F. A. Hayek, “Freedom of Choice”

“Freedom of Choice” is a letter to the editor published in The Times on August 3, 1978, and republished in the supplied 2022 version with explanatory editorial notes. Responding to William Wallace’s challenge to identify an authoritarian government that protected freedom better than a democracy, Hayek distinguishes individual liberty from democratic government. His central claim is that democracy is valuable principally as a means of securing liberty, peace, and orderly political succession, rather than as a supreme value independent of those ends. The letter moves from a clarification of his position through controversial historical comparisons to an argument about democracy’s institutional preconditions. The accompanying notes contextualize the dispute and challenge the evidential basis of his examples.

Hayek begins by denying that he generally prefers authoritarian government as a safeguard of freedom:

I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary.

This qualification governs the argument that follows. Hayek presents himself as defending the possibility of exceptions to a general preference for democracy, not reversing that preference. Nevertheless, the exceptions carry substantial argumentative weight: they are intended to demonstrate that the method by which governments obtain power does not, by itself, establish how securely individuals enjoy liberty. Democracy and freedom must therefore be assessed separately rather than treated as interchangeable descriptions of a political order.

His first example is ancient Athens. He asserts that subjects were safer under the “thirty tyrants” than under the democracy that executed Socrates and exiled prominent citizens through arbitrary decrees. The comparison directs attention toward restraints on governmental action rather than popular participation in government. The letter then extends the argument to modern regimes:

In modern times there have of course been many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.

Hayek cites the early Salazar government in Portugal and makes a sweeping comparison with contemporary countries across several continents. He then invokes his encounters in Chile, reporting that he could find nobody who disputed that personal freedom was greater under Pinochet than under Allende. Monaco and Lichtenstein provide further examples of governments whose imperfectly democratic character, he suggests, does not imply an absence of personal liberty. These cases are offered as counterexamples to a necessary connection between democracy and freedom; the letter supplies no systematic definition or comparative measure of the liberty at issue.

The editorial apparatus makes this evidential limitation central to reading the reprint. Its note on Portugal identifies restrictions on association, the suppression of political alternatives, censorship, and secret-police activity under Salazar. Its discussion of Chile records a correspondent’s objection that the absence of dissent could reflect imprisonment, exile, murder, or enforced silence rather than agreement. It also recounts Nicholas Kaldor’s criticism, Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to regard some Chilean measures as acceptable within Britain’s democratic institutions, and evidence that Hayek had already received warnings about human-rights abuses. These notes do not merely supply background: they contest his use of apparent agreement and personal observation as evidence of freedom. The letter’s abstract distinction between democratic procedure and liberty can be considered separately from the credibility of the regimes selected to illustrate it.

Hayek next makes explicit the hierarchy of political values underlying these comparisons:

That a limited democracy is probably the best possible known form of government does not mean that we can have it everywhere, or even that it is itself a supreme value rather than the best means to secure peace, a defensor pacis or instrument of peaceful change of government.

“Limited” is the crucial qualification. Hayek endorses democracy while refusing to make popular decision-making an unrestricted source of legitimate power. His emphasis here falls on its capacity to preserve peace and permit changes of government without violence. The argument consequently shifts from whether democracy is desirable to when it is possible. A preferred governmental form cannot simply be assumed to work independently of the institutions and traditions surrounding it.

The final paragraph sharpens this problem through democracy’s founding procedures. Except in a direct assembly of all citizens, Hayek argues, democracy depends on prior decisions by a few people, including decisions about plebiscitary questions and voting procedures. He calls these decisions authoritarian and adds that military power has sometimes made democracy possible. The conceptual move separates the creation of democratic arrangements from their subsequent operation. Yet the letter does not establish why procedural choices by a limited number of founders necessarily constitute authoritarian rule, nor explain how military intervention would reliably produce enduring constitutional restraints.

Its closing sentence supplies the principal institutional condition:

And my old doubts whether a democracy can be maintained in a country which has not by different institutions been taught the tradition of the rule of law has certainly been only confirmed by recent history.

For Hayek, democracy’s durability depends on a prior tradition of legally constrained power; electoral arrangements alone cannot supply that tradition. The letter’s lasting relevance lies in the tension between this insistence on institutional limits and its permissive treatment of particular dictatorships. It asks an important question about the relationship between majority rule and individual protection, while the editorial notes expose how claims to protect freedom can discount repression. Read together, letter and apparatus preserve both Hayek’s distinction between democracy as a mechanism and liberty as an end, and the unresolved burden of proving that his authoritarian examples actually served that end.