Degree of inflexibility

It’s not just down to the students – our universities have encouraged a Leftist intolerance of ideas

Ryan Bourne

Marxist students want to cancel societies that study free market thinking – but the professors are to blame

Agroup of university students engaging in a dumb campaign? Quelle surprise! That was my initial reaction to the furore about a London School of Economics “Class War” group of “activists” demanding the dissolution of the university’s Hayek Society.

With growing intolerance on campuses to alternative ideas, it was perhaps inevitable that the front line debate over which historical figures are “acceptable” would edge towards free-market thinkers. Now, even a deceased Nobel Prize winner like Friedrich Hayek is not safe, despite the Austrian’s cosmopolitanism and him having taught at the university for two decades.

LSE Class War claims the Hayek Society promotes “free market fundamentalist views which outwardly call for the oppression of working class people”. It should therefore be shut down because it discusses ideas “harmful to marginalised students”. Aside from the absurd paternalism on speech, that sounds very much like your typical student Marxist bloviating. It is easy to dismiss the demand as one of a rogue Leftie fringe group seeking attention, tapping into the zeitgeist of “no platforming”.

On reflection, though, I think there’s more to this. For the argument Class War alludes to – the idea that classical liberal economic ideas are some sort of constructed veneer for the continued exploitation of the poor – didn’t start with students. In fact, it originates in the conspiratorial assertions and assumptions of output from Left-wing academics. You know, the sort who spend their careers writing indecipherable papers bemoaning “neoliberalism”.

Hayek played a key role in laying the intellectual foundations for freemarket economics’ revival and the 1980s policy revolution that followed. For a certain crowd of scholars, who don’t judge ideas at face value but by what they think the intentions are, he is therefore definitionally guilty of encouraging exploitation. That’s because “neoliberals” are regarded as not just wrong, but dishonest about their true motives and the private and government oppression they would willingly tolerate.

Claims that Hayekian classical liberals are blind to oppression, of course, are perverse. Hayek himself fled Austria with the Nazis on the rise and wrote extensively in his book, The Road to Serfdom, about the political dynamics that risked a growth in authoritarianism.

He opposed economic planning in large part because he understood that no central authority had the information to account for our personal tastes, abilities and knowledge. He therefore advocated power being left with individuals, away from the coercive tentacles of planners.

Unlike many of his contemporaries that wanted to nanny, cajole, or shame, particular groups “for their own benefit”, he didn’t believe in patronising the poor, but in protecting their freedom. In fact, the very essence of Hayek’s ideas was that everyone had a useful role to contribute because of their own very specific knowledge and abilities. All deserved dignity, equal treatment under the law and rights to trade property and use their talents.

His book, The Constitution of Liberty, made references to the case for a basic safety net for the poor, although not the sprawling welfare state we have today. The logic of his arguments advocated limited cash transfers or providing social insurance where market mechanisms couldn’t alleviate true hardship. He opposed, though, a harrying, coercive, conditional welfare bureaucracy that over time, he said, would surely spiral towards growth-retarding attempts to reduce inequality, rather than mitigating actual poverty.

Now, you can argue about whether he was proved right or wrong on that. But outwardly calling for oppression? Exploitation? Claiming that his ideas endorsed these things is to say that anyone who might demur from thinking welfarism or full socialism is the best way to help the poor is similarly guilty.

Indeed, it’s particularly ironic that Hayek’s ideas stand accused of oppressive intent, given the stated views of his contemporaries. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Prize with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, for example, a doyen of the Left for his work on macroeconomic Keynesianism and social welfare policy. Yet designing and “improving” society from the top-down took socialists, nationalists, and even social democrats, in dangerous directions in the 20th century. Myrdal, for example, argued in a 1934 book for forced sterilisation on eugenics grounds. The founders of the LSE were likewise prominent eugenicists. Who’s oppressive now?

Marxists in the LSE Class War clan might say Hayek’s commitment to private property damns him alone. But Hayek saw private property, rightly, as crucial to both liberty and prosperity. Dispersed private ownership, he thought, reduced the scope for any authority having too much power.

The existence of private property also facilitated trade and so specialisation, driving the skillbuilding that improved productivity and generated the growth of the past three centuries, which has near eliminated the grinding poverty most humans faced beforehand.

So if there’s no obvious links between Hayek’s ideas and endorsing exploitation, what types of issues do the Hayek Society discuss in their meetings that might be deemed “outward calls” that are “harmful” to marginalised groups?

Vincent Geloso, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, explained to me that when he was society president last decade, events focused on Britain’s housing laws and the 2011 London riots, including how both hurt the poor.

A review of this year’s offering hardly suggests a pro-oppression turn since. The online webinars have included former Economist science editor Matt Ridley talking about innovation, a panel on the future of globalisation, and discussion of Britain’s green energy policies.

It’s difficult not to conclude that, underpinning the targeting of the Hayek Society is not any actual evidence of Hayek or society members’ views that suggest they support oppression.

What generates Class War’s ire is a belief that free markets are necessarily exploitative, or else that supporting them is a cover for oppressive intent. The ammo for those false claims can indeed be found at universities – but in the faculties rather than the student union bars.