Friedrich August von Hayek, “‘Literarism’ versus ‘Scientism’”

Friedrich August von Hayek’s published letter to the editor, originally printed in the Times Literary Supplement on May 21, 1970, and supplied here in a 2022 republication with editorial notes, seeks to restore precision to the term “scientism.” Its argument moves from a recollection of Hayek’s 1942 definition to a revised account centred on the difference between simple and complex phenomena. The governing distinction is between scientific inquiry and the indiscriminate transfer of methods: scientism names a methodological prejudice, not science itself.

The editorial notes locate the letter in a controversy prompted by F. R. Leavis’s defence of literature against the educational and cultural dominance of science. Leavis’s concerns included the inadequacy of scientific analysis to human creativity and the treatment of universities as institutions of technological utility. Hayek’s intervention addresses a narrower issue. He protests that the fashionable, vague use of “scientism” has deprived the word of its specific meaning. Rather than taking sides in a general opposition between literary and scientific culture, he asks what makes a purportedly scientific approach inappropriate to its subject.

Hayek recalls defining scientism in Economica in 1942 as the slavish imitation of the methods and language of natural science, distinguished from the general spirit of disinterested inquiry. On that account, an approach can borrow the outward habits of science while violating its intellectual discipline: it decides how a subject must be investigated before adequately considering the subject itself. Hayek then specifies the original direction of his criticism:

The target of my criticism then was not the natural scientists, but the majority of the sociologists.

This clarification prevents his earlier argument from becoming a blanket indictment of natural science. The problem lay in the adoption of its procedures elsewhere without sufficient attention to their applicability. Yet Hayek also qualifies his original formulation. Having learned more about scientific method, chiefly from Karl Popper, he would now express the argument differently. He notes that scientists themselves can misunderstand scientific method, so professional identity offers no guarantee against methodological prejudice.

The revised account shifts attention from imitation between disciplines to the explanatory demands of different kinds of phenomena:

The characteristic feature of scientism now seems to me that it insists on applying the techniques that were developed for the explanation of essentially simple phenomena to the explanation of essentially complex phenomena.

The distinction is consequential because successful techniques are not thereby universally transferable. Hayek identifies the explanatory success of physical laws that represent one magnitude as a function of two or three others. His objection is not to those achievements, but to treating their form as the necessary model for every adequate explanation. Some phenomena depend on interactions that cannot be captured through such restricted relations.

There exist in the world essentially complex phenomena in the sense that they occur only when a great multiplicity of different events interact—events which are yet not numerous enough to make them accessible to statistical treatment.

This sentence gives complexity a specific methodological meaning. Multiplicity alone does not make a phenomenon statistically tractable. Hayek identifies cases in which many different events interact, yet their number remains insufficient for statistical treatment. The difficulty therefore cannot simply be resolved by moving from a few-variable law to aggregate statistics. Invoking Warren Weaver’s “problems of organised complexity,” Hayek concludes that scientism has harmed the scientific treatment of precisely these cases.

The letter’s relevance lies in its concise reformulation of a criticism of methodological overreach. It preserves the aspiration to scientific explanation while denying that one successful explanatory technique supplies a universal standard. Its central move is to make the character of the phenomenon, rather than the prestige of an established method, determine the appropriate approach to inquiry. Within the surrounding literary controversy, Hayek thus redirects attention from the authority of science to the conditions under which particular scientific methods genuinely explain.