Liberalism’s Last Man

Liberalism’s Last Man is, in many respects, one of the most remarkable contributions to Hayekian scholarship post-1989, the year that Hayek’s vision of social order and his analysis of comparative economic systems received the ultimate validation in the collapse of the Soviet system. Vikash Yadav’s book is outstanding in its approach, originality, and relevance.

The book is structured around three dimensions that combine in an ingenious way and reinforce each other. First, it focuses on a single work by Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). By providing a reading of Hayek’s political thought using his highly influential and contentious work as a vehicle, Yadav doesn’t intend to achieve an intellectual history or intellectual biography. He simply wants “to take Hayek’s political thought seriously” (p. viii), to offer a better sense of the architecture of Hayek’s contributions to twentieth-century political thinking, as illuminated by a close examination of this landmark and consequential work. But Yadav goes beyond mere analysis, conceptual reconstruction, and interpretation. He engages in an effort to restate and recalibrate Hayek’s ideas for the circumstances of the twenty-first century. In this respect, the book is unique, long overdue, and by all accounts, an outstanding and successful enterprise.

The author manages to achieve his most important objective: to take, one by one, Hayek’s major themes and perspectives and to demonstrate their relevance and applicability to the current circumstances of the beginning of the third millennium. Yadav’s project echoes Hayek’s own idea about how the classical liberal tradition should adapt and evolve over time as societies and institutions change: “If old truths are to retain their hold on man’s mind, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations” (p. viii).

The book is thus an extended argument for the revival of liberalism in the twenty-first century. With that end in view, it sets the stage for understanding the current circumstances by pointing out that they are dominated by the rivalry between two types of systems: on the one hand, “political capitalism” (as developed, for instance, in China or Singapore) and, on the other hand, “liberal meritocratic capitalism” associated with Western advanced industrial democracies, especially the United States. With the stage set, Yadav proceeds by examining each chapter of The Road to Serfdom, aiming to identify its key points and main theses. He meticulously interprets them in the context of Hayek’s book, Hayek’s broader thinking, and the historical circumstances in which Hayek wrote. Then he turns to the relevance of these theses or arguments to our current circumstances.

In most cases, Yadav finds Hayek’s positions both cogent and relevant. In some cases, he identifies either weaknesses in the initial arguments or the necessity to recalibrate them to remain relevant to today’s problems. The list is impressive in itself. For instance, he discusses the ideological origins of socialism and its clash with liberal meritocratic capitalism, the alternatives to classical liberalism, and whether socialism and national socialism are part of the same genus, collectivism. Other topics include, as one may expect, a critique of centralized planning; the rule of law as a mechanism to restrain centralized planning; the relationship between economic performance and good governance; the issue of economic, religious, and racial inequality; the support of minimum income and social insurance; the problem of adverse selection in socialist and totalitarian systems; the role of propaganda and dogmatic indoctrination; and the challenges of organizing an international order based on liberal principles.

This fascinating list of themes closely follows the chapter structure of The Road to Serfdom and the broad architecture of Hayek’s political thought. In all cases, Yadav’s interpretation adds significant value to our understanding of the nature, context, and substance of Hayek’s thought. Also, he elaborates in very insightful ways on its relevance in contemporary settings.

One of the immense merits of the book is that it is written by an author who is fully aware of the strange predicament of classical liberalism in the last thirty years or so, after its triumph in 1989. From the very beginning, Yadav describes the current retreat of liberalism as at least partially an outcome of the “flaccid response” of liberal scholars to nearly four decades of extensive leftist critique of the concept of “neoliberalism.” He notes that this lack of reaction “has left a lacuna in academia even as capitalism in its various forms has spread globally” (p. 1). The implications of this hard-to-explain attitude for the weakening position of liberalism’s stance in the broader climate of opinion in the West and at the global level have been massive.

Indeed, Yadav puts his finger on one of the most curious episodes of recent intellectual history. For more than three decades, the epistemic community of libertarians and classical liberals had almost no reaction to the emergence, expansion, and then explosion of an entire literature dedicated to an ideological critique of a dogmatic and extravagant nature, targeting a cartoonish straw man called “neoliberalism.” They left unanswered an almost unmatched assault on the principles, theories, and values of a classical liberal nature. The situation became even more bizarre as the largest part of this literature escalated to unprecedented levels of sloppy scholarship, was more denunciatory than analytical or empirical, and, in some cases, bordered on conspiracy theory. It was only very late in the game, after the outlandish abuses featured in works such as Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains (2017, New York: Viking), that a timid reaction started to emerge, mostly in a defensive mood.

How did that happen? How the formidable victory of 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet system, could have transmuted into such complacency and feebleness among classical liberal and libertarian intellectuals and academics is a different story in itself. In the context of this review, the important thing is that there should be no surprise that a book like Yadav’s, attempting to update and make Hayekian ideas relevant for the present circumstances, had to wait so many years to be written. The book can therefore also be seen as a thoughtful, balanced, and vigorous response to the aforementioned assault. Hence another of its major merits.

Probably the most significant contribution of the book, apart from its attempt to modernize and update the entire set of Hayekian ideas about liberalism and political order, lies in its accurate identification of the primary challenge to classical liberalism in our current times. Yadav repeatedly elucidates the need to recalibrate Hayek’s ideas, not in response to the threat of a potential resurgence of twentieth-century fascism or communism, but in response to a new political-economic system unique to the twenty-first century: political capitalism. The twenty-first century, he makes clear, “is unlikely to be characterized by a simple ideological reenactment of the Cold War” (pp. 1–2). With that, the author distances himself from the too-prevalent approach in the Hayekian scholarship tradition, which operates in most cases under the assumption that the twentieth-century (and especially Cold War) categories of alternative economic and political systems are still framing the current political and ideological evolutions.

At the core of the argument is a concern that “liberal meritocratic capitalism” is unable to compete successfully with “political capitalism” when it comes to economic performance. This is why the real challenge to liberalism in the twenty-first century is the emergence of this new type of system in countries like China, Vietnam, and Singapore, and its spread all over the world. A lackluster economic performance would make liberal states lose their capacity to defend or shape a world defined by liberal values. The book argues that in order to respond to this challenge, liberal democratic societies must not only be restructured along institutional lines but must also refocus on the “moral foundations of individual freedom” (pp. 178–79).

Given the critical role that political capitalism plays in the book’s architecture, we need to focus more on it. That will give the reader a better sense of the ambition, depth, and relevance of Yadav’s contribution. Political capitalism is defined as “an alternative form of capitalism associated with an efficient technocratic bureaucracy, the absence of the rule of law, and the autonomy of the state in matters of private capital and civil society” (p. 2).

An ability to deliver economic performance is the foundation of the legitimacy of these types of regimes. The majority of production is in the private sector, and the majority of economic decision-making is market oriented rather than centrally planned. That explains the label “capitalism.” The state apparatus is technocratic, with a view to delivering economic performance. This apparatus is relatively autonomous from the owners of capital, and it is able to control and coerce those owners, if needed. Similarly, it has state-run control over the workers. To build up policies, it uses a variety of mechanisms to ensure state autonomy—not just regulations but also propaganda, anticorruption campaigns, and purges, for instance. These explain the label “political.” Therefore, the system is geared toward economic performance, but at the same time, it does so to the detriment of individual liberty. That, argues the author, should concern us profoundly.

A supporter of political capitalism, writes Yadav, may justifiably ask: What is the problem? If political capitalism generates sustained prosperity and order for its citizens and manages to do so in a much more effective way than old-style liberal capitalism, why be concerned, and why try to revive a system that is not only exhausted but also unable to compete?

The fear of political capitalism expressed in this book, responds Yadav, is neither that it will “create prosperity in Asia” nor that “the resurgence in China will displace American hegemony, for hegemonic decline is inevitable” (p. 8). Rather, it is that political capitalism represents a prosperous future with limited scope for individual autonomy and freedom. The relevance and the defense of meritocratic liberal capitalism ultimately stand not in its technical abilities and efficiency but in the fact that it represents the architecture supporting and mobilizing the intrinsic value of liberty. The book hence embraces a profound normative position: individual liberty is fundamental because “individual liberty is the source and condition of most moral values” (p. 8).

Liberal meritocratic capitalism is a system in which human freedom is both a resource and a foundational principle as well as a final objective of social order. It is a system of “natural liberty that is open to talent and possesses no formal legal or religious barriers to achievement” (p. 9). It is at the same time a defense against repressive social structures. The major concern is that this system is becoming increasingly rigid and dysfunctional: “A liberal capitalist system that is unable to escape the ossifying process and the inequality and discrepancies created by the fusion of political and economic corruption, will inevitably slouch towards a plutocratic form that will culminate in political capitalism and authoritarianism” (p. 10).

To escape that fate, we need to reengage with the classical liberal tradition in a profound way, and to do that, we need to take Hayek’s political thought seriously. We now have a clearer image of the context in which the book views the multiple dimensions on which liberalism, guided by Hayek’s ideas, may prepare and launch its revival in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century.

As already noted, each chapter brings new insights in this respect. One of the most important insights is related to the impact of government policy on the political character of the people. The author insistently draws our attention to the connection between institutions, psychological change, and the character of the people. He is concerned that, although Hayek was very clear about that connection, we have failed to recognize the role of morality, values, and culture in governance and economic systems. The future revival of liberalism depends on understanding that liberal civilization is not only a civilization of the rule of law or institutional structures, but also a complex order of values, norms, culture, and psychological and sociological profiles.

At this point, Yadav’s enterprise visibly converges with other lines of research within (or inspired by) the Austrian economics tradition that have emerged in the last ten years or so. It is thus surprising that the author has failed to reference and engage another groundbreaking book related to the Austrian economics tradition that was published recently. It is Erwin Dekker’s Viennese Students of Civilization (2016, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dekker’s book contends that the Austrian economists, including Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, have been interpreted too narrowly, as typical social scientists, while their work was much broader, focusing on the study and defense of a liberal civilization. He emphasizes the significance of civilization in their work and their perception of their own responsibilities toward it, especially given the fragility of a civilization based on liberal principles and the fact that it was under attack from all sides. Dekker invites us to reread the corpus of literature produced by these thinkers, as well as their positions, in light of their self-identification as students of that civilization, rather than as mere social scientists or social engineers. Seen in conjunction with Dekker’s book, which is in itself another form of revisionist history of the Austrian tradition, Yadav’s contribution gains a new, even broader and bolder dimension.

Yadav’s vision is one of a universal civilization. He is convinced that Eurocentric Western liberalism is exhausted. The future of “meritocratic liberal capitalism” is global, based on a fusion that transcends its European and Western roots. He thinks in terms of what V. S. Naipaul called in his famous Manhattan Institute lecture “our universal civilization.” Dekker’s book provides the foundation for understanding the roots of this way of thinking in the Austrian tradition and the way that tradition contributes to its defense and growth. Both Dekker’s and Yadav’s works are significant contributions to the emergence of this classical liberal revival at the global level. Such contributions have been long overdue and should be applauded and emulated. Not only are they based on the letter and textual analysis of the Austrian and Hayekian writings, but they also reflect their spirit and aspirations in a profound and fertile way.