Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Hayek and Rand on reason

I am organizing a session for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme is “Reason in Hayek and Rand.”

Here we have two giants of twentieth-century thought, but few comparative studies have been done. So as a start I have chosen Reason as a focusing theme and have solicited papers from several scholars on topics such as the following:

* How does Friedrich Hayek’s account of reason compare to Ayn Rand’s?

* Hayek is more focused on reason’s role in social causation while Rand is more focused on reason as an individual phenomenon. True?

* Is it accurate to say that Hayek is a sociologist of reason while Rand is a philosopher of reason?

* Hayek is an empiricist, broadly speaking, as is Rand, but Hayek’s reason is more Humean while Rand’s is more Aristotelian. True?

* Hayek has been interpreted as being a skeptic about reason and as tending to postmodernism (e.g., by Theodore Burczak). True? And if so, does this put him in direct contrast to Rand, who is a strong anti-skeptic?

* Hayek sometimes seems ambivalent about the relation between reason-based discoveries of social science and normative issues. Rand tightly integrates reason’s descriptive and normative functions. Issue here?

* On socialism: Hayek argues a reason-as-fatal-conceit thesis, while Rand places the blame primarily on an ultimately irrational altruism. Are these interpretations complementary or in conflict?

When the session’s panel is finalized, I’ll post it.

“Nietzsche and the Nazis” update

Since its 2006 publication, my 2:45-hour documentary on Nietzsche and the Nazis has been available from Amazon, Netflix, and other venues.

Beginning this summer, Netflix has made the documentary available via video-stream, which has led to a healthy uptick in feedback — including gratifying praise, interesting new angles, thoughtful disagreement — and a smattering of ad hominem and/or otherwise vituperative attacks from those whose interpretations of National Socialism or Nietzsche are very different than mine.

Probably par for the course when dealing with such weighty matters and polarizing political movements and philosophers.

This summer I have been turning the script into a manuscript (and am almost finished). The manuscript includes the footnotes for all the key quotations and assertions, along with a full bibliography. This will enable scholars and other interested thinkers to check everything for accuracy and to use it for other scholarly purposes.

The script and manuscript are in 38 sections [pdf of the scene selection menu]. The plan is to release the manuscript sections serially over the next few months, each section containing the text, relevant images, and being available in both HTML and PDF formats. When all of the sections of the manuscript have been released, a full version in PDF will also be made available.

Alongside that process, I will post in response to the many very good emails I’ve been receiving from those who have watched the documentary. By far, the most email I’ve been receiving focuses on the two most controversial interpretive points in the documentary:

1. On the Nazis: I argue that they were socialists and anti-capitalist. .
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2. On Nietzsche: I argue that he is an individualist only in a very limited sense and that he is much more a collectivist than he is an individualist. .

Those two theses have generated the most heat, so in near-future blog posts I will take up two important issues:

Were the Nazis really socialists?
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Was Nietzsche an individualist or a collectivist?

If those issues interest you, please sharpen your debating skills, brush up on your history and philosophy, and prepare for some serious intellectual fun.

[Go to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

The four healthcare debates

Like many of you, I am engaged with thinking through the healthcare proposals and debates and am occasionally frustrated with the scattered focus and the talking past the other guy’s position. So, as a start, I propose a clarification of the questions involved.

As I see it, the overall healthcare discussion is a four-dimensional debate:

1. Ethics: Is health primarily an individual self-responsibility or a collective responsibility? Should I see myself as responsible for my own health decisions and finances, or should we all see ourselves as mutually responsible for our health decisions and finances? This is the debate between the individualist-self-responsibility-egoist axis and the communitarian-collective-responsibility-altruist axis.

2. Civil society: What is the power of voluntary, decentralized institutions such as for-profit physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies and non-profit institutions such as the United Way, the Red Cross, charity hospitals, volunteers and pro bono professionals? Are they sufficient to supply our health care needs, with particular focus on the needs of those who are poorer or less capable? This is the debate between the optimists and the pessimists about the power of voluntary civil society.

3. Politics: What is the proper use of government as a centralized, compulsory institution? Is its role properly limited to protecting our lives, liberties, and property, or is its role properly expanded to include the provision of key values such as health care? This is the debate between the libertarians at one end of the political spectrum and the socialists at the other end.

4. Economics: For any health delivery system, how absolutely and comparably effective will it be at delivering quality, quantity, and innovation in health? This is the debate between those who argue that free markets deliver those goods better and those who argue that governments do.

And some follow-up questions:

Are these the four main issues?
Are there important sub-issues that should be highlighted?
Which of the four is/are most controversial?
Which of the four is/are actually driving the current debates over health care?

Architecture and politics

How structures concretize a political system’s core social dynamic:

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Feudalism: Build walls to keep the enemy out.
Examples: the medieval castle, the Great Wall of China.
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Socialism: Build walls to keep your people in.
Examples: the Berlin Wall, the Koreas’ DMZ.
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Capitalism: Create glass wall storefronts to attract other people.
Example: the shopping mall.
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So here’s a question: Is the above a cheap shot or an essential truth?

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault
Scholargy Publishing, 2004.

The following scholarly reviews have been published:
Professor Gary Jason in Liberty
Professor Curtis Hancock in The Review of Metaphysics (and can be read online here)
Professor Marcus Verhaegh in The Independent Review
Dr. David Gordon in The Mises Review
Professor Max Hocutt in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
Professor Steven M. Sanders in Reason Papers.

[Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
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