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Brad De Long is reading Hayek -- but none too closely. Hayek distinguishes between liberal democracy bounded by the rule of law -- and unlimited democracy bounded by nothing. De Long completely ignores a distinction which is fairly easy to understand. Why? Lord knows. Anyway, here is De Long, and his "criticism" of a straw-Hayek (a criticism which ignores the central purposes which Hayek does find in democracy -- and which can be found repeatedly in Hayek's work, if the objective is scholarship, and not political demagoguary):

But last night I ran into a passage that makes me wonder whether Hayek in his inner core believed that democracy had any value -- even any institutional value -- at all. It came on pp. 171-2 of Friedrich Hayek (1979), Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Political Order of a Free People vol. III (Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press: 0226320901):

"Egalitarianism is of course not a majority view but a product of the necessity under unlimited democracy to solicit the support even of the worst. It is by the slogan that 'it is not your fault' that the demagoguery of unlimited democracy, assisted by a scientistic psychology, has come to the support of those who claim a share in the wealth of our society without submitting to the discipline to which it is due. It is not by conceding 'a right to equal concern and respect' to those who break the code that civilization is maintained."

Now it is certainly true that of the trio "Prosperity, Liberty, Democracy," Hayek puts prosperity first and liberty second--or, rather, that freedom of contract needs to be more closely safeguarded than freedom of speech, for if there is freedom of contract then freedom of speech will quickly reappear, but if there is no freedom of contract than freedom of speech will not long survive. But the passage above makes me wonder whether democracy has any place in Hayek's hierarchy of good things at all.

That isn't end of De Long's non sequiturs, but enough for here.

UPDATE: And here is my rather heated posting to De Long's comments section:

Balderdash. This is ridiculous Brad, and shame on you for pretending otherwise. If you want to know what purposes Hayek finds for democracy he tells you -- repeatedly in many places. But I'm not sure that is your interest or your purpose. If it were you would start at by pointing out up front that Hayek make a big deal of a distinction between liberal democracy bound by the rule of law and unlimited democracy bound by nothing. I can't believe that you've read what you claim to have read and still somehow you failed to absorb this rather simple distinction, which Hayek hammers home again and again in his work. Hayek values liberal democracy most highly and has little use for unlimited democracy -- a position shared by Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and the other folks who created America. This is fairly commonplace stuff. Why pretend otherwise -- and why smear Hayek in such a blantantly unscholarly fashion -- and in a way that mimics the worst of the worst .. false carnards against Hayek coming from the far left on the fringes of the Internet. What web sites have you been reading to get this stuff?

You see, I've run into this idiotic non-sense again and again on the internet, and there is more of it in the comments section of De Long's post. Sadly, and predictably, some of it comes out of the universities, where the Left finds it impossible to deal with either truth or the actual ideas of actual people. Smear is instead the favorite game in town -- and the appalling lack of intellectual diversity in the university make its an easy to get away with. Sad, terribly frustrating .. and more than a little pathetic.