Favorite books of the semester

My favorite book I’ve read this semester has got to be Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

Next up would be Friedrich V. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. This is research for a paper, but I’ve really enjoyed it. So far, I have eleven pages of quotes from the book. Here’s a few good ones.

“While the rationalist tradition assumes that man was originally endowed with both the intellectual and the moral attributes that enabled him to fashion civilization deliberately, the evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error; that it was the sum of experience…”

“They [the British theorists] were very far from holding such naïve views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the ‘natural goodness of man,’ the existence of a ‘natural harmony of interests,’ or the beneficient effects of ‘natural liberty’ (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. The problem was how ‘that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make toward pursuing its own.’ [Josiah Tucker] It was not ‘natural liberty’ in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure ‘life, liberty, and property,’ which made those individual efforts beneficial. Not Locke, nor Hume, nor Smith, nor Burke, could ever have argued, as Bentham did, that ‘every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty.’ Their argument was never a complete laissez faire argument, which, as the very words show, is also part of the French rationalist tradition and in its literal sense was never defended by any of the English classical economists.”

“The rationalistic design theories were necessarily based on the assumption of the individual man’s propensity for rational action and his natural intelligence and goodness. The evolutionary theory, on the contrary, showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do least harm. The antirationalist tradition is here closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it.”

“Far from assuming that those who created the institutions were wiser than we are, the evolutionary view is based on the insight that the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any one man possesses.”