What Friedrich A. Hayek sought with his three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty was to propose a legal-political system in which the Rule of Law principle would not be de facto replaced by the rule of men through laws (Rule by Law). To do this, he built a recursive model of a legal system whose initial conditions were the … Continue reading Hayek, or the Recursive Model of the Rule of Law
In a brief autobiographical note, Friedrich Hayek refers to the influence he had received in his younger years from both his teacher Ernst Mach and his distant cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein: “But I did, through these connexions, become probably one of the first readers of Tractatus when it appeared in 1922. Since, like most philosophically interested … Continue reading A few words — and many quotations – about the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Friedrich Hayek
In 1945, Friedrich A. Hayek published under the title “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in The American Economic Review, one of his most celebrated essays -both at the time of its appearance and today- and probably, together with other studies also later compiled in the volume Individualism and Economic Order (1948), one of those … Continue reading Some derivations from the uses of the terms “knowledge” and “information” in F. A. Hayek’s works.
In the first volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), we will find the most daring theses of Friedrich Hayek regarding the problem between law and politics. Just as his economic work of the 1930s and 1940s had been, in his opinion, misunderstood by his colleagues; just as he was surprised to hear the fervent … Continue reading A Note on “Hayekian” Empirical Normative Systems
However, theorizing about law enforcement takes on vital importance when it comes to considering whether a low level of law enforcement denatures the Rule of Law in such a way that it implies, de facto, a change of regime. That is, when it happens that, under the shell of a constitutional system, an increasingly authoritarian … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 10 of 12)
If individual freedom is defined as the absence of arbitrary coercion – as F. A. Hayek did in his The Constitution of Liberty (1960) – it is clear that a government that bases most of its decisions on rules known to all will have to be less arbitrary than the one who makes decisions according to his … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 9 of 12)
This reference to the distinction of values between the short and the long term also refers to the theory of capital and interest that Eugen v. Böhm-Bawerk and Austrian and Swedish economists who followed him in such developments, such as Ludwig v. Mises, Knut Wicksell, the already named Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachmann, or the British … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 3 of 12)
Obviously, there is a whole question of information and transaction costs surrounding the game between empirical social norms and positive legal norms. The former are more agile and immediate, better adapted to the circumstances, but at the same time they are not enough to guarantee peace when the interests at stake gain social relevance. There … Continue reading Liberal Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes: The Case for Law Enforcement. (Part 2 of 12)
This essay aims to highlight that the low generalized application of positive legal norms in any legal system, by allowing greater discretion on the part of the public powers, leads to a gradual increase in the levels of authoritarianism, both on the part of governments and of society itself.
François Furet, in the preliminary essay that serves as an introduction to The Past of an Illusion, entitled “The Equalitarian Passion,” highlights that in the Ancient Regime inequality was legally consecrated, while after the French Revolution, inequality persists surreptitiously, of contraband, thus cementing a feeling of vindication in the face of illegitimate inequality. Something similar … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 8): Inequality before the law, de facto
However, the law itself has its own endogenous system of production of rules, which operates on the abstract plane of the configuration of the structure of the relationships between its terms, and whose dynamics depends on the negative feedback process implied by the judicial work itself to clarify the words of the law for each … Continue reading Institutions, Machines, and Complex Orders (Part 7): The open texture of the words of the law
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson call the set of regulations that obstruct innovation “extractive institutions.” Of course, here again, extractive institutions are less harmful than the total absence of institutions. Not every change in the status quo can be interpreted as “creative destruction” or “entrepreneurship.” As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in Law, Legislation and Freedom, so … Continue reading Three Lessons on Institutions and Incentives (Part 4): Institutions and the Rule of Law
This article by Matt McManus (@MattPolProff) recently published at Quillette made me remember H.L.A. Hart’s theory of law and the problems derived from the open texture of language, a concept borrowed by him from Friedrich Waismann, an Austrian Mathematician and philosopher of the Vienna Circle. Many authors would rather distinguish “open texture” from vagueness: being the … Continue reading Rule of Law: the case of open texture of language and complexity
We live in times in which the liberal democracy is challenged by a sort of political meritocracy according to which a performance legitimacy — i.e., the utility that government management brings to the population – would be more important than the legitimacy of origin, based on the consent of the sovereign people. Thus, economic growth … Continue reading Some Reflections on Liberal Democracy, Political Meritocracy, and Critical Rationalism
Just as language carries with it a phenomenon of open texture, according to which the reference and meaning of some of its terms are modified in response to changes in the environment — for example, saying that the head of state is commander in chief of the armed forces implies different denotations and connotations as … Continue reading On the open texture of conflicts
Notes On Liberty 