. Ending with confidence in his future achievements, Hayek connects personal esteem to the essay’s broader relevance: defending freedom requires better explanations of inherited institutions, charitable engagement with opponents, and thinkers able to make those explanations intelligible beyond academic circles.