Hayek wanted to make sure that everybody else in the world knew the dangers of scientism so that other countries would not follow in Nazi Germany’s footsteps.
On the latest episode of The Editors, Michael recommended a series on the Nazis from the podcast The Rest Is History. It covers the period between 1933 and 1938, when the Nazis were in power in Germany but World War II had not yet begun. I’m also a listener of that podcast, which is hosted by British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. They cover a wide range of topics (it’s not all about Nazis).
One of the points that Holland and Sandbrook emphasize about the Nazis is their ability to toggle between vicious antisemitism and “scientific” explanations for their racial worldview. On the one hand, the Nazis produced blatant antisemitic propaganda, encouraged children to inform on their parents if they were too close with Jews, and fomented pogroms. On the other hand, the Nazis employed some of the top medical professionals, legal minds, and university professors to promulgate clinical-sounding explanations for why the Jews had to be eliminated from Germany.
Nazi racial “science” was anything but, and some of the Nazis’ explanations would be comical if the consequences of the Nazi worldview weren’t so awful. Holland and Sandbrook describe some of the difficulties the Nazis had in deciding who counts as Jewish — an important question to figure out if you believe Jews should be eliminated but an impossible question to definitively answer since there is no such thing as a Jewish race.
Regardless, an intellectual familiar with Germany or Austria around this time would have picked up on the ways in which the Nazis enlisted “science” to their cause. One such intellectual was F. A. Hayek, who was born in Vienna in 1899.
He fought in World War I for Austria-Hungary. He graduated with his final doctoral degree from the University of Vienna in 1923. He became a professor at the London School of Economics in 1931. After the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, he knew he could not return to his home country and became a British citizen.
From the relative safety of London, Hayek saw how the Nazis had transformed Germany into an antisemitic war machine, with the backing of many top intellectuals. In the spring of 1933 — right after the Nazis took power and years before World War II or the Holocaust — Hayek wrote a memo on national socialism.
“Incomprehensible as the recent events in Germany must seem to anyone who has known that country chiefly in the democratic post-war years, any attempt fully to understand these developments must treat them as the culmination of tendencies which date back to a period long before the Great War,” Hayek began.
He viewed the Nazi regime as the culmination of collectivism, and in that respect viewed it as similar to the Soviet Union. “It is more probable that the real meaning of the German revolution is that the long dreaded expansion of communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognized because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden by the difference in the phraseology and the privileged groups,” Hayek wrote in the spring 1933 memo. This would turn out to be true in two respects: 1) the Nazi economy was centrally planned as part of a totalitarian program to realize a vision of utopia, and 2) the Nazi defeat during World War II with help from the Soviets resulted in the Soviet occupation of what became East Germany and the creation of the communist Eastern Bloc that endured until 1989.
It’s easy to see why Hayek would be so sensitive to what he called “scientism” in his later work. Sometimes people claim Hayek is too obsessed with scientism, but given what he saw happen to the society in which he grew up, it makes sense that he sounded the alarm about the application of “scientific” methods to social affairs.
One way he argued against scientism is to point out the methodological differences between social sciences and natural sciences. In a 1942 lecture called “The Facts of the Social Sciences,” Hayek wrote, “I believe that this view which regards social collectivities such as ‘society’ or the ‘state,’ or any particular social institution or phenomenon, as in any sense more objective than the intelligible actions of the individuals is sheer illusion.” Rather, people use social theories to ascribe terms such as “society” or “state” to the actions of individuals.
“What do we mean by a ‘fact’ of history?” Hayek asked. “Was the man plowing his field just beyond the extreme wing of Napoleon’s guards part of the Battle of Waterloo?” In a sense, maybe, but that’s not what people mean when they talk of “the Battle of Waterloo.” The facts of the social sciences cannot be defined by time or space, Hayek argued. They require theory to be intelligible:
The situation is not that we first study the “given” historical facts and then perhaps can generalize about them. We rather use a theory when we select from the knowledge we have about a period certain parts as intelligibly connected and forming part of the same historical fact. We never observe states or governments, battles or commercial activities, or a people as a whole. When we use any of these terms, we always refer to a scheme which connects individual activities by intelligible relations; that is, we use a theory which tells us what is and what is not part of our subject.
That claim is devastating to Nazi racial “science.” If the facts of social science are always ultimately reducible to individuals, that means they are not ultimately reducible to race. It means that objectively defining a superior “German race” or an inferior “Jewish race” is a fool’s errand, and using the imprimatur of science and reason to do so is to abuse science and reason.
Of course, Hayek knew that this wasn’t merely an academic exercise in arguing about methodology. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek picked up where he left off in his 1933 memo on national socialism. “It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background,” he wrote. On the contrary:
Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.
Perhaps for that reason, Naziism was very alluring to German intellectuals. Hayek is unsparing: “The way in which, in the end, with few exceptions, [Germany’s] scholars and scientists put themselves readily at the service of the new rulers is one of the most depressing and shameful spectacles in the whole history of the rise of National Socialism.” They had been clamoring for a “scientific” organization of society, and the Nazis provided a way to do that.
Hayek wrote that 25 years before he was writing, before World War II and the Nazis’ rise to power, it was perhaps possible to believe that a scientifically organized, planned society would be desirable. “But to find it once more held after 25 years of experience and the re-examination of the old beliefs to which this experience has led, and at a time when we are fighting the results of those very doctrines, is tragic beyond words,” he wrote.
Hayek wrote The Constitution of Liberty in 1960 to articulate his view of how to avoid the trappings of collectivism. In that book, he maintained, “The concurrent decline in esteem for individual liberty and individual responsibility is in a great measure the result of an erroneous interpretation of the lessons of science.” He wrote that “the conception of universal determinism that dominated 19th-century science” was applied to all human behavior, meaning that everything humans did could be explained with reference to generally applicable laws.
“The intellectual history of the last few generations gives us any number of instances of how this determinist picture of the world has shaken the foundation of the moral and political belief in freedom,” Hayek wrote, no doubt thinking of Nazi Germany as one of those instances.
Germany was not an intellectual backwater before the Nazis took over. It was at the forefront of European culture and science, and was perceived by foreigners as an eminently modern nation-state. That country produced the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, and it plunged Hayek’s native land, Austria, into tyranny and war.
Hayek could write about the intellectual foundations of Naziism as an outside observer living in London during the Nazi regime while also having inside knowledge of intellectual trends in the German-speaking world in the years leading up to the Nazi takeover. He recognized immediately that the Nazis weren’t a passing phase in Germany, and that the results of their regime would be catastrophic. And he wanted to make sure that everybody else in the world knew the dangers of scientism so that other countries would not follow in Germany’s footsteps.