Saturday 7 May 2011

On Francis Fukuyama's coda to his article on Hayek in The New York Times

Hayek did not actually criticise Cartesianism in itself, but rather “Cartesian Dualism”. In “Law, Legislation and Liberty”, Chapter I, paragraph “Reason and abstraction”, he explained his position on rationality, abstraction and evolutionism: abstraction is not a conscious operation of the agent upon reality, but it is what constitutes his perceptions of it –and what is subject to blind evolution. So, I do not see such contradiction in Hayek’s thought as Fukuyama does.