Hayek’s vicarious secularization of providential theology

Abstract

Friedrich Hayek’s defense of neoliberal free market capitalism hinges on the distinction between economies and catallaxies. The former are orders instituted via planning, whereas the latter are spontaneous competitive orders resulting from human action without human design. I argue that this distinction is based on an incomplete semantic history of “economy.” By looking at the meaning of “ oikonomia” in medieval providential theology as explained by Giorgio Agamben and Joseph Vogl, I argue how Hayek’s science of catallactics is itself a secularization of providential theology. This exposes Hayek to three criticisms: (1) he unjustifiably neglects the possibility of tendencies toward spontaneous disorder in free markets, (2) he condemns the “losers” of neoliberal competition to being providential waste on the road to general prosperity, and (3) he imposes on people the duty to consent to a neoliberal order that hinders them from cultivating their inoperativity.

Spontaneous order and civilization: Burke and Hayek on markets, contracts and social order

“…1 There has not been an extensive comparative treatment of Hayek and Burke since Raeder's essay was published over 20 years ago, however. In light of a growing body of scholarship that has cast a measure of doubt on the analytic import of spontaneous order (Christiaens 2019;de Benoist 1998;Luban 2020;Muller 2007;Sandefur 2009), the purpose of this article is to rethink their relationship by suggesting that reading the idea of spontaneous order, perhaps the fundamental concept in Hayek's political philosophy, into Burke's thought introduces greater frictions between the two thinkers than prior scholars have suggested. While Burke and Hayek possessed noticeable similarities in their views on the virtues of markets and the limits of reason, I argue that assigning prominence to their antirationalist inclinations overlooks key conceptual tensions and historical examples in Burke's political life that call into question whether spontaneous order accurately captures the depth of his thought and statesmanship.…”

Technologies of (in)security: Masculinity and the complexity of neoliberalism

“…In order to adequately grapple with neoliberal theory, it must be confronted at its point of greatest strength. Christiaens (2019) has argued that Hayek's position is, in effect, a form of secularised providential theology, with 'the market' occupying the place of an absent God. Hayek's Nobel lecture does little to contradict this claim, as he comments approvingly on 'the Spanish schoolmen of the sixteenth century, who emphasized that what they called pretium mathematicum, the mathematical price, depended on so many particular circumstances that it could never be known to man but was known only to God ' (1989: 5).…”