Was Mill anti-traditional?
And was Hayek suffering from the burden of the past...?
In an article about Hayek, Mill, and the liberal idea of traditions, Cass Sunstein writes,
John Stuart Mill, also a defining liberal, can be seen a great critic of traditionalism. The Subjection of Women is a sustained attack on a tradition that he saw as an exercise of power, and not as the wisdom of crowds. On Liberty can be seen as a form of constructivism in Hayek’s sense: It offers a principle (the Harm Principle), discovered and defended by reason, that cuts like a knife through traditions.
I wonder if Mill has a more nuanced view of tradition—or at least of history. In the Subjection, he is careful to say that the custom does not have a right of prescription “in this case”, rather than rejecting the idea of custom per se:
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption…
Mill’s view of history is important because he believes that it can be used to promote whatever argument you wish to promote, but also that it does have real uses in showing “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform.” This is not an argument against tradition, but rather a way of seeing how tradition evolves in progressive societies. In his address at St. Andrews, he spoke of “the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.”
And, of course, he wrote in the Subjection, that
When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons.
We might see the phrase “common arrangement” as meaning something very close to “custom”. He also wrote to Harriet Taylor that women would continue to “beautify life”. Though he may be taken to have softened that view in the Subjection, his argument about the blacksmith suggests that he is open to the idea that the “common arrangements” between men and women might continue somewhat unaltered, or that what free enterprise, experiments in living, and competition would lead to was not a rational equality, but to a society in which women’s innate qualities lead them to different sorts of lives than men. He writes that “the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities.” Is that anti-traditional or rational?
In the Chapters on Socialism, Mill prefers the “utopian” socialism of Owen and Fourier to the radical socialism of the Continentals, and he says his preference is based on the fact that the first sort of socialism “need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an engine of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction.” This is not exactly pro-tradition, but it is not exactly rationalist anti-traditionalism either. He also says in the Chapters,
Sudden effects in history are generally superficial. Causes which go deep down into the roots of future events produce the most serious parts of their effect only slowly, and have, therefore, time to become a part of the familiar order of things before general attention is called to the changes they are producing; since, when the changes do become evident, they are often not seen, by cursory observers, to be in any peculiar manner connected with the cause. The remoter consequences of a new political fact are seldom understood when they occur, except when they have been appreciated beforehand.
This seems to be a vision of history in which things change slowly and (to us) unknowably, through the operations of “familiar orders”, which, to me at least, sounds Hayekian. In Auguste Comte and Positivism, he writes of “the peculiar phaenomena of English development” and “its exceptional character in relation to the general European movement.”
If I were speculating, I would almost venture to say that Hayek recognized some of his own ideas in Mill and felt “belated”, as a literary critic might say about one poet reacting to a previous poet. Think of Book V of Mill’s Political Economy, surely either an important influence upon Hayek or a book that made him realize that Mill had anticipated some of his insights, albeit not fully. If Hayek felt the pressure of Mill’s influence, and had to deal with what Walter Jackson Bate called “the burden of the past”, the spur of his surprising and (dare I say) irrational dislike of Mill might be due to this feeling of belatedness…
I read Sunstein's post earlier today and was surprised to see Henry Oliver's quick response to it, and curious as to his take on it given my own reaction. Sunstein has written in the past of his respect for Hayek, but always with an element of seeming irritation. His current discussion, comparing him with Mills, continued this impression as he somewhat leaves you with the feeling that commenter David Gordon notes below in this string. I was curious what ChatGPT might say about Hayek and Mills and received this thoughtful answer:
"Friedrich Hayek did not argue that traditions should be honored simply because they are traditions.
"Hayek’s position is often misunderstood. He believed that we should approach established traditions with humility because they may embody knowledge and experience accumulated over generations. However, he did not claim that all traditions are good, moral, or beyond criticism.
"In his major works, especially The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek acknowledged that traditions evolve, compete, and sometimes disappear because they are ineffective or incompatible with changing circumstances.
"A fair summary of his view would be:
•Don’t assume you fully understand why a tradition exists.
•Don’t abolish traditions lightly.
•Recognize that some traditions are harmful and should change or disappear.
•Prefer gradual, evolutionary reform over wholesale reconstruction of society.
•Hayek explicitly rejected the idea that survival alone proves a tradition is morally right. A custom may survive because of historical accident, power structures, or circumstances that no longer exist.
"Where he differed sharply from Mill was not on whether traditions can be wrong, but on the burden of proof:
Mill tended to place the burden on the tradition to justify itself.
Hayek tended to place the burden on the reformer to show why an established practice should be discarded.
A useful example is slavery. Hayek would not have defended slavery merely because it was traditional. Rather, he would argue that reformers should understand the broader social consequences of change and proceed through institutions governed by general rules of law. The fact that slavery was longstanding would not, by itself, give it moral legitimacy.
So the answer is: Hayek advocated respect for tradition, not blind obedience to it. He thought traditions deserve a presumption of value, not immunity from criticism."
I recall my surprise, once upon a time, upon learning that two prominent neuroscientists, who worked on similar topics with similar approaches, absolutely despised each other and viewed each other as personal and intellectual enemies. When I tried to figure out why, the scientific content seemed like such fine hair-splitting that it could have caused a nuclear explosion.
This kind of thing no longer surprises me!