Transcript:

BORK: Doctor Hayek, I think that if there’s one area in which I disagree with you slightly, it is about — We were discussing the intellectuals, and I guess it is that I see something a little more sinister about them [laughter] than you do. Isn’t it significant that, as you watch the intellectual classes, they tend to move the society always in one direction? That is, towards more regulation, towards more intervention, towards more politicization of the economy. And that you notice on campuses, at least the campuses I’m familiar with, an enormous resistance by very bright people to what are really fairly basic and simple ideas in economics, which suggests — may suggest — that something more than intellectual error is at work.

HAYEK: Is it really? You know, the resistance against being guided by something which is unintelligible to them is, I think, quite understandable in an intellectual. Go back to the origin of it all. Descartes, of course, explicitly argued only that we should not believe anything which we did not understand, but he immediately applied it that we should not accept any rules which we did not understand. And the intellectual has very strongly this feeling that what is not comprehensible must be nonsense. And to him the rules he’s required to obey are unintelligible and therefore nonsense. He defines rational almost as intelligible, and anything which is not intelligible to him is automatically irrational, and he is opposed to it.
(more…)