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Some Remarks on Hayek's The Sensory Order

CategoríaPsicologíaMarzo-Septiembre 2003

Kurt R. Leube

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__________________________________________________________________ Kurt rt R . Leube Some Remarks on Hayek s The Sensory Order Of the Sensory Order I can truly say , as Hume said of his Treatise , that it fell deadborn from the press I F . A . von Hayek Two months short of his 18th birthday Fritz von Hayek dropped out of school and made some effort to pass a supplementary exam in order to be entitled to an officer s training in the Austro-Hungarian army . Having been born into an aristocratic family that could not only lay claim to a long academic tradition but also to a long and dutiful service to the Empire , this was the way youngsters of his social class were raised in fin-de-siecle Vienna . Thus , consciously devoted to the vision and splendor of the Habsburg Empire he joined up in March 1917 and after some seven months of basic military drill and officer s school outside Vienna , he was anxious to be sent as an artillery sergeantcadet to the intensely embattled Italian front . He considered it an honor to serve and never doubted that there are things in life worth fighting for and risking one s own life .” 1 At that time unconfirmed reports of mass desertions and mutinies of troops mostly from the eastern provinces of the Empire already surfaced in Vienna . Hayek arrived in Gorizia 1 Conversations and interviews with Hayek I , Salzburg , 1971-77 . Tapes in my possession at the Italian front and much to his dislike missed by a few days the Battle of Caporetto in October / November 1917 that left many dead and wounded . After months in the damp and dirty trenches along the Piave River in the hinterland of the Adriatic Sea , Hayek s artillery regiment took part in the last offensive of the Austro-Hungarian army in the Italian battleground in June 1918 . By early July , however Major-General Boroevic gave order to abort this last desperate assault due to an appalling number of casualties , malnutrition , and a rapidly declining discipline . And in late October of the same year then , Austria suffered the terminal blow delivered by the Italians after they crossed the Piave River . The front lines broke down and the Austrian army s inner order and command structure began to disintegrate . As rumors of immediate mutinies were abound , these disillusioned troops speaking some 11 different languages found themselves left in the trenches , wounded and hungry without any entrusted command or legally binding oath . Hayek was among those tens of thousands of demoralized soldiers who escaped Italian imprisonment and attempted to retreat into the economic and political Kurt R . Leube is associated with the Hoover Institution ( Stanford University , California ), and the F . A . von Hayek Institute ( Vienna ). ( my translation ). __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 12
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__________________________________________________________________ uncertainty of their shattered homelands . Aggressive nationalistic and political fanaticism erupted among the soldiers and in countless occasions they turned violently against each other . And yet , as a keen observer Hayek witnessed how not before long and with no one formally in charge small groups began to spontaneously evolve among these confused monarchists , radical nationalists , or revolutionary Marxists . He joined these spontaneously developing orders and structures , as one soldier after an other started to search for some comrades to band up , thus facilitating their a common and arduous march back through sometimes hostile territory . On November 3 a cease-fire treaty was signed in Padua . The once mighty Habsburg Empire in which these troops had been raised and whose proud and traditional institutions they had vowed to defend has collapsed before their eyes and a dramatically changed world order was about to emerge and began to break all bonds . Severely weakened by malaria , Hayek returned into a starving and deeply divided Vienna on November 12 , 1918 , the very day the self-styled parliamentary deputies of what had remained of the Habsburg Empire unanimously resolved that the German speaking Austria from now on shall be part of a German Republic .” In other words , if there was not to be a new multi-national federation of the many states and nations occupying the area along the river Danube , then the German speaking population of Austria would naturally become a part of a new German state . 2 Like so many of his 2 Karl R . Stadler , The Birth of the Austrian Republic , 1918-1921 ( Leydijthoff , 1966 ), friends , Hayek had grown to manhood within an intellectual milieu formed by individuals who had become accustomed to playing a leading role in a large cosmopolitan multi-national state . For this entire group the most important fact about the newly founded Republic of German-Austria was that it simply did not offer a field of action commensurate to their aspirations , and they were to respond accordingly . Politically unprepared , democratically unfit , and totally cut off from the fertile farmlands and resources of its former eastern provinces , the once mighty Empire of about 50 million people was reduced to the size of a small , land-locked country of barely seven million . The unexpected situation in which German-Austria found itself raised a set of unprecedented social problems which Hayek and his countless contemporaries who all had clearly assumed that their primary tasks were attached to a vast empire before the war , found difficult to turn their attention to . It was here that von Hayek , Ludwig von Mises and large numbers of fellow intellectuals became convinced advocates of the Anschluss to Germany . 3 They advocated the annexation not so much for emotional reasons , rather it seemed for them the only way the little Austria could economically survive . Their society had disappeared and the new Austria was simply unable to offer the type of opportunities for leadership which Hayek and his social class had come to expect . The experiences of his war service , the loss of his best friend , and the collapse of his social and political milieu left 3 See among other works L . von Mises , Der Wiedereintritt Deutsch-Österreichs in das Deutsche Reich und die Währungsfrage ”, in Wirtschaftliche Verhältnisse in Deutsch- Österreich : Schriften des Verein für Sozial- pp . 64-65 , 68 . politik , 158 ( 1919 ), pp . 147-71 . __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 13
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__________________________________________________________________ a lasting impression on Hayek . And yet , as he remarked in retrospect , it was like being shipwrecked which also leaves you without any doubt that one has to start anew , rather than a slow decline .” 4 His fascination with the natural sciences which clearly dominated in his family for several generations , thus gave way to the problems of individual behavior and economic organization . 5 II Within this political void , Hayek , like many of his fellow veterans , looked for some lead and intellectual orientation and attempted to find them in the few books they could get . And they found it in the works of Ernst Mach ( 1838-1916 ), Walter Rathenau ( 1876-1922 ), the Webbs ( 1858 / 59-1943 / 47 ) and Eugen von Philippovich ( 1858-1917 ), among others . As a passionate reader and book collector he was at once especially captivated by Rathenau s persuasive books Von Kommenden Dingen ( 1917 ). It was Rathenau , a German statesman and admirer of the utopian socialist Saint Simon who probably more than others drew Hayek s attention to the economic problems of society . For a passing time these ideas lead him to favor some sort of a well-intentioned Fabian Socialism with a moderate economic planning attitude . In order to promote these ends he even founded , with some friends , the Deutsch-Demokratische Hochschüler Vereinigung , a somewhat left-leaning 4 Conversations and interviews with Hayek I , Salzburg , 1971-77 ( see Note 1 ). 5 In a short letter to a Swedish neurologist ( Feb . 17 , 1983 ), Hayek claims that only the political excitements of the time after WWI have abducted him into the social sciences ( my translation ).” Hoover Archive , Hayek left-leaning student association at the university . As his interest was almost equally divided among philosophy , psychology , and economics , the circumstances of the time forced him to chose between his academic attractions and the dim expectations for landing a job . Hayek thus decided to enroll in the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna . Although the Habsburg Empire with its traditional institutions has ceased to exist , the typical old Austrian juristic ethos entrenched in the Central European tradition was still present , and economics thus was merely offered as one major field within the entire legal curriculum . Therefore , in order to read economics one had to study law which provided a degree with some prospects for a position in the legal professions or the civil service . Immediately after his return to Vienna , Hayek and hundreds of his fellow war veterans therefore flooded the University of Vienna and began to study towards their law degree . Despite the dismal material conditions at the university , the intellectual climate was still vibrant and carried the marks of such towering figures who either had died before or during the war , like Böhm-Bawerk , Phillipovich , the philosopher of science and physicist Ernst Mach , the physicist Jodl , the art historian Schlosser , the legal theorists Bernatzik or Loeffler , among countless others . 6 Due to his rather mixed success in his school years and his premature termination of the Gymnasium ( he joined up two months short of his 18th birthday ), Hayek s literary and philosophical education was less than complete , and most of his friends 6 See the very useful book by J . Nautz and R . Vahrenkamp , eds ., Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende : Einflüsse-Umwelt-Wirkungen , 2 nd Collection , 34-4 . ed . ( Vienna , 1996 ). __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 14
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__________________________________________________________________ were far ahead intellectually . It was mainly for these reasons that as soon as he recognized the academic vigor prevalent at the university he at once plunged into several branches of study and after a short period of time surpassed even his most ambitious friends . The political excitement of the time encouraged Hayek to venture out far beyond his own narrow subject , which later enabled him to develop his legal , economic and philosophical ideas into a comprehensive socioeconomic system . With several positions vacant due to the war and the famous Friedrich von Wieser resuming his chair for economics at the University of Vienna only in 1919 , economics at the time of Hayek s first semesters was somewhat underrepresented . Carl Menger had left the university prematurely already in 1903 . There were more or less only Othmar Spann ( 1878-1950 ) and Carl Grünberg ( 1861- 1940 ) teaching , and thus Hayek s first contact with academic economics was the Marxist Grünberg who introduced him among other things to the Bodenreformer ,” a German blend of the Henry George School and the Ricardian theory of land rent . Although his attraction to Ricardo s thought was a passing one , this experience taught Hayek much and was his decisive step into economic theory even before he was formally exposed to Wieser . A brief mention should also be made here that , since Ludwig von Mises was never promoted to full professor at the University of Vienna and thus only conducted a weekly private seminar there , Hayek at no time was a student of Mises in a formal sense . In fact Hayek checked out Mises at the university only once and quickly came to thoroughly dislike him . 7 It was only later that they developed their lasting and scientifically fruitful relationship . During these first months at the university , Hayek devoted again much energy and time to the systematic study of Ernst Mach s writings on scientific method . Mach , who had died in 1916 , still was philosophically by far the most influential figure in Vienna of that time . 8 It was mainly Mach s work Die Analyse der Empfindungen ( 1885 / 1902 / 1959 ) that turned out to be the main stimulus for Hayek s increasing interest in physiological or sensory psychology . And yet , the lasting influence of Hayek s father , the physician and eminent botanist August von Hayek ( 1871-1928 ), should not be underestimated . It was his father who exposed him from early boyhood on to accompany him on his extended botanical excursions and was perceptive enough to see that his oldest son s mind was already more theoretical than it was taxonomical . Nurtured by his father , at age 16 Hayek s interests began to slowly shift from systematic botany to paleontology and further to the theory of evolution . The exposure to his father proved very educational . Without a life teacher Hayek also began to study the works of the psychologist von Helmholtz and the philosophers Adolph Stöhr and Alois Riehl . The reading of Ludwig Feuerbach s ( 1804-1872 ) 7 Conversations and interviews with Hayek I , Salzburg , 1971-1977 . 8 See especially Hayek s Preface to The Sensory Order ( 1952 ), as well as his essay on Ernst Mach und das sozialwissenschaftliche Denken in Wien ”, in Ernst Mach Institut , Symposium aus Anlass des 50 . Todestages von Ernst Mach ( Freiburg / Br ., 1967 ). __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 15
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