In this respect, a large chunk of social conservatives and big-government liberals should be classified as anti-liberal, whereas a minority of moderate politicians in both parties qualify. The claims from these researchers are actually very tentative and qualified.įrom what I understand about Wolfe’s thesis, he really views liberalism as an anthropological cathegory, which is better described by experience and culture. And I see Wolfe’s dim view of the reach of Evolutionary Psychology equally ignorant. Hayek’s intuitions about resilience and adaptability are much easier to grasp by people educated in Biology, Physics or Economics. Wolfe is thinking like a mid 20th-century humanist with no training in the sciences. It is actually eliciting information and making it more visible but on a local scale. The market is a metaphor for voluntary exchange, and the latter is not hiding anything. Wolfe COMPLETELY misunderstands Hayek’s view of the “market”. I cannot imagine how Hayek (and Popper and Wittgenstein, to complete my austrian trinity) could not be considered mainstream liberals. Wolfe offers a consequentialist argument (“it’s about what works”), and is in my opinion very weak. A fortiori, there is hardly any prescription on government size. If individual autonomy is the organising, self-evident principle, there is no direct connection between it and equality as a welfare objective.
However, I think that the relationship between utilitarianism and substantive liberalism is not an easy one. In the same non-empty set I would put Amartya Sen, who emphasizes not equality, but enablement (“functioning”) for the poor. There is a point of contact between modern liberalism (as embodied by Rawls) and classical liberalism. I should point out that prominent conservative economists (e.g., Feldstein, or Friedman) favor policies in favor of the worse-off. The podcast made me want to read the book.
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