Hayek Idea Of Freedom Essay

2) F. A. Hayek, in his seminal work titled The Constitution of Liberty, argues, “General altruism, however, is a meaningless conception. Nobody can effectively care for other people as such; the responsibilities we can assume must always be particular, can concern only those about whom we know concrete facts and to whom either choice or special conditions have attached us. It is one of the fundamental rights and duties of a freeman to decide what and whose needs appear to him most important.” Discuss the theoretical and policy-relevant implications of this idea with respect to social protection policies and tax policies.

Hayekian ideas have been the most influential ones in policy making since the mid-1980s. For Hayek, increasing control of the governments of economic life means increasing control of the governments in every area of life and thus …show more content…
Harvey asserts that neoliberalism and the neoliberal idea of freedom were not a simple utopian project of intellectuals but rather a political project that helps elites to regain the power they somehow lost in the regulated. Therefore, the meaning and importance they devoted to liberty as a conceptual apparatus helped them to construct the consent of the society for the changes they asked for. Hayek, with referring Polanyi, claims that freedom is not a good thing necessarily. There are good and bad freedoms and neoliberal thinking made bad ones superior to good ones for the sake of capitalists. And in most of the advanced capitalist societies, the meaning freedom is what neoliberalism gave it nowadays. The reconstruction of the freedom in a neoliberal sense not only promotes capitalism but undermines collectivism, solidarity, and reciprocity and thus may cause further social crises that would be irrevocable because of people’s underestimation of collective