Disco Boy wrote:
Once again, the Austrian School of Economics is not even remotely close in ideology to Social Darwinism. And here you go again, twisting things up. How can Hayek agree with your opinion when he apparently rejects traditional concepts of Social Darwinism, regardless if it contains elements of it? And if what you say is true about Diamond, he must be smokin' something very strong.
You know, having a discussion with you is like chewing an over-cooked streak with massive amounts of sinew that you have to eat but you don't want to...
I'm sorry you find my posts such tough going; mind you, if you think I'm opaque you should try Hayek and Popper. Diamond quotes the former in the article I linked to above.
' "The error of Social Darwinism was that it concentrated on the individual rather than on that of institutions and practices, and on the selection of the innate rather than on culturally transmitted capacities of the individuals."
His own version of Social Darwinism [my italics] is aptly summarized in the following paragraph [from Hayek's
the Road to Serfdom]:
"These rules of conduct have thus not developed as the recognized conditions for the achievement of a known purpose,
but have evolved because the groups who practised them were more successful and displaced others. They were rules which, given the kind of environment in which man lived, secured that a greater number of the groups or individuals would survive. [my italics]. The problem of conducting himself successfully in a world only partially known to man was thus solved by adhering to rules which would serve him well but which he did not and could not
know to be true in the Cartesian sense." '
http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/adiamond ... struct.pdfHow's that for a sinewy steak?
Thus Hayek himself points out errors
of focus in traditional concepts of Social Darwinism whilst claiming that Social Darwinist theory applies to institutions.
My basic point that is the Laissez- Faire economics propounded by the Austrian school suggests that as in evolution "the fittest will survive".
This is reflected in fairly neutral articles about Hayek and the Austrian School. Here is Nesta Devine an academic from NZ:
"These institutions [the market, the family, the church], so vital for the continued existence of ‘society’ he [Hayek] believed to have formed over time, by a process of evolution. The evolutionary process had weeded out less advantageous forms of human relationships, and had left behind these outstanding examples of the ‘spontaneous’ creation of order from the chaos of myriad individual human decisions. No one human he contended, was sufficiently rational to be able to coordinate all the variables which came together in one of these institutions: they were therefore not of human design, although they were of human creation. In effect Hayek had devised a scheme of social Darwinism which valorised certain institutions – the market, the Church, and the family, as evolutionary survivors, and therefore the ‘fittest’ form of human institutions. His term ‘spontaneous order’ however also suggests that these institutions erupted from the evolutionary process without genealogy — without a history. ‘Collectivism’ — which he sometimes calls ‘tribalism’, he regards as an early and inferior form of human organisation, now outmoded by the evolutionary process."
http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.p ... _educationMy opinion is basically the same as George Soros on this topic, (somebody I'm sure you don't like) who writes:
"The laissez-faire argument against income redistribution invokes the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The argument is undercut by the fact that wealth is passed on by inheritance, and the second generation is rarely as fit as the first.
In any case, there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution, just as the equilibrium theory in economics is taking its cue from Newtonian physics. The principle that guides the evolution of species is mutation, and mutation works in a much more sophisticated way. Species and their environment are interactive, and one species serves as part of the environment for the others. There is a feedback mechanism similar to reflexivity in history, with the difference being that in history the mechanism is driven not by mutation but by misconceptions. I mention this because social Darwinism is one of the misconceptions driving human affairs today. The main point I want to make is that cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition, and the slogan "survival of the fittest" distorts this fact." ("The Capitalist Threat" by George Soros
Atlantic Monthly, Volume 279, No. 2, February 1997
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/soros.htm).
Could you perhaps explain
why you think Social Darwinism has nothing remotely to do with the Austrian School of Economics? I don't believe you have attempted to do this yet.
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