Article by Mousa Akrami: “Social Justice: A Hayekian Mirage Born of an Atavistic Wish, or an Ancient Attainable Ideal Through the Cooperation of Science and Philosophy?”

Social Justice: A Hayekian Mirage Born of an Atavistic Wish, or an Ancient Attainable Ideal Through the Cooperation of Science and Philosophy?[1]

(A Critique of Friedrich von Hayek, Neoliberalism, and the Persian Translation of One of His Works)

Mousa Akrami

1_ An Important and Influential Philosopher in the Realms of Economic and Political Thought, and the Necessity of Critiquing Him

Friedrich von Hayek, in great fear of state interventionism in general, and fear of the role of the totalitarian state in particular, in his intellectual life—which has mainly dealt with political philosophy, law, and political economy, as well as their philosophical discussions in the field of epistemology and methodology—has striven to level criticisms at the pursuit of justice in the sphere of society in general and at the idea of socialism in particular.

With his particular liberal social philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of economics, in a special reading of the history of socio-economic developments and formations,

Firstly, he presents narratives of history, capitalism, and socialism that are to a large extent uniquely his own and to which serious criticisms can be directed;

Secondly, in connection with the description, analysis, and explanation of the doctrines or ideals of "social justice" (which Hayek always places in quotation marks to show its meaninglessness and his own disbelief in it) and socialism, he has utilized specific phrases in the titles of some of his writings (lecture, book, or article) that reflect his philosophy and have driven his admirers in various countries, including Iran, to clap and dance around them as if, like eloquent and expressive formulas, they do full justice to the incorrectness of the ideals of social justice and socialism;

Thirdly, a number of intellectuals (in the general sense of intellectuality that encompasses all those who theorize and disseminate opinions in connection with the discussions of the public sphere of society), from among the colorful spectra of organic, traditional, intra-governmental, and extra-governmental or pro-government and government-critical intellectuals, with various anti-leftist tendencies, have made Hayek's ideas, alongside the ideas of other anti-leftists, a banner over the marketplace of ideas, proclaiming the destruction of socialist tendencies and dancing for it, writing around Hayek's ideas and their righteousness, and defending his intellectual foundations, political and economic analyses, and quasi-ideological or even ideological positions;

Fourthly, his prescriptions, and those of a number of his like-minded colleagues (especially in the Chicago School, such as Milton Friedman himself), in governments' turn to neoliberal economic policy, with its widespread consequences in domestic and foreign policy, have created catastrophes in countries and for humanity, which, while necessitating calling upon everyone to seriously reconsider this economic policy, must also place on the agenda a re-reading of his philosophical foundations in analyses and explanations on the one hand, and his narrative of the historical reality and the socio-political-economic reality of countries on the other.

In critiquing Hayek's views, as in critiquing the views of any thinker or theorist, one can adopt two kinds of stance: an extra-discursive stance and an intra-discursive stance. In the first stance, the critic does not accept the discursive foundations of Hayek, and their critique is essentially directed at those very foundations or their consequences. Personally, although I deeply sympathize with some of Hayek's concerns regarding the manifestations of totalitarianism, the unbridled interference of government in individual life, and the modern enslavement of individuals against their true interests, I do not accept many of his teachings in epistemology, methodology, anthropology, historical sociology, philosophy of law, philosophy of economics, political philosophy, as well as his narrative of economic, political, and social events in the context of history. Therefore, while I esteem his efforts in representing some of the hidden aspects of economics and politics in the past and present, I count myself among his critics, both regarding his intellectual foundations, his research achievements, and the prescriptive consequences of the entirety of his particular liberalism, and I consider myself one of his extra-discursive critics.

Regardless of the discussion about Hayek's true place in the history of thought in general and in the twentieth century in particular, one cannot ignore his intellectual legacy and the scope of his influence, an intellectual legacy and influence that perhaps

1) the precise weight of each has not been well assessed,

2) the two are not proportionate to each other, and

3) there have been exaggerations regarding both.

In Bruce Caldwell's plan for the collected works of Hayek, this collection comprises twenty volumes which, regardless of whatever stance we may take towards Hayek, it must be said contain fascinating discussions and analyses in the fields of economics, philosophy of economics, political economy, history of economic relations, capitalism, political philosophy (especially the affirmation and expansion of liberalism, as well as the critique of socialism and Nazism), epistemology, and philosophy of science. Hayek's prose is, on the whole, very clear, and his method of narrating and analyzing issues places him largely within the tradition of analytic philosophers in the realm of economics and politics.

Hayek himself, like Karl Popper, had socialist leanings in his earliest youth and then distanced himself from socialism and its ideals, without, like Popper, remaining an admirer of those ideals and an admirer of Marx. While being influenced by a philosopher like Kant, who is the philosophical father of the entire Austrian Empire, he gravitated towards the liberals of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and, apart from being influenced by the giants of classical political and economic liberalism such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, was more influenced by Hume than anyone else, and in an atmosphere heavily influenced by a powerful personality like Ludwig von Mises, he turned towards the empiricism of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and theorized in philosophy, politics, and economics.

There is no opportunity in this writing to critique Hayek's intellectual foundations. Therefore, here I will only look at Hayek's opposition to the idea of social justice and mention some points in critique of it.

In Hayek's view of the ideas of socialism and social justice, three phrases are particularly prominent:

1) "The Atavism of Social Justice", which is the title of Hayek's lecture at the University of Sydney, Australia, on October 6, 1976; Hayek, F. A. (1976)

2) "The Mirage of Social Justice", which is the subtitle of the second volume of the three-volume book "Law, Legislation and Liberty" (Hayek, F. A. [1973, 1976, 1979] (2013));

3) "The Road to Serfdom", which is the title of a famous book by him (published in 1944);

The two books above have been translated into Persian (Hayek, 1392 a, 1392 b, 139. In addition to these two books, the esteemed Ezzatollah Fooladvand has selected and translated chapters and lectures from several of Hayek's books and published them under the title "In the Bulwark of Freedom". (Hayek (1389)

Given that, unfortunately, the two terms “the atavism of social justice” and “the mirage of social justice” reflect Hayek’s incorrect and misleading ideas, and many in political, social, and economic thought have wielded them as winning cards against socialism and social justice, and as a cudgel or sledgehammer against those who, in their view, have had an ancient ancestral disposition—a devotion to social justice—reappear in them after centuries, and have been beguiled by a “mirage” called “social justice,” I shall endeavor, with a glance at historical knowledge and Hayek’s intellectual foundations, to show briefly the incorrectness of his conception of “social justice,” the inaccuracy of his accounts, and the consequences of this conception for political and economic thought.

In this piece, I attend only to the second volume of “Law, Legislation and Liberty” (namely The Mirage of Social Justice) and two lectures by Hayek published in (Hayek 1978) (which, as it happens, have found their way into the selected collection of Professor Fooladvand), and I do not deal with The Road to Serfdom, even though it raises discussions that could have been useful in a broader examination of the subject of this piece.

I am compelled here, while maintaining respect for the esteemed translators of the two books “Law, Legislation and Liberty” and “The Road to Serfdom,” to respectfully submit that, despite all their efforts, inexcusable inaccuracies have crept into these books. Therefore, I humbly request that they place a re-examination and re-editing of the resulting work on their agenda for the next printing of the books. (In the appendix to this article, I will show examples of inaccuracies in the translation of the second volume of “Law, Legislation and Liberty”).

Among the works Dr. Ghaninejad has published to introduce Hayek and Hayek’s ideas, he has dedicated a piece to the concept of “the mirage of social justice” (under this very title), which was first published in the journal Nameh-ye Farhang (Ghaninejad 1372) and later in the book “About Hayek” (Ghaninejad 1381).

2_ The Reappearance of the Inclination Toward Social Justice as an Ancestral Trait

In the title of his 1976 lecture, Hayek used the term atavism, to whose precise meaning, unfortunately, neither of the two Persian translators of the lecture paid attention: one considered it “dead inheritance” (Hayek 1389) and the other translated it as “ancestral inheritance” (Hayek 1394). Moayeri-Ghaninejad, in the second volume of “Law, Legislation and Liberty,” rendered it as “ancestorism.”

The word atavism is originally a biological term (which psychologists may also use). Its meaning is the reappearance of an ancestral hereditary characteristic of a biological organism (such as a specific behavior or trait) after its concealment or apparent disappearance over several generations. It can be considered as lineage-recurrence, lineage-resemblance, or lineage-reversion, provided it is noted that the ancestral characteristic in question returns not to children or grandchildren who are a short distance from the ancestor or ancestors, but to descendants separated by several generations from that ancestor or ancestors. Since Hayek was familiar with biology and psychology, it can be said that he used this word with attention to its biological/psychological meaning. Therefore, perhaps atavism can be translated as “the reappearance of an ancestral trait,” and translating “the atavism of social justice” as “the reappearance of the ancestral trait [of devotion] to social justice” can be accepted.

Hayek used this word three times in the book “New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas”: once in the title of the University of Sydney lecture (Hayek1978, pp. 57-68), and twice in another lecture titled Adam Smith's Message in Today's Language (in Hayek1978, pp. 267-268).

In the text of the University of Sydney lecture, Hayek makes no direct use of this term, but one can arrive at an understanding of what he implicitly has in mind. Within the constraints of this piece, I shall endeavor to show Hayek’s implicit and explicit uses of the term “atavism” in those two lectures, as well as in “Law, Legislation and Liberty.”

A. In the lecture entitled “Adam Smith’s Message in Today’s Language”

1) After opposing the view of those who consider Adam Smith a proponent of “selfishness” and also referring to his view on the necessity of paying individuals according to the value of their services, Hayek considers his teachings to be opposed to this “deeply ingrained instinct” inherited from the clan or tribe, that is, the “older face-to-face society” in which “over hundreds of thousands of years, emotions developed that still command man after he has entered the open society.” (Hayek 1978, p. 268)

Now the ground seems prepared for Hayek to use the term atavism: “Thus the demand for ‘social justice,’ the demand for allocating shares of material wealth to various people and groups according to their needs or merits, upon which all socialism rests, is an atavism, a demand that cannot be reconciled with the open society in which the individual can use his own knowledge for his own purposes.” (Hayek 1978, pp. 268-269)

2) In his lecture, Hayek has a quotation from Adam Smith in which that great classical liberal economist speaks of a person with a “systematic” or “system-believing” attitude who sees society as a chessboard and human beings as chess pieces that must move on that board, without that system-believing person noticing that the chess pieces have no principle of motion other than the hand that moves them. Smith says that “in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.” (Hayek 1978, p. 269)

Smith immediately expresses his view on how the game on the chessboard of society should be played correctly: “If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.” (ibid)

Ending the quotation, and disregarding the two recommendations of that great economist, Hayek proceeds to his own use of this quotation: “The last sentence is not a bad description of our present society. And if we do not abandon this atavism (=the reappearance of an ancestral trait [attachment]) and, following the instincts inherited from the tribe, insist on imposing upon the Great Society principles that presuppose the knowledge of all particular circumstances by its chief, we shall return to the tribal society.” (ibid).

Professor Fooladvand, in the collection “In the Bastion of Freedom,” has used the equivalent “ancestral legacy” in both instances of translating the lecture “Adam Smith’s Message in Today’s Language.”

B. In the book “Law, Legislation and Liberty”

The term atavism is also used twice in this book (pages 304 and 497 of the English text: Hayek 2013), and here I will provide the translation of a few sentences containing this term in both cases:

3) Referring to the failure of man’s first attempt to enter from tribal society into the open society, and stating man’s unpreparedness to abandon the moral attitudes developed for tribal society as its cause, Hayek cites a quotation from José Ortega y Gasset [from The Revolt of the Masses (London, 1932), p. 83] which he has placed at the beginning of the eleventh chapter of the book (in the second volume). Ortega y Gasset wrote there:

“It is well to recall today that liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to coexist with the enemy, [even] more than that, to coexist with the weak enemy. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural a stance. Hence, it is not surprising that this same humanity should soon appear eager to be rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.” (Hayek 2013, p. 291)

After recalling the above quotation from Ortega y Gasset, Hayek immediately writes: “At a time when the vast majority are employed in organizations and have little opportunity to learn the morals of the market, it is quite likely that their intuitive craving for more humane [/more compassionate] and personal morals in accordance with their inherited instincts will destroy the ‘Great Society.’” (Hayek 2013, p. 304)

It is here that Hayek recalls the ideals of socialism and social justice and considers them to be that very atavism:

“Yet it must be realized that the ideals of socialism (or [the ideals of] ‘social justice’) which appear so attractive in such a situation, do not really offer a new morality, but merely appeal to instincts inherited from an earlier type of society. They are a kind of atavism (= the reappearance of an ancestral trait [attachment]), a vain endeavor to impose the morals of the tribal society upon the Open Society which, if they prevail, must not only destroy the ‘Great Society,’ but also threaten the survival of the large numbers [of humans] which three hundred years of the market order have enabled man to attain.” (p. 304)

4) In a section entitled “The Sudden Reappearance of Suppressed Primordial Instincts,” in the lengthy appendix to the eighteenth chapter of the book (the final chapter of the entire book and its third volume), where he addresses “the three sources of human values,” Hayek writes:

“But at present an ever-increasing part of the population of the ‘Western world’ is entering large organizations and thus becoming alienated from those rules of the market that have made the great open society possible. The market economy is largely incomprehensible to them; they have never practiced the rules on which this economy rests, and its results seem to them irrational and immoral. They often see in it merely an arbitrary structure maintained by some malevolent power.” (Hayek 2013, p. 497)

Here, once again, Hayek employs the term atavism:

“As a result, innate instincts long suppressed have reappeared. Thus their demand for a just distribution in which organized power is used to allocate to each what he deserves is an atavism (= the reappearance of an ancestral trait [attachment]), based on primordial [human] emotions. And these emotions are so overwhelming that prophets, moral philosophers, and constructivists appeal to them with their program for creating a conceived new type of society.” (p. 497)

In his University of Sydney lecture, Hayek speaks of atavism in a more specific manner without uttering the term itself. After stating that before “the last ten thousand years, during which man has developed agriculture, cities, and finally the ‘Great Society,’ he lived for at least a hundred times that long in bands of about fifty food-sharing hunters, with a strict order of dominance within a defended common territory” (Hayek 1978, p. 59)

Pointing to the role of “the needs of this primitive ancient type of society” in determining “many of the moral feelings that still govern us and whose presence we approve in others,” Hayek says: “It is highly probable that many of the moral feelings acquired at that time were not merely transmitted culturally through teaching or imitation, but became innate or genetically determined.” (ibid., same place)

Hayek immediately adds:

«ولی چنین نیست که هر آنچه بدین معنا برای ما طبیعی است ضرورتاً در شرایط متفاوت برای گسترش گونه [ی انسان] نیک و سودمند باشد. دستۀ کوچک در شکل بدوی خود به‌راستی از چیزی برخوردار بود که هنوز برای بسیاری از مردمان بس جذاب است: غایتی یگانه، یا سلسلۀ مراتب مشترکی از اهداف، و شراکتی سنجیده در وسایل بر حسب نظر مشترک در بارۀ شایستگی‌های فردی. ولی این بنیادهای انسجام این شکل از جامعه محدودیت‌هائی را بر بالندگی ممکن آن اعمال می‌کرد. رویدادهائی که گروه می‌توانست خود را با آنها سازگار کند، و فرصت هائی که گروه می‌توانس از آنها سود برد، تنها آن‌هائی بودند که اعضای گروه به گونه‌ئی مستقیم از آنها آگاه بودند. حتی بدتر از این، فرد می‌توانست بخش اندکی از آنچه را دیگران نمی پسندیدند انجام دهد. آزاد دانستن فرد در جامعۀ بدوی یک پندار است. برای یک حیوان اجتماعی هیچ آزادی طبیعی‌ئی وجود نداشت، در حالی که آزادی یکی از محصولات [artifact] تمدن است. فرد در درون گروه هیچ گسترۀ پذیرفته‌ئی برای کنشگری مستقل نداشت؛ حتی رئیس دسته می‌توانست انتظار اطاعت، حمایت، و فهم علائم ارسالی خود را تنها برای فعالیت‌های مرسوم و متعارف داشته باشد. مادامی که هر فرد می‌بایست در خدمت آن نظم سلسله مراتبی برای همۀ نیازها باشد، که سوسیالیست‌های امروزی در رؤیای آن‌اند، هیچ گونه آزمایشگری آزادی برای افراد نمی تواند وجود داشته باشد.» (همان، همان‌جا.»

اینک سخن هایک را، پیش از این که این گزارش/نگرش تاریخی را همراه با نتیجه‌گیری خاص خویش به دست دهد، بهتر می‌توان دریافت:

«دلیل این که چرا بیشتر مردمان باور به «عدالت اجتماعی» را، حتی پس از آن که کشف کرده‌اند که معنای این عبارت را به راستی نمی دانند، همچنان به استواری حفظ می‌کنند این است که فکر می‌کنند هرگاه تقریباً هر کس دیگری بدان باور داشته باشد، می‌بایست چیزی در آن وجود داشته باشد. مبنای این پذیرش تقریباً جهانشمولِ یک باور، که مردمان اهمیت آن را درنمی‌یابند، این است که همۀ ما از جامعۀ متفاوت کهن‌تری، جامعه ئی که انسان در آن بسی درازتر از جامعۀ کنونی زیسته است، غرایز عمیقاً ریشه‌داری را به ارث برده‌ایم که بر تمدن کنونی ما کاربست‌پذیر نیستند.» (Hayek 1978, pp. 58-59)

گفتنی است که هایک در دو کتاب مهم The Road to Serfdom و The Constitution of Liberty واژۀ atavism را به کار نبرده است.

3_ «عدالت اجتماعی» چونان اصطلاحی بی‌معنا

هایک سخنرانی دانشگاه سیدنی، با فرنام «آتاویسم عدالت اجتماعی»، را این گونه آغاز می‌کند:

«کشف معنای آنچه ‘عدالت اجتماعی’ خوانده می‌شود به مدت بیش از ده سال یکی از درگیری‌های فکری مهم من بوده است. من در این کوشش شکست خورده‌ام – یا، به سخن بهتر، به این نتیجه رسیده‌ام که، با در نظر داشتن جامعه ئی از انسان‌های آزاد، این عبارت هیچ معنائی ندارد. ولی جستجو برای دلیل این که چرا با این همه این عبارت چیزی حدود یک سده بر گفت‌وگوی سیاسی چیره بود، و همه جا در طرح ادعاهای گروه‌های خاص برای سهمی بیشتر در چیزهای نیک زندگی با موفقیت به کار بسته شده است، همچنان جستجوئی جالب توجه است.» (Hayek 1978, p. 57).

هایک با اشاره به انتشار قریب الوقوع جلد دوم کتاب «قانون، قانونگذاری و آزادی» این که فرنام آن را «سراب عدالت اجتماعی» گذاشته است می‌گوید: «نخست باید به کوتاهی توضیح دهم [...] چرا به این جا رسیده ام که ‘عدالت اجتماعی’ را چیزی بیش از فرمولی تهی نمی دانم که مطابق معمول برای بیان موجه بودن ادعائی خاص بدون عرضۀ هیچ دلیلی به کار می‌رود. [...] مفهوم ‘عدالت اجتماعی’ [...] فاقد اعتبار عقلی است.» (ibid)

هایک با بیان برخورد سربه‌هوا و نادقیق برخی از روشنفکران به این نکته، از این «نتیجۀ اسف‌بار» سخن می‌گوید که چون «عدالت ‘اجتماعی’» تنها نوع عدالتی است که، به ادعای هایک، آنان بدان اندیشیده‌اند، از این رو نتیجه گرفته‌اند که هیچ یک از کاربردهای واژۀ عدالت محتوای معناداری ندارد.

Hayek continues: “I have accordingly been forced to show in the same book [i.e., the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty] that rules of just individual conduct are as indispensable for the preservation of a peaceful society of free men as are the efforts made to demonstrate the incompatibility of ‘social’ justice with it.” (ibid)

After this, Hayek brings up “distributive justice” in order to express his understanding of “social justice” and to demonstrate its meaninglessness:

“The term ‘social justice’ is now generally used as a synonym for what used to be called ‘distributive justice’. The latter term perhaps gives a better idea of what can be meant by it, and at the same time shows why it cannot be applied to the results of a market economy: where no one distributes, there is no distributive justice. Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rule for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals may conduct themselves as justly as possible, but since the results for separate individuals are neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state can be called neither just nor unjust.” (Hayek 1978, p. 58).

Hayek offers another reason in support of the emptiness of the term “social justice”:

“The complete emptiness of the phrase ‘social justice’ manifests itself in the fact that there is no agreement on what social justice requires in particular instances; also that there is no known test by which, if people disagree, it can be determined who is right, and that no preconceived scheme of distribution can be effectively designed in a society whose individuals are free, in the sense that they are allowed to use their own knowledge for their own purposes. Indeed, the individual moral responsibility for one’s actions is incompatible with the realization of such a desired overall pattern of distribution.” (ibid)

In addition to Hayek equating “social justice” with “distributive justice” and, by denying the existence of anything to distribute, reaching the implicit conclusion that social justice is a mirage,

4_ Hayek’s Understanding of “Social Justice”

In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek identifies the probable meaning of socialism as “the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security,” as its ultimate aims. (Hayek [1944] 2007, p. 108) After referring to the particular method by which most socialists hope to achieve these goals (such as “the abolition of private enterprise and private ownership of the means of production and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ in which a central planning body takes the place of the entrepreneur working for profit” (ibid)), he points to centralized economic activity to bring the distribution of income into conformity with “current ideals of social justice” (p. 109). As far as I have observed, Hayek does not use the phrase “social justice” again in The Road to Serfdom.

The publication of John Rawls’s book entitled A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) was a very important event in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and liberalism. No thinker in these fields, including Hayek, could ignore the publication of this book. An examination of Hayek’s relationship with Rawls requires a separate piece. It is clear that someone like Hayek had to express his stance on the fundamental concept of “social justice,” which had attracted the attention of many thinkers, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, in a more detailed manner. On October 21, 1973, in a lecture entitled “Economic Freedom and Representative Government” (Hayek 1978, pp. 105-118), at the “Royal Society of Arts” in London, he used the phrase “the mirage of social justice”:

“In fact, in a market economy where no single person or group determines who receives what, and individuals’ shares always depend on many contingencies that no one could have predicted, the whole concept of social or distributive justice is empty and meaningless; and therefore no agreement will exist on what is just in this sense. I am not sure that this concept even has a definite meaning in a centralized economy, or that in such a system people would agree on what distribution is just. But I am sure that nothing has destroyed the legal protection of individual freedom so much as the pursuit of the mirage of social justice.” (Hayek 1978, pp. 110-111)

He had for some time been carrying out his important plan to write and publish the major work Law, Legislation and Liberty, which was eventually published in three volumes (1973, 1976, 1979). He gave this book the specific subtitle “the Mirage of Social Justice.” In the book’s introduction, after referring to the aim of Montesquieu and the framers of the American Constitution in providing a limiting constitution and liberal constitutionalism’s adherence to this view, he expresses his opinion that, given the acquisition of extensive powers by governments through that very constitution, what Montesquieu and the framers of the American Constitution intended by the separation of the three powers was not realized. Hayek, referring to the experience of democracy as a form of government in which the will of the majority is unlimited in any sphere, speaks of the ineffectiveness of constitutions in governments and consequently of a function of the constitution that has made possible a government with absolute power. Hayek poses the question: if the founders of liberal constitutionalism, possessing the experience we have gained in the meantime, were today to seek the goals they had in mind, what would they do? Thus, Hayek, believing in the enduring validity of their goals, considers their means inadequate and speaks of the need for new institutional innovation. (Hayek 2013, 1-2)

Hayek, noting that in another book (he means The Constitution of Liberty) he had tried to restate the traditional doctrine of liberal constitutionalism, says that it was after completing this book that he clearly realized, first, why those ideals failed to win the support of the idealists to whom all great political movements are indebted, and second, which prevailing beliefs of our time are irreconcilable with those ideals. He enumerates the main reasons for this transformation as follows: “the loss of the belief in a justice independent of personal interest; a consequent use of legislation to authorize coercion, not merely to prevent unjust action but to achieve particular results for specific persons or groups; and the fusion in the same representative assemblies of the task of articulating the rules of just conduct with the task of directing government.” (ibid)

Now Hayek can speak of his reasons for writing another book on “the same general subject as the earlier book” based on “three fundamental insights” necessary for “preserving a society of free men.” He mentions these three insights as follows:

“The first is that a self-generating or spontaneous order and an organization are distinct, and that their distinctness is related to the two different kinds of rules or laws which prevail in them. The second is that what today is generally regarded as ‘social’ or distributive justice can have meaning only within the second kind of order, the organization; but is meaningless and wholly incompatible with that spontaneous order which Adam Smith called ‘the Great Society,’ and Sir Karl Popper called ‘the Open Society.’ The third is that the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions, in which the same representative body lays down the rules of just conduct and directs government, necessarily leads to the gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system in the service of a coalition of organized interests.” (ibid)

Hayek, as he himself says, devoted the three main parts of the book Law, Legislation and Liberty (subtitled Rules and Order, The Mirage of Social Justice, and The Political Order of a Free People) to these “three fundamental insights.” (ibid)

Thus an important book by Hayek was published, in which the major themes of his political philosophy were set forth. Hayek’s longstanding quarrel with the notion of “social justice” took shape in the middle of the book as a “mirage,” so that, based on his discussions of “rules and order” in the first volume, the way would be paved for the design of Hayek’s desired political order in the third volume. This book is truly one of the important classic works in political philosophy, although I, like many others, may have my own particular criticisms of it.

In all three volumes of this book, Hayek mentions John Rawls by name only once, although he refers to some of his works in several footnotes. That single mention, in the final paragraph of the ninth chapter of the book (or the third chapter of the second volume), adopts a conservative stance toward the important book A Theory of Justice:

“Before leaving this subject I want once more to emphasize that the insight that in combinations such as ‘social,’ ‘economic,’ ‘distributive,’ or ‘retributive’ justice the term ‘justice’ is completely empty should not lead us to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not only is the justice administered by courts, as the basis of the legal rules of just conduct, very important, but there is undoubtedly also a genuine problem of justice in connection with the deliberate design of political institutions, a problem to which Professor John Rawls has recently devoted an important book. My regret, and what I consider a source of confusion, is simply that he employs the term ‘social justice’ in this context. But I have no quarrel with an author who, before addressing that problem, accepts that ‘the task of selecting specific systems or distributions of desired things as just must be abandoned as mistaken in principle, and it is, in any case, not capable of a definite answer. Rather, the principles of justice define the crucial constraints which institutions and joint activities must satisfy to ensure that the persons engaged in them have no complaints against them. If these constraints are satisfied, the resulting distribution, whatever it is, may be accepted as just (or at least not unjust).’ This is more or less what I have tried to show in this chapter.” (Hayek 2013, p. 261)

Hayek takes this quotation from Rawls from the article “Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice,” which Rawls published in 1963, eight years before the publication of A Theory of Justice, in the fourth issue of the journal Nomos. After citing the bibliographic details of this article in the “Notes” section, Hayek says that Rawls wrote before this quotation, “It is the system of institutions which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view.” Hayek then adds an explanation that, astonishingly, shows that at least until the time of writing the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (i.e., 1976), he had not read, or had not read carefully, the important book A Theory of Justice, despite its worldwide fame: “I do not know whether Professor Rawls’s much more widely read book, A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971), speaks more clearly on the central point, which might explain why this work seems often, but in my view erroneously, to have been taken as supporting socialist demands.” As an example, Hayek cites Daniel Bell’s article “On Meritocracy and Equality” in the Fall 1972 issue of Public Interest, in which Bell considers Rawls’s theory “the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialist ethic.” (Hayek 2013, p. 335)

It is worth noting here that, as far as the present author knows, Rawls made no reference to Hayek or his works in his own writings.

It is now time to take a look at the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (i.e., The Mirage of Social Justice).

It is clear that we expect Hayek in this book to focus most intently on defining “social justice” and articulating the issues associated with it. In the second chapter of the book (that is, the ninth chapter of the three-volume set), titled “The Quest for Justice,” he attempts to show

1) Justice is solely an attribute of human conduct (though he believes this attribute can also be applied to governmental and social organizations and institutions. However, applying it to society as a whole, as a spontaneous order, is meaningless and unwarranted.)

2) The rules of just conduct are generally prohibitions against unjust conduct;

3) Both the rules of just conduct and the test of their justness are negative, not positive, and this negative character is of great importance;

4) The criterion for the justness or unjustness of human actions is the degree of their incompatibility with the spontaneous order of the "Great Society" based on the market economy.

Thus, what Hayek presents in the eighth chapter is merely individual justice in the conduct of each person vis-à-vis the spontaneous order of capitalist society based on the relations of supply and demand and the individuals' understanding of its requirements. It is evident that Hayek ignores the entire long tradition of Western political philosophy, especially from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Locke, Mill, Bentham, and Rawls, who would never have reduced the definition of justice, even individual justice, to such a low level.

The reader of the book expects Hayek, in the ninth chapter, titled "'Social' or Distributive Justice," to precisely articulate his understanding of "social justice." Given that he will ultimately link "social justice" to vague notions of "merit," "need," and "welfare," he begins this chapter with two quotations from Hume and Kant, the translation of which is necessary:

1) Quotation from Hume (taken from David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. Ill, part II, Works IV, p. 187 ): "The uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity, and from the self-conceit of each individual, is so great, that no determinate rule of conduct can ever follow from it." (Hayek 2013, 226)

2) Quotation from Kant (taken from Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798), sect. 2, para. 6, note 2) ): "But welfare has no principle, either for the one who receives it or for the one who distributes it (they place it in different positions); for it depends on the material content of the will, which is dependent on particular facts and therefore incapable of a general rule." (ibid)

After these quotations, Hayek begins the first part of this chapter. Having chosen the title "The Concept of Social Justice" for this section, he starts by referring to his own understanding of the concept of justice in connection with individual conduct, as "the foundation and inescapable limitation of all law," and believes that one must resist the misuse of the word justice, a misuse that threatens that conception of law which has made it the protector of individual freedom. This misuse consists of someone applying their understanding of justice in connection with the conduct of individuals toward one another to the joint effects of the actions of a large number of people, even where these effects are unforeseen or unintended. (Hayek 2013, p. 226)

Hayek, with this kind of warning, expresses his understanding of "social" justice or the understanding he considers common:

“'Social' justice (or sometimes 'economic' justice) came to be regarded as an attribute which the 'actions of society,' or the 'treatment' of individuals and groups by society, ought to possess. As primitive thinking usually does when first noticing orderly processes, the results of the spontaneous ordering of the market were interpreted as if some thinking being deliberately directed them, or as if the particular benefits or harms accruing to different persons from them were the results of deliberate acts of will, and could therefore be guided by moral rules. Thus this conception of 'social' justice is a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and require that a process which is impersonal and satisfies human desires more than any deliberate human organization could, should conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.” (Hayek 2013, p. 227)

Thus Hayek

firstly, still believes that “justice” can only be used to describe individual conduct (and organizations possessing a man-made order), not to describe what possesses a spontaneous order and is not the result of conscious planning;

secondly, considers the use of the phrase “social justice” to be the result of anthropomorphism and the imaginary attribution of a personal existence to society, and the ascription of individual human characteristics to that imaginary personal entity;

thirdly, reduces social justice to economic justice in order to then argue against it.

It is with such a conception of the common notion of “social justice” that Hayek goes on to write:

“The use of the term 'social justice' in this sense is relatively new, and apparently no more than a hundred years old. Before that, the phrase was sometimes used to describe organized efforts to enforce the rules of just individual conduct, and today it is sometimes used in scholarly discussion to evaluate the effects of existing institutions of society. But the meaning now generally attributed to it, and constantly invoked in public discourse, and which will be examined in this chapter in that sense, is essentially the same meaning long applied to the phrase 'distributive justice.'”

In Hayek's view, it seems that this meaning for the term social justice has become prevalent since John Stuart Mill used both terms equivalently, and this itself has probably been partly the cause of such prevalence. He quotes John Stuart Mill:

“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost possible degree to converge.” (Hayek 2013, p. 227)

Hayek then has another quotation from John Stuart Mill:

“It is universally considered just that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust that he should obtain a good, or be made to undergo an evil, which he does not deserve. This is, perhaps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it involves the notion of desert, the question arises, what constitutes desert.” (Hayek 2013, pp. 227-228)

Hayek goes on to explain that the first quotation appears in an account of one of the five meanings of justice that John Stuart Mill distinguishes. Four meanings refer to rules of just individual conduct, and this meaning, the fifth, expresses a factual state of affairs whose emergence is possible, but not necessary, through deliberate human decision. In Hayek’s view, it seems that John Stuart Mill was not aware that this fifth meaning refers to situations entirely different from those to which the other four meanings apply. That is, Mill never knew “that this conception of ‘social justice’ leads directly to full-fledged socialism.” (Hayek 2013, p. 228)

Hayek now arrives at his own particular conclusions:

“Such statements, which explicitly link ‘social and distributive justice’ to the ‘treatment’ of individuals by society according to their ‘deserts,’ reveal in the clearest fashion the difference between it [i.e., social and distributive justice] and simple justice, and at the same time the cause of its emptiness: the demand for social justice is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific end, and therefore the demand for ‘social justice’ becomes a demand that the members of society should organize themselves in such a way as to make it possible to assign particular shares of the product of society to various individuals or groups. The preliminary question then becomes whether there is a moral duty to submit to a power that can coordinate the efforts of the members of society with the aim of achieving a particular scheme of distribution deemed just?” (ibid)

The ground is prepared for Hayek to take his final step in rejecting the acceptance of such a power:

“If the existence of such a power is taken for granted, the question of how to share in the means available for satisfying needs truly becomes a question of justice – though not one to which the prevailing morality provides an answer. In that case, even the assumption from which most modern theorists of ‘social justice’ start, namely that [social justice] requires equal shares for all insofar as special considerations do not demand a deviation from this principle, appears to be a justified assumption. But the question prior to that is whether it is moral for human beings to be subject to the directing powers that must be exercised so that the benefits obtained by individuals can meaningfully be called just or unjust.”

5_ A Brief Look at the Intellectual Connection Between Hayek and Popper

Hayek and some of his followers have spoken of the similarity of his methodology to Popperian methodology. Hayek, of course, had close ties with Popper, and it was he who invited Popper to give his famous lecture at the London School of Economics in 1936 and worked hard to secure Popper’s position. In his book The Poverty of Historicism (Popper 1957), Popper cites Hayek several times, and he dedicated Conjectures and Refutations (Popper 1962) to Hayek, remaining grateful to him throughout his life. However, the influence of the two upon one another is not so significant that a historian of thought would need to devote a section to it. After The Poverty of Historicism, Popper no longer cites Hayek’s works. Hayek, however, refers to Popper’s works sporadically.

The publisher or editor of Law, Legislation and Liberty placed this statement by Popper on the very first page of the book: “I regard Hayek’s work as a new beginning of the most fundamental discussion in the field of political philosophy.”

We saw that in the introduction to this book, Hayek considered Adam Smith’s “Great Society” to be the same as Popper’s “Open Society.” On the fifth page of the book, in the same introduction, he identifies his own evolutionary rationalism with Popper’s critical rationalism, and his own constructivist rationalism with Popper’s naive rationalism, such that just as Popper sets critical rationalism against naive rationalism and accepts the former, Hayek also considers evolutionary rationalism the opposite of constructivist rationalism and judges it to be correct. (Hayek 2013, p. 5).

Hayek has previously explained to some extent what he means by constructivist rationalism: “In the first chapter of this book I attempt to show that certain widely accepted scientific as well as political views depend on a particular conception of the formation of social institutions, a conception which I shall call constructivist rationalism – a conception which assumes that all social institutions are, and ought to be, the product of deliberate design.” (Hayek 2013, p. 5) Hayek is vehemently opposed to this view: “It can be shown that this intellectual tradition is false both in its factual and in its normative conclusions, because the existing institutions are not all the product of design; neither can we make the social order wholly dependent on design without at the same time greatly restricting the utilization of available knowledge.” (ibid)

After this, Hayek says that he has come to believe that not only scientific differences but also the most important political (or ideological) differences of our time ultimately rest on certain fundamental philosophical differences between two schools of thought, one of which can be shown to be erroneous. These two schools are “constructivist rationalism” and “evolutionary rationalism,” of which Hayek opposes the former and advocates the latter.

The slightest familiarity with Popper’s thought shows that his critical rationalism is a combination of both of the rationalisms that Hayek sets in opposition to one another, negating the first and accepting the second. At the same time, Popper has put forward the doctrine of evolutionary epistemology, with which Hayek’s evolutionary rationalism shares commonalities. (For a relatively comprehensive understanding of Popper’s critical rationalism, see Popper 1945, Popper 1962, 1982 Quintanilla, Miller 1994, and Ormerod 2009).

One of Popper’s important doctrines in the social sciences and political philosophy is “social engineering,” which, on the one hand, contradicts Hayekian doctrines of spontaneous order and the prohibition of government intervention in society as a whole, and, on the other hand, is based on Popperian critical-constructivist rationalism, part of which opposes Hayek’s stance against constructivist rationalism, as he specifically defines it.

Hayek pays little attention to the great figures of Western political thought, and therefore his works lack significant references to the works of these giants. Even Popper, in instances such as “social engineering,” shows that he pays more attention to the doctrines of the fathers of liberalism, such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith. Indeed, what place do the two principles that Adam Smith mentioned in the chessboard metaphor and its application to the game on the great chessboard of society have in Hayek’s thought?

Popper, although a liberal, both pays attention to the ideal of social justice and honors the stature of Plato and Marx, while, with his own specific foundations, defending democratic social engineering against utopian social engineering. (For the doctrine of engineering, see Popper 2013 (including p. 148 for the difference between the two types of social engineering mentioned above), Swirski 2011). Popper’s social engineering has considerable proponents in African, European, and Asian countries, where the result of reflecting on Popper’s doctrine and applying it at the level of organizations and even countries has yielded outcomes that are thousands of times more valuable and defensible than the application of Hayek’s ideas in prohibiting government intervention in the market economy and leaving the game to the corrupt players of the capitalist world, especially commercial capitalism and financial-banking capitalism.

It can also be shown that, contrary to what Hayek is interested in, his desired “Great Society,” or that of Adam Smith or Graham Wallas, is not the same as Popper’s “Open Society,” although they bear some similarities to one another. Political philosophers and politicians, in describing their desired society, have used terms that, in comparing them, one must not ignore the characteristics of each, nor the historical, social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of each one’s formulation, just as throughout the history of political thought, in addition to these two terms, we encounter other terms: “the Good Society” or “Good City,” “Utopia,” “Nowhere,” “the Just Society,” “Civilized Society,” “the Virtuous City,” “the Model City.” (For a comparison between the two concepts of “Great Society” and “Open Society,” see Vernon 1976, Moldofsky 1985)

6_ A Look at the Vast Volume of Refutations of Hayek's View in the History of Thought

In confronting Hayek's theorizing, one can refer to the vast volume of works written in political philosophy. For those interested in the "history of justice" in the Western tradition, one can speak of Greek mythology and "Dike," the goddess of justice, daughter of Zeus and Themis (guardian of the stable order of the world), and how Dike transformed into the Greek concept of justice (dikaiosyne) and its place among the pre-Socratics such as Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus.

But to avoid being accused of turning to the "myths of the ancients," one can begin with Plato and his two important books The Republic [Politeia] and The Laws [Nómoi] and show how Plato seeks justice, and especially social justice (in his own particular conception). Yet, to avoid the attacks of those who consider Plato either a captive of ancestral ideals and/or a theorist of totalitarian government, one can turn to Aristotle and ask them to read Book Five of the Nicomachean Ethics and the book Politics [Politiká] and even the Constitution of the Athenians [Athenian Constitution / Athenaion Politeia] seriously and carefully, so they become acquainted with that great philosopher of ethics and politics' concerns for justice at both the individual and social levels and their interconnection.

In criticizing Hayek's view on the natural emergence of the capitalist system and market economy and the perception of this system as a spontaneous order, I refer those interested to the classic book of the foremost Hungarian-Austrian expert in political economy, political sociology, economic sociology, historical sociology, and economic history, namely Karl [Károly] Polanyi: the important book The Great Transformation, which was published in the same year as The Road to Serfdom (1944) and to which, unfortunately, Hayek seemingly did not pay the necessary attention and did not learn that the three-hundred-year capitalist system was not the result of a spontaneous and natural movement or evolution of society. Of course, one cannot agree with Polanyi's analysis and explanation of economic and political developments in all cases, but undoubtedly, Polanyi's analysis and explanation of the emergence of the market and its specific capitalist order is far more reasoned and closer to historical reality than Hayek's analysis and explanation. (Polanyi [1944] (2001))

Given that I am writing this article for a Persian-speaking reader, and some of Hayek's supporters in Iran consider the concept of social justice an imported concept and mock and condemn this imported commodity (as if liberalism, and, worse, neoliberalism, are not imported commodities), I deem it necessary, as a reminder, to point to examples of justice-seeking in the distant past that have been instances of a demand for social justice, although this concept has differed among various nations, governments, cultures, and worldviews, and I never claim that the intended meaning has been uniform throughout history or bears a strong resemblance to the theoretical and practical examples of the last two centuries.

1) The Code of Hammurabi

This code, which probably belongs to the period between the 23rd and 18th centuries BCE, whether in its prologue, its 282 articles, or its epilogue, is a manifestation of remarkable justice-seeking and justice-dispensing in the civilization of Babylon. In the two famous translations by Harper (1904) and King (1910), the words "justice" and "righteous" are specifically used.

Specifically, in the epilogue section of Harper's translation, we read:

Hammurabi, the king of righteousness, whom Shamash has endowed with justice, am I.

"I am Hammurabi, the king of righteousness, the one to whom Shamash has granted justice."

This text in King's translation is as follows:

Hammurabi, the king of righteousness, on whom Shamash has conferred right (or law) am I.

"I am Hammurabi, the righteous king, to whom Shamash has granted the truth (or the law)."

We note that Shamash, in Mesopotamian mythology, within the Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian civilizations, was the god of the sun, law, and justice. As King explains, he held the titles "god of judgment" and "judge of the heavens and the earth."

Also, in a part of the prologue (in Harper's translation), we read in the voice of Hammurabi: "When Marduk [/Merodach] sent me to rule over men and to help the land, I established law and justice in the land and promoted the welfare of the people." (Hammurabi 1904)

Marduk or Merodach, the god of fertility and creation in Babylonian civilization, was the successor to Anu, the god of gods, the creator of humanity, and the protector of Babylon. With the expansion of Babylon's political power, this god acquired the attributes of numerous Mesopotamian deities. It is this god whom Cyrus mentions in the text of his famous cylinder.

2) The Cyrus Cylinder

Many English and Persian translations of the Cyrus Cylinder's text are available. Below, I present the text of lines 12 and 14, based on the translation by Abdolmajid Arfaee:

12. (Marduk) searched and examined all the lands, seeking a righteous king, one who would be according to his (i.e., Marduk's) desire, a king whom he took by the hand (to accept him).

13. While he (i.e., Cyrus) shepherded them continually with truth and justice, the great god, the guardian of his people, looked with joy upon the good deeds and the just heart of him (i.e., Cyrus) (Arfaee, 1366).

One must pay attention to the role of Marduk/Merodach, that is, the great god and guardian of the people of Babylon. It is evident that justice and righteousness refer not to the individual actions of Cyrus, but to his socio-political conduct towards the people. (The discussion regarding the nature of Cyrus's actual rule can remain for another time.)

3) The Inscriptions of Darius III

King Darius, in the thirteenth paragraph of the fourth column, lines 61-67 of the Behistun Inscription, says:

"Ahuramazda and the other gods that exist helped me because I was not treacherous (unfaithful?). I was not a liar. I was not wicked (a tyrant?). Neither I, nor my family. I acted according to justice. I did not use violence against the weak or the strong. The man who cooperated with my house (throne/people?), I rewarded him well, and the one who caused harm, I punished him severely. (Taken from the Iranian Studies website/Darius Inscription)

Olmstead, while considering Darius the Great a lawgiver who paid attention to legislation and just rule, made an interesting comparison between the statements of Darius and those of Hammurabi. (Olmstead 1948, pp. 119-134).

Today, few people familiar with the history of Iran and philosophy and philosophical reflection on the history of Iran have not heard something of Hegel's words about Iran in his book *Reason in History*. Below, we read a passage from Hegel's writing:

"In the Persian world, we find a pure and sublime unity that leaves the particular existences that are part of its essence free to themselves; like light, which merely reveals what bodies are in themselves. This unity rules over individuals only to incite them to become strong themselves, to pursue the path of development, and to consolidate their individuality. (Explanation by Hamid Enayat as translator: 'A reference to the Achaemenids, especially in the time of Cyrus, when the nations under the Persians had the freedom to maintain their religion, rituals, and many of their characteristics.')

"Light makes no distinction [among beings]: it shines equally on the pious and the sinner, the high and the low, and bestows blessing and well-being upon all in equal measure. Light is only life-giving when it connects with something separate from itself, influences it, and nurtures it. Light is the opposite of darkness, and this contrast reveals to us the principle of striving and life." (Hegel, 302)

4) The Letter of Tansar

This “Letter” is a treatise attributed to Tansar, the chief herbad of the era of Ardashir Babakan, in response to Gushnasp, the king of the regions of Tabaristan, Gilan, and Damavand. Some consider it to belong to the time of Khosrow Anushirvan or to the days of Yazdegerd III. Its language was probably originally Middle Persian, and Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ translated it into Arabic and Ibn Isfandiyar into New Persian.

Whether we consider the time of the writing of the “Letter of Tansar” to be the days of Ardashir Babakan, or the days of the Sasanian Khosrow Anushirvan, or the days of Yazdegerd, and whether we regard it as sincere or deceptive, it in any case belongs to the pre-Islamic era and reflects a noteworthy perspective on governance. It is therefore not inappropriate to read a portion of it, from the third and thirteenth sections:

From the third section: “As for what you wrote, ‘Know that the King of Kings, in demanding the rights of the ancients, may be said to have abandoned tradition, and if he is right in worldly terms, he is not right in religion,’ know that tradition is of two kinds: the tradition of the ancients and the tradition of the moderns. The tradition of the ancients is justice. The path of justice has been [so] obliterated that if in this age one calls someone to justice, his ignorance leads him to wonder and find it difficult, and the tradition of the moderns is oppression. People have become so accustomed to oppression that they cannot find their way from the harm of oppression to the benefit of preferring justice and turning away from it, so that if the moderns establish some justice, they say, ‘It is not suitable for this age.’ For this reason, the mention and traces of justice have not remained, and if the King of Kings diminishes something of the oppression of the predecessors, which is not expedient for this age and time, they say, ‘This is the ancient custom and the rule of the ancients.’ You must know the truth, that one must strive to change the traces of the oppression of the ancients and the moderns. The lesson is that oppression, in [any] age in which it was or is committed, is reprehensible; whether it is ancient or modern. And this King of Kings has power over it, and religion is his ally, in changing and eradicating the causes of oppression, for we see in him more praiseworthy qualities than in the ancients, and his tradition is better than past traditions; [...]” (The Letter of Tansar, pp. 55-56)

From the thirteenth section: “You also indicated ‘the seizure of the wealth of the rich and merchants.’ If he called them rich and they were not rich, his command would be void; and if not, the proof of their richness is that he did not take anything by force and beyond their capacity, except that they brought it forth willingly, eagerly, and in manifest service. If he wishes, he will not call them rich, but will call them vile and sinful, because they acquired it through hypocrisy, baseness, and meanness, not by lawful means. And this notion that the king of the time seeks help from the surplus wealth of the people of means for the general populace has a basis in religion and a clear aspect in reason.” (ibid., pp. 72-73).

It should be noted that both Ardashir Babakan and Khosrow Anushirvan paid special attention to Greek philosophy. It can therefore be expected that in their mode of governance, they placed particular value on the analyses and recommendations of Greek philosophers. Khosrow Anushirvan paid special attention to science, literature, and philosophy. His acquaintance with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, alongside his renown for wisdom and justice, has been reported in many sources. Regardless of specific criticisms of his rule, many elites and commoners used the title “the Just” for him, and he has even been referred to as Plato’s philosopher-king. (For a brief introduction to his character, see Jalilian, pp. 398-405)

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that in her book A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice From Mesopotamia to Globalization (Darling 2013), Linda Darling chose the title “The Best Deeds Before God Are Righteousness and Justice” for the third chapter of the book, which is dedicated to pre-Islamic Iran (from the Achaemenids to the Sasanians). She took this title from a text attributed to Khosrow Anushirvan.

5) Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh

The slightest familiarity with the Shahnameh shows that justice is a fundamental concern of Ferdowsi in the rule of each of the kings. In explaining the reason for the compilation of the Shahnameh, he says that he is in search of the causes of the extinction of nations and an explanation of the present situation:

There was a paladin of dehqan stock,

Brave, great, wise, and generous.

A researcher of ancient times,

He sought out all the tales of the past.

From every country, an aged mobad,

He brought it forth, that letter he recalled

He asked them of the kings of the world

And of those renowned, blessed nobles

How they held the world at its beginning

That they left it to us so contemptibly

How their days came to an end with good fortune

For them, all days were of valorous deeds (Shahnameh, Moscow edition, vol. 1, p. 21)

In Ferdowsi's view, justice and injustice are of such importance that they even affect nature:

Describing the return of Kavus to the land of Iran, he sings:

He struck the neck of sorrow with the sword of justice

The thought of death did not come upon the heart

The earth became full of greenery, water, and moisture

The world adorned itself like the garden of Iram

It grew rich from justice and security

The hand of the demon was bound from evil

[...]

The world became adorned like paradise

Full of justice and brimming with wealth (vol. 2, p. 126)

Likewise, in describing the reign of Kay Khosrow, we read:

When he placed the great crown upon his head

The crown rejoiced in him, and he too rejoiced

Everywhere, he made ruins prosperous

He freed the hearts of the sorrowful from grief

From the spring clouds, moisture rained down

From the face of the earth, it washed away the rust of sorrow

The world became full of greenery and flowing water

The heads of the sorrowful sank into sleep

The earth became adorned like paradise

From justice and generosity, full of wealth (vol. 4, p. 9)

Ferdowsi, in expressing the effect of injustice, after recounting the story of Bahram Gur and the gardener's wife, composed thus:

Thus spoke the woman: "O noble husband,

This talk of mine is not without cause.

When the world-holding king becomes a tyrant,

The moon does not shine from the celestial sphere as it should.

In the udders, the milk becomes dry,

Within the musk-pod, the musk no longer smells.

Adultery and usury become manifest,

The soft heart becomes like granite stone.

In the plain, the wolf devours people,

The wise man flees from the fool.

The eggs beneath the birds become spoiled,

Whenever the king becomes a tyrant." (vol. 7, p. 383)

       6) From Farabi to Khajeh Nasir al-Din Tusi

Farabi, Ibn Miskawayh, and Khajeh Nasir al-Din Tusi have works that, in their particular variety, reflect these great thinkers' concerns in the field of individual ethics/politics and collective politics/ethics. Given the renown of their views and their being influenced by Aristotle, I will not delve into their thought here.

7_ Ibn Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun, within the framework of founding the science of Umran, which is linked to his conception of rational politics (as opposed to the short-term Sharia-based politics of the Prophet's time), presented a novel concept of justice. His rational politics, like politics in ancient Iran, attends to the worldly interests of life, in contrast to the Sharia-based politics' attention to otherworldly interests (Tabatabai, 167-172). In his view, rulership is the form and Umran is the matter, and form without matter has no value. (p. 175) He considered rational politics to be specific to the Iranians. (ibid., p. 174) His view of Umran and its results in Egypt demonstrates an attention to the role of Umran in public welfare and comfort. (p. 175)

Ibn Khaldun, after recounting an anecdote from the “Akhbār al-Īrāniyyīn” (Chronicles of the Persians) as narrated by al-Masʿūdī, proceeds to state the moral of the story: “The Mowbedān (thus in the original) said: O King, the realm attains no dignity save through religion [...] and kingship attains no dignity save through men, and men gain no strength save through wealth, and wealth cannot be attained save through prosperity, and prosperity cannot be achieved save through justice.” (Quoted from Ṭabāṭabāʾī, 181). Ṭabāṭabāʾī considers this perspective to be Ibn Khaldun’s forging of a link between Iranshahri thought and socio-economic analysis, which is carried out by relying on a kind of “political and social philosophy.” (Ibid.)

In the aforementioned book (Darling 2013), Darling has sought to trace what she herself calls “social justice” from the glorious days of Mesopotamian civilization through pre-Islamic Iran and the Islamic era (from the Umayyads and Abbasids, the Buyids, Fatimids, Seljuks, and Mongols, to the Safavids, Suleiman the Magnificent, the modern era, and the present day, i.e., the year 2000 CE).

8_ A Glance at a Few Errors in the Persian Translation’s Table of Contents for Volume Two of Law, Legislation and Liberty

What particularly compelled me to write these few lines was the name of dear Professor Malekian as the book’s editor. The translators have written at the beginning of the book: “The translators consider it their duty to sincerely thank the learned master of knowledge and ethics, Mr. Mostafa Malekian, for his meticulous and patient collation and editing of the translation of the second volume [...] Thanks to his corrections, the translated text became more refined and precise. However, given that in a few instances the master’s observations were, for some reason, not observed, the translators deem it necessary to assume sole responsibility for all possible errors in the translation.”

My cursory glance at the book’s table of contents and the mention of a few points is solely to demonstrate the necessity of fidelity to the minimal principles of translation. If any fault or shortcoming on the part of the translators is pointed out, it in no way diminishes the esteem in which I hold them.

It is my belief that, in addition to the translator’s need to possess the three usual conditions: 1) familiarity with the subject of the book, and 2 & 3) familiarity with the source and target languages, the translator must, in translating a book, especially a technical philosophical book,

firstly, thoroughly grasp the meaning of technical terms,

secondly, select appropriate equivalents for those terms,

thirdly, while introducing the chosen equivalent to the reader, use it consistently from the beginning to the end of the book, and

fourthly, in the first instance where the chosen equivalent is changed, inform the reader of that change and its reason.

This necessity is a kind of commitment to acquiring adequate knowledge of the terminology and observing uniformity in the chosen equivalents, which, in the author’s view, is best carried out within the framework of observing isomorphism across all sentences, clauses, sections, and chapters.

Now, a few instances of the translators’ inaccuracies are pointed out, firstly, solely in word choice, and secondly, only in the table of contents of the second volume. I have many examples from the text itself, but engaging with them is beyond the scope of this article.

1) In the title of Chapter Seven, they have translated “General Welfare” as “خیرعمومی” (Public Good). Immediately thereafter, in the title of Section One of this same Chapter Seven, i.e., on the very next line, “خیرعمومی” (Public Good) is used for “general good.” In the body of the book, we see the compounds رفاه عمومی (general welfare), رفاه همگانی (common welfare), and رفاه عامه (public welfare), even on a single page, without any consistent, unified logic having been applied in the use of these compounds. It might seem that Hayek himself uses these terms interchangeably, as we encounter, for example, the phrase “the common welfare or the public good” (Hayek 2013, p. 170). However, Hayek assigns a specific meaning to each term, even if he sometimes presents them as apparently synonymous.

Hayek uses the words “good” (in the nominal sense), “interest” (and interests), and “welfare.” The translators have repeatedly conflated them, using the equivalents “naf‘” (benefit), “khayr” (good), and “refāh” (welfare) in a haphazard manner. In the Kant quotation at the beginning of Chapter Nine, they have used “nikukāri” (beneficence) for “welfare”! Furthermore, the translators have not noticed that Hayek uses the three words public, general, and collective precisely, respectively, in the senses of “‌‘omumi” (public, as opposed to private, i.e., “khosusi”), “‌‘ām” (general, as opposed to particular, i.e., “khāss”), and “jam‘i” (collective, as opposed to individual, i.e., “fardi”). Hence, we are, with great surprise, witnessing confusions in their usage. Thus, in summary, it must be said that the pairs of contrasting terms in Hayek’s text are (public-private), (general-particular), and (collective-individual), for which we must use the following equivalents, respectively, throughout the text: (‌‘omumi-khosusi), (‌‘ām-khāss), and (jam‘i-fardi).

2) In the title of Section Seven of Chapter Seven, as in other instances throughout the book, the equivalent “son‘‌garāyāne” (artificialist) has been chosen for constructivist (hence constructivism is rendered as “son‘‌garāyi” [artificialism]). Previously, the translators had rendered the title of Section One of Chapter One, which is construction and evolution, as “san‘at va tahavvol” (industry and evolution). In our culture, the equivalent for “san‘at” is industry. In Afghanistan, it might be art. In translations of important works of our traditional culture, words such as creation, handiwork, and fashioning have been used for “son‘.” Jamil Saliba, in his Philosophical Dictionary, equates construction with the Quranic “inshā’.” In the translation of the hemistich “Pir-e mā goft khatā bar qalam-e son‘ naroft” (Our master said: Error did not occur upon the pen of creation), the equivalent creation is usually used for “son‘,” or creator’s pen for “qalam-e son‘.” I have not seen in any Persian writing anyone render construct or construction with a word from the family of “son‘.” Most translators, professors, and students, in finding equivalents for these words and their cognates, have used the truncated infinitives “sākht” and “barsākht.” I wish the esteemed translators had indicated the reason for this kind of equivalent selection.

3) In the translation of Section Eight of Chapter Seven, and everywhere else in this book, the word “raftār” has been chosen for conduct. The slightest familiarity with psychology, biology, and sociology shows that “raftār” is the appropriate equivalent for behavior. Hayek, like anyone else who adheres to the accepted technical meanings of words, was undoubtedly fully aware of the difference between behavior, conduct, and action and never used one in place of another. The translators were expected to use, from the beginning to the end of the book, the equivalents “raftār,” “kerdār,” and “konesh” for these three words, respectively, as these technical equivalents are accepted in many good academic texts.

4) In the same title of Section Eight of Chapter Seven, they have rendered the word improvement as “eslāh” (reform/correction), while in Section Six of Chapter Eleven, they have taken the word “eslāh” as the equivalent for “to correct.” In the text of the book, they have translated correct (as an adjective) as “sahih” (correct).

5) The title of Section Nine of Chapter Seven, namely ‘generalization’ and the test of universalizability, has been translated as “ta‘mim va āzmun-e ta‘mim‌paziri” (generalization and the test of generalizability). We are faced here with two different words in terms of their scope of application: general (and its cognates) and universal (and its cognates). Hayek is attentive to the difference between these two words; otherwise, he would have considered, for example, ‘universalization’ and the test of universalizability or ‘generalization’ and the test of generalizability for the title of this section. Without needing further explanation, I submit that the esteemed translators should have considered the title of this section as “ta‘mim va kolliyat‌paziri” (generalization and universalizability).

6) The title of Section Three of Chapter Eight is as follows:

Rules of just conduct are generally prohibitions of unjust conduct

The Persian translation in the book’s table of contents is as follows: “qavā‘ed-e raftār-e dorost [‌‘ādelāne] ma‘mulan mamnu‘iyat‌hā‘i barāye raftār-e nādorost [nā‌‘ādelāne] ast” (Rules of right [just] conduct are generally prohibitions of wrong [unjust] conduct)

Also, the title of Section Four of this chapter is as follows:

Not only the rules of just conduct, but also the test of their justice, are negative

The Persian translation in the book's table of contents is: "Not only the rules of just [fair] conduct, but also the test of their justness [fairness] are negative."

In most cases, the translators have rendered just, unjust, and justice throughout the book as "correct [fair]," "incorrect [unfair]," and "correctness [fairness]," respectively.

The translators may have chosen these equivalents based on Hayek's view regarding the applicability of the words just, unjust, and justice to human actions. Firstly, one cannot engage in such a controversial coinage for translating two words that are themselves very ancient and have very ancient equivalents in some cultures. Secondly, the Persian equivalents for "correct" and "incorrect" are "dorost" and "nadorost," two words that Hayek, incidentally, on the very first pages of this same eighth chapter, rejects using as equivalents for just and unjust or as descriptions of them:

The rules by which men try to define kinds of actions as just or unjust may be correct or incorrect; (Hayek 2013, p. 198)

The translation of this sentence is: "The rules by which humans try to define types of actions as fair or unfair actions may be correct or incorrect;

The translators themselves have translated this sentence as: "The rules by which humans try to describe types of actions as fair or unfair can be correct or incorrect;"

This is one of the rare instances in the entire book where the translators have not used the combinations "correct [fair]," "incorrect [unfair]." I wish they had paid attention to this sentence by Hayek and the Persian equivalents for the Arabic words "sahih" (correct) and "ghalat" (incorrect), and had not used the equivalents "correct [fair]," "incorrect [unfair]," and "correctness [fairness]" for just, unjust, and justice, respectively, throughout the book. Meanwhile, we recall that, as I wrote, the translators rendered "to correct" as "eslah" (reform).

7) I fear being accused of excessive fault-finding, otherwise I would engage more with the equivalents in the table of contents of the chapters and sections. Nevertheless, I cannot resist pointing out a few instances of not-so-appropriate equivalent selection:

7-1) In the subheadings of three sections (8-10) of the eighth chapter, the word "law" is used, which has been translated as "hoquq" (rights/law) in one instance and as "qanun" (statute/law) in two instances;

7-2) In the third section of the ninth chapter, "inapplicability of the concept of justice to …" has been translated as "non-enforceability of the concept of justice regarding…," whereas equivalents like "applicability" or "attributability" are both more common and more accurate (what does applicability or attribution have to do with "enforcement"?) and make the phrase clearer;

7-3) In the subheading of the fifth section of the ninth chapter, it is better to translate "The alleged necessity of" not as "the claim of the necessity of…" but as "the alleged necessity of…";

7-4) In the subheading of the fourth section of the tenth chapter, the correct equivalent for foreknown is "pish-shenakhteh" (foreknown), not "pish-bini shodeh" (predicted);

7-5) In the subheading of the sixth section of the tenth chapter, the correct equivalent for changing circumstances is not "conditions that have evolved" but "changing [transforming] circumstances";

7-6) The subheading of the eighth section of the tenth chapter, The correspondence of expectations is brought about by a disappointment of some expectations, has been translated as "The realization of expectations takes place through the non-fulfillment of some of them," where correspondence has apparently been translated as "realization"!

7-7) In the subheading of the ninth section of the tenth chapter, the equivalent for chance has been taken as "forsat" (opportunity), whereas previously, and correctly, they had chosen "forsat" for "opportunity" (in the subheading of the twelfth section, they used "shans" [chance] for chance).

7-8) In the heading of the fifth section of Chapter Seven, they have rendered Commands as “احکام” and in the heading of the tenth section of Chapter Ten as “دستورات” (with the same plural marker “ات”), while in some other instances they have treated “حکم” and “احکام” as equivalents for other words. In a large portion of the country’s technical texts, “فرمان” is taken as the equivalent of command;

7-9) In the heading of the first section of Chapter Eleven, they have translated unattainable goals as “اهدافی که هیچ کس نمی تواند به آنها برسد,” whereas, for example, “اهداف دست‌نیافتنی” is far more expressive;

7-10) The heading of the fifth section of Chapter Eleven, From the care of the most unfortunate to the protection of vested interests, has been translated as: “چگونه نگرانی برای کسانی که بدترین وضعیت را دارند منجر به حمایت از گروههای ذی نفع می‌شود.”

I leave the reader alone with this translation and conclude my remarks with this reminder that the translators, unfortunately, have not translated the end-of-chapter notes (i.e., the endnotes), whereas these, besides containing the bibliographic details of Hayek’s sources and references, sometimes include very important points that the eager and serious reader needs to be aware of.

9_ A General Assessment of Hayek’s Intellectual Foundations and Research-Theoretical Achievement

With a mixture of intellectual foundations and the political and economic views of a broad spectrum of liberalism—from classical liberals, especially John Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, the framers of the American Constitution, and John Stuart Mill, to Carl von Mises and Popper—against a backdrop of immense fear of the role of the state, particularly the totalitarian state (with important historical examples that Hayek himself witnessed), Hayek cultivated a doctrine on the right wing of liberalism that possesses both coherent parts and, in some parts, suffers from internal incoherence. This doctrine, or amalgam of doctrines, is both open to criticism in its foundations and lacks the necessary internal coherence in its totality, such that serious criticisms can be leveled against his thought from both extra-discursive and intra-discursive positions, although one must always insist on the special value of these works in political philosophy and the philosophy of economics.

Hayek himself has given his admirers the pretext to consider him, in epistemology, a follower of Kant, who held that knowledge of the thing-in-itself is impossible. There is no room here to address this subject. One can only say that Hayek never reached the depths of Kant’s thought. In epistemology, he is more influenced by the Scottish school and ultimately caught up in Humean skepticism.

Thus, with an epistemology and methodology mixed with Humean skepticism and inattention to the great tradition of Western political philosophy that led to classical liberalism with giants such as Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Kant, through John Stuart Mill and finally Rawls, and against a backdrop of fear of totalitarianism and state interventionism, Hayek cultivated, in noteworthy works, his own particular understandings of the following concepts: tribal society and the Great Society, order and rule, natural order and artificial order, spontaneous order, justice, the rule of just individual conduct, government and its functions, the market economy, the universality of the rule of supply and demand, the public good, social justice, distributive justice, individual freedom, the democratic system, and law.

Ultimately, the body of teachings of von Mises and Hayek, in confrontation with socialist doctrines on the one hand and Keynesian doctrines on the other, led to a neoliberalism that had dire consequences for the real economy of countries and for a vast portion of their citizens, which must be addressed on another occasion. However, since the domestic promoters of Hayek’s ideas consider neoliberalism a myth fabricated by opponents of liberalism, I draw the attention of all interested parties to a large number of academic books and articles written about neoliberalism, which specifically speak of von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman as the founders of neoliberalism, and of figures such as Donald Regan and Margaret Thatcher as its implementers. (For examples of belief in the existence of the neoliberal school and also the view of Hayek as one of its founders, see Hoerber (2017), Hoerber, Thomas (2019), Henry, John F. (2010), Peters, Michael A. (2019), Rodrigues, João (2018), Cahill et al (2018). All chapters of this 720-page handbook are worth reading.)

With his own constructed concepts, in the form of existing terms or terms sometimes of his own making, Hayek presented a picture of economic and political relations in history and society, some of whose outlines can be expressed as follows:

1) The existence of spontaneous order in nature and society, society as a spontaneous order among diverse and numerous individual wills;

2) The spontaneity of the order of modern capitalist society based on the market economy versus the artificiality of an order that arises through direction or command from above or outside society;

3) Individual freedom as a core value;

4) Denial of the existence of collective goals represented by the government;

5) Government as a facilitator of conditions for the easier provision of individuals' welfare;

6) The large, complex society with the unknown aims of individuals versus small, simple tribal societies with common goals determined and directed by the head of the society;

7) The possibility of legislating for the process of collective agreement and its instruments, not for the realization of a goal or a final collective state;

8) The emergence of the self-governing free market, as self-organizing or self-regulating and without need for an external agent, in which competition occurs within the framework of each person's understanding of their own interests and the context and conditions of economic activity;

9) The necessity of individual conduct serving the preservation of spontaneous order, not serving a specific overarching goal;

10) The duty of government in adhering to these rules of conduct, not in articulating final overarching goals;

11) Considering just or unjust as an attribute of individual conduct, as behavior that is not contrary to spontaneous order;

12) The permissibility of applying the attributes just or unjust to collective behavior and to an organization or institution such as the government;

13) The impermissibility of applying the attributes just or unjust to society as a whole (which possesses its own spontaneous order);

14) The conclusion that just or unjust is an attribute of conduct, not an attribute of what results from conduct;

15) Conformity of conduct with spontaneous order as the determining criterion of its justness;

16) Considering any social situation as the result of thousands of years of free choices by thousands of humans within the framework of a kind of natural selection and the survival of the fittest;

17) The emergence of any social situation being outside human will;

18) Using the attributes good and bad to describe the socio-economic situation, not the attributes just and unjust;

19) The goodness or badness of law according to whether it helps or does not help the just conduct of individuals and organizations, such that law in itself is neither just nor unjust;

20) The existence of two parts for just individual conduct in society: private law and criminal law;

21) The manifestation of justice in guaranteeing the natural conduct of individuals within spontaneous order to preserve that order;

22) The not very numerous duties of the state and the necessity of its size and intervention being small and minimal.

23) "Social justice" is an empty term;

24) This term can be considered equivalent to "economic justice" and "distributive justice";

25) The existence of ideals among our ancestors in ancient times (in fact, in the times of pre-agricultural-feudal tribal life) regarding justice that were never of the "social justice" type;

26) Speaking today (in the era of the dominance of the market economy) of social justice is a sign of the re-emergence of an attribute that ancient ancestors possessed and which has reappeared after centuries of dormancy;

27) Given the equivalence of "social justice" with "distributive justice" on the one hand, and the absence of anything to distribute on the other, speaking of social justice, and (a fortiori and especially) "socialism," is to be caught in the grip of illusion and deceived by a mirage;

28) The nature of speaking about social justice, distributive justice, or socialism entails accepting the necessity of planning and striving for its realization by a superior institution such as the state;

29) Hayek, in his own way, attempts to present his particular narrative of the emergence of the capitalist system based on individualism and private property as a spontaneous, quasi-natural process in which the state played no role, and which is the ultimate result of an economy based on the free market, such that this roughly three-hundred-year-old order represents the pinnacle of human civilization in moving beyond pre-capitalist tribal relations and creating the free individual, leading to a society that is Smith's "Great Society" or Popper's "Open Society," which continues its life and evolution according to its own natural rules, without need for any intervention based on government planning;

30) Any planning for the mode of distribution within the framework of intervention by an institution like the state constitutes opposition to the spontaneous order of the dominant economic system;

31) The justness or unjustness of individuals' actions is determined by the degree of their adherence to the rules and requirements arising from the relations of supply and demand within the spontaneous, self-organizing system of the free market;

32) The freedom of the individuals of this society, as the greatest achievement of Western civilization, consists of their being permitted to use their own knowledge in pursuit of their purposes and goals;

33) The optimal government, which is the minimal state, has no right to intervene in the spontaneous natural order of the free market; and is solely responsible for legislation, execution, and adjudication to the extent that the rules of just conduct in the economic relations of the free market for goods and services are not violated, ensuring the continuation of the spontaneous order of capitalist society; these rules are based on the proportion between supply and demand on the one hand, and the freedom of individuals to use their own knowledge to achieve their goals on the other.

In a critical approach to Hayek's scientific legacy, the general outlines of discussions can be raised, the elaboration of each requiring a suitable occasion:

1) A superficial understanding of Kant's philosophy; the weakness of Hayekian epistemology, which considers reason incapable of comprehending reality, leading his supporters and some commentators to regard him as Kantian in this respect;

2) Excessive reliance on the trust in common sense within the Scottish-English school for discerning market economic behavior that is spontaneous and requires no planning or intervention;

3) Lapsing into a kind of superficial naturalism as well as superficial pragmatism;

4) Hayek's disregard for the natural rights of classical liberals;

5) Hayek's disregard for contractarianism (from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Kant);

6) Hayek's neglect of entropy in all systems, including social systems, and their spontaneous movement toward disorder, even chaos and crisis;

7) Disregard for the fact that humans, even in the biological realm, can possess such knowledge as to prevent mutations and the occurrence of undesirable events in the process of natural evolution. Hence, Hayek must answer why humans cannot, with their knowledge, intervene in the process of economic evolution or development and prevent the emergence of certain events or accelerate some?

8) Hayek's disregard for the connection of economics with social matters, politics, ethics, geographical conditions, theoretical knowledge, etc.

9) Failure to provide the necessary knowledge of how the spontaneous order functioned before the emergence of the market (historical discussion);

10) The lack of an adequate guarantee that human actors in the market economy will refrain from deceit and fraud; also, disregard for the possibility of creating monopolies and various processes that lead to the ever-increasing wealth of a minority and the ever-deepening impoverishment of the majority;

11) The openness of the system and its interaction with other systems also renders it unstable;

12) Hayek's disregard for what place his maximal individualism leaves for collective duty and shared values? How can the dominance of selfishness and self-regard over solidarity be prevented?

13) What explanation does Hayek have for the addition of the slogans “fraternity” and “equality” to the slogan “liberty” in the French and American Revolutions?

14) Hayek’s disregard for the fact that it is fundamentally “the human being” who matters, both morally and as a condition for the stability of society. The economy must serve “the human being.”

15) What meaning and place does internationalism have in Hayek’s view?

16) The disregard for society in Hayek’s extreme individualism, such that ultimately a small number of individuals came to count, and a tiny percentage of them became owners of a vast portion of the world’s wealth. The economy grew suicidally. It became cancerous, and its cells—the great body of human society—turned a vast portion of ordinary cells into ones that then began to devour one another. Could Hayek have imagined that even welfare states would fall prey to the depravity resulting from the sowing of the seeds of his ideas, and that society, or humankind, would become a means of sustenance for a corrupt minority who, as if “spontaneously and naturally” (in the Hayekian sense), proceed to consume other parts of this body and achieve monopoly?

17) Hayek’s disregard for the fact that the presupposition “no individual, group, or system will ever succeed in fully understanding society, let alone designing and directing it” accepts epistemological passivity and practical passivity from the very outset, and drives a vast portion of citizens, like modern slaves, to the slaughterhouse of the market economy, plundering the public assets of the country and the assets of the people;

18) In an intra-discursive critique of Hayek’s own text, one can provide examples of how government intervention in legislation for the proper implementation of the rules of just conduct serves as a license to use laws that determine conduct, action, and even economic “behavior” to transcend spontaneous order;

19) Despite Hayek’s attention to theoretical knowledge alongside practical knowledge, one can ask Hayek, who believes in the spontaneous order of the market economy: “Does economics also have theoretical discussions that theoretical knowledge can grasp?” If the answer is “yes,” what use is this theoretical knowledge if one must only submit to spontaneous order?

20) Does Hayek realize that with his view on the spontaneous order of the market, we ultimately arrive at the negation of any economic planning and policymaking (even policymaking in the field of growth or economic productivity)?

21) In the Hayekian view, economic activity is the principle, and indeed everything, relative to any other activity. This is a kind of economism and the definition of the human being as homo economicus;

22) What place does “culture” and its various manifestations have in this view? What place do definitions or attributes such as “political human,” “religious human,” “cultural human,” and all that constitutes “spiritual matters” (by any definition) have in this view?

23) Is the conception of the “naturalness” of justice not a reduction of any criterion for evaluating individual conduct and collective/social conduct to a kind of natural selection within the framework of the evolutionary sociology of figures like Spencer, with all its consequences?

24) Whether Hayek likes it or not, in his social ontology he is a “nominalist” and cannot accord any ontological status to society; thus, on the one hand, we are faced with a disregard for the human being’s duty toward others and society, and on the other hand, society is ultimately reduced to a tool for exploitation by individuals clinging to any pretext, so that these individuals may use it however they wish until they realize they have reached a boundary where their own interests or existence are threatened; of course, sometimes they advance so far that retreat is no longer of any use; in that case, they are faced with uprising, rebellion, and revolution.

25) The baselessness of ethical behavior oriented toward self-sacrifice and devotion with Hayekian teachings, despite his attempt to make room for ethics, within the framework of an amalgam of reliance on common sense, pragmatism, and the theory of biological evolution, in his political philosophy and philosophy of economics;

26) Disregard for the rights of those unable to work in society, except as potentially dangerous and threatening appendages to society; moreover, there is no criterion for condemning poverty whenever its existence is natural and the result of the spontaneous order of a society based on a market economy;

27) The baselessness of speaking of human rights, especially, as Hayek explicitly states, where it lacks a legal nature; the baselessness of speaking of human dignity in Hayek’s anthropology; and the negation of positive rights for human beings in Hayek’s philosophy, because it is founded from the very beginning on negation and is incapable of deducing positive instances;

28) The meaninglessness of a pathological analysis of the economic, social, and political afflictions befalling individuals and the whole of society based on Hayekian ontology, anthropology, and economics;

29) The impossibility of criticizing the outcomes of the free market, because there exists no criterion and no other authority apart from the rules of supply and demand, which are both the product and the guarantor of its survival.

30) In Hayekian ethics, we ultimately reach the conclusion that there is no criterion for the goodness of actions other than conformity with the rules of the market economy, and finally, everyone, even the corrupt, the deceivers, and the swindlers of the economic sphere, lack voluntary actions and lack any standing to be held accountable before any personal or legal authority.

Final section of the article:

9_ Final Word

Whenever we are completely Hayekian and do not permit the intervention of the state or any other authority in the economic behavior of a being called “economic man,” corruption and plunder continue. If we are not currently facing the complete unbridledness of economic actors in countries (from America and England to Chile, Brazil, and even Iran), the reason must be sought in the more or less intervention of the state and institutions that, for better or worse, strive to prevent the outbreak of crisis and the rebellion of the dispossessed; otherwise, the economic actors themselves, who are mostly interested in fields that are more lucrative (such as brokerage economics, usury, and the usurpation and plunder of public property in the official guise of commercial capitalism, banking capitalism, and privatization), recognize no stopping point for themselves unless they encounter serious obstacles from the state or the dispossessed.

This is the manifestation of neoliberalism inspired by the ideas of figures like Hayek, whose advocates proclaimed it so loudly in the marketplace that they beguiled and enchanted many, even within the Iranian government; and so it came to pass that Iran, like America, England, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and many other countries, was set on a path that one wishes Hayek were alive to see and to answer us: was this the very wish he had for eliminating state intervention in the economy?

It is worth asking: where are we heading with this kind of management for countries? Here, I humbly invite all followers of Hayek, as well as anyone else interested in political philosophy, to read carefully the chapter related to the causes of the emergence of revolution in Aristotle’s Politics, namely the fifth chapter of the book, just as I emphatically request that they also read carefully the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is about justice and fairness.

I, as I said before, share Hayek's fear of right-wing and left-wing totalitarian governments. I can even cry out that my ultimate wish is the complete elimination of government in the distant or near future, with the establishment of optimal living conditions for all human beings alongside one another. But until then, we must pay attention to optimizing the structure and function of government. In this regard, we must undoubtedly draw upon Hayek's analyses and explanations in the pathology of governments. Apart from the classic examples of totalitarian governments, we have witnessed that even in our own country, a number of state managers were so inefficient, became so corrupt, and created such catastrophes for the country's economy that they provided a pretext for domestic Hayekians to, based on the failed examples of classic totalitarian governments and the smaller examples of governments that, through the concentration of political power, have held and still hold control over economic enterprises and political institutions for the benefit of their own governmental insider clique, speak out in condemnation of government/state interventionism and demand its shrinking, the transfer of economic enterprises for the production and exchange of goods and services to the private sector, and even the sale of public property at a bargain price to individuals from a colorful spectrum of rent-seekers, the sorrowful tale of whose outcomes is seen and heard every day. In such a situation, Hayek and Hayekians, instead of scientifically engaging in genuine pathology, have provided the subjective conditions and pseudo-ideological justification for a greater inclination toward corruption.

In this writing, I have not provided my own definition of "social justice." Yet I consider it (with any definition of it that somehow takes into account the optimal collective life of human beings) the most important subject of political philosophy in all ages and for all societies, just as we find various manifestations of its pursuit among all nations and cultures. With such a view that I hold of the past, present, and future, I am interested in asking Hayekians whether they accept that, firstly and primarily, all human beings are equal in creation and in the utilization of the Earth, and secondly and consequently, in the enjoyment of all the resources of a country, and in collective life must express their will, within the framework of equal rights, through democratic participation in decision-making? The way out of current problems is not to mock democracy. Did Hayek not hear from his friend, Karl Popper, that if the criterion is the possibility of replacing an incompetent government at the least cost, democracy is the best form of government? Undoubtedly, in societies where human beings are categorized into various classes and strata based on age, gender, racial, ethnic, religious, political, and economic affiliations, such that belonging to a particular group may lead to progress or regression, one cannot speak of genuine democracy. But we must always think of a future situation where optimal living conditions must be provided for everyone, regardless of any affiliation and gender, ethnic, religious, age, political, and economic differences, while at the same time securing and guaranteeing the rights of those who, for any reason, deserve a more "equitable" share of resources.

I myself personally believe in social engineering with a broader and deeper scope than Popper's engineering, both at the national level of a country and at the global level, through responsible international cooperation among countries endowed with genuinely democratic systems, and I consider the future of optimal human life on Earth, and even the future of the human species' existence, to depend on it. To realize this, philosophy and science, in their various manifestations and scopes, cooperate with one another: the cooperation of the humanities and the natural sciences in various fields with political philosophy, the philosophy of economics, philosophical anthropology, and moral philosophy for the optimal understanding of

1) the current human situation in terms of the quality of life,

2) their available possibilities,

3) the optimal conditions for communal life,

4) how to realize those optimal conditions.

Whenever intellectual elites, whose hearts are devoted to the this-worldly happiness of humanity, engage in responsible cooperation and, with collective reason, contemplate the optimal conditions of human life, taking into account all individual and social exigencies, one can hope that, with a clear understanding of the goals, a program for their realization will be designed and implemented, and will create an ever more comprehensive example of the social engineering of a society that is a crystallization of the "social justice" that various nations in various ages have presented an image of according to their own understanding and imagination.

We have not reached the end of history so as to offer a final and unalterable prescription for social justice; yet we possess enough historical and social experience, and enough political, economic, and ethical understanding, to know what the best conditions for communal life might be—conditions in which all have an equal right to live, and all are for one and one is for all. We desire such a political philosophy and such an ethics so that our politics and ethics may occupy the place that the greatest philosopher of ethics and politics, that First Teacher, Aristotle, accorded them as the highest sciences, because he contemplated the virtuous life of the human community and regarded it as the desired happiness and the ultimate end of politics and ethics.

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