PRESTOPUNDIT

I'VE BEEN INVITED by Prof. Paul Velleman to tell you about a new academic group blog -- Left2Right. Dr. Velleman sends along this from the "about" page of the blog:

In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? "Left2Right" will be a discussion of these and related questions. Although we have chosen the subtitle 'How can the Left get through to the Right?', our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.

Members of the group blog include Joshua Cohen (MIT); Richard Rorty (Stanford); Peter Railton (Michigan); Gerald Dworkin (UC-Davis); David Schmidtz (Arizona), among others.

Here's a serious issue I'd like to raise. Perhaps the most significant thinker of the last 100 years making a difference in how everyone thinks about society and politics is a fellow named Friedrich Hayek. (For some sense of Hayek's intellectual contribution, see this.) Now most all of the folks who make up this new blog are philosophers, many of them political philosophers. But here's an experiment -- try to find an academic philosopher in America who's engaged Hayek's work at any level beyond that of stick figures or carnival mirror caricatures. In fact, most academics neglect Hayek or consciously ignore his work. The tenured left simply will not engage the meatiest intellectual work in the overlapping domain of philosophy and political economy of the last 100 years. For some time I've encouraged academia to Take Hayek Seriously -- even recently launching a blog titled, well, Taking Hayek Seriously. If leftist and independent academics want to engage non-leftists, they might consider engaging the ideas that non-leftists take seriously. It's hard to find a conservative who isn't massively influenced by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, either directly or indirectly. It's also very easy to find everyday Americans who have read Hayek. How do I know this? Well, there is rarely a day of the week that I don't sell at least one book by Hayek or about Hayek via the Hayek Scholars Page. And Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is perennial Amazon bestseller, with the paperback edition rarely outside its list of the top 1,500 sellers at Amazon. For example, the paperback is right now at #1,170. I also know that Barnes & Noble stocks The Road to Serfdom in their bookstores as part of their regular inventory, and that the book sells consistently, month to month to month. Why? Well, one reason is that Rush Limbaugh, Walter Williams and other non-leftists in the media regularly recommend Hayek to their readers and listeners -- and folks actually follow up on their recommendations, as they've said on the air. Here's another reason -- Hayek's name pops up with some frequency at many conservative and classical liberal Internet sites and in the non-leftist blogosphere (Tech Central Station, Becker-Posner, FrontPage Mag, InstaPundit, National Review have all had Hayek mentions in recent weeks.)

So believe it or not is it is easier to find a 9-5 working stiff who's read Hayek than it is a university professor. And when you do find a professor who's heard of Hayek, what they "know' of Hayek is mostly second-hand and mostly false -- read the journals and you will consistently come across statements about Hayek that just aren't so. I call these "Hayek Myths" and they reflect scholarly laziness perhaps more than they do they do intellectual incompetence (which is also a problem).

My point here is that academics have had every opportunity to engage the intellectual world of the non-left on their own turf -- in the domain of ideas -- and they have repeatedly declined to do so. Here's a prime example, pointed to in a review of Richard Rorty's book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America written by George Leef:

The most annoying thing about this book, though, is that the author writes as if free-market intellectuals had never said anything in criticism of the socialistic notions of which he is so fond. Consider �social justice.� The phrase is used repeatedly throughout the book, but never does Rorty acknowledge the writings, to cite only the most prominent critic of this vaporous locution, of F.A. Hayek. Hayek�s The Mirage of Social Justice (volume 2 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty) was a devastating attack on the term �social justice,� arguing that it does not and cannot have any meaning. If Rorty has ever read Hayek (or Mises, Rothbard, Nozick, or any other serious critic of welfare-state interventionism), there is no evidence of it here. Rorty loves to imagine the political system riding in on a white horse to rectify all the world�s injustices, but a large body of free-market analysis�public choice economics�says that this expectation is hopelessly na�ve. Naturally, you find no reference to James Buchanan or any other public choicer in the book.

Here's a little experiment I've conducted. I've Googled the web sites of all of the members of the Left2Right blog, and I've Googled "Hayek" along with the names of these bloggers. Here's what I found: Arthur Kuflik (zero hits); Dale Jamieson (zero hits); Daniel Farrell (zero hits); David Estlund (zero hits); David Schmidtz (zero hits); Debra Satz (zero hits); Don Herzog (zero hits); Elizabeth Anderson (1 hit); Eric Talley (zero hits); George Sher (zero hits); Gerald Dworkin (zero hits); David Velleman (zero hits); Jeff McMahan (zero hits); John Deigh (zero relevant hits); Joshua Cohen (2 hits); Judith Lichtenberg (4 hits); Kwame Anthony Appiah (zero hits); Lewis Kornhauser (1 hit); Lynn Sanders (zero relevant hits); Michele Moody-Adams (zero hists); Paul Velleman (zero hits); Peter Railton (zero hits); Richard Rorty (zero relevant hits); Seana Shiffrin (zero relevant hits); Stephen Darwall (zero relevant hits); and Steven Shiffrin (zero hits).

I'll have more on this in a later post. Meanwhile, here are some people who have taken Hayek seriously: Bruce Caldwell, Mark Smith, Roger Garrison, R. T. Allen, and Christina Petsoulas.

More thoughts on the Left2Right blog from Crooked Timber -- be sure to read the comments!!

UPDATE: Dean Esmay weighs in:

I was moved to excitement when I heard about a site called "Left 2 Right." The subtitle is "How Can The Left Get Through To The Right?" While there's something a bit condescending about that title, I see great promise in it. When people are being liberal-minded enough to say, "gee, maybe we actually need to have some dialogue with our opponents," that's a good thing.

My heart sank a bit when I read this thread on supporting the troops, though. I immediately thought, "wow, this guy really, really doesn't get it does he?" ..

I'm hoping for good things from the "Left 2 Right" crowd. Know why? Because they're trying. Maybe those of us on the other side can try a little harder ourselves, eh? By the way, Prestopundit has some suggestions for the Left 2 Right crowd. I think he goes mildly off the rails in spending so much time on mentioning free market philosophers, but, I think the overarching point is corret: the important thing is to actually study and understand what the other side's arguments really are. Stereotyping and casual assumptions get you nowhere. I voted for Bush this year not because I consider myself a conservative--I really don't--but I do understand and respect many conservative ideas, and share a few of them. But more to the point: I really do understand them and I really do respect where they're coming from (most of the time, anyway).

UPDATE II: Matt Lister writes:

I think you're a bit off in the claim that the left2right folks ignore Hayek. Probably it would be better to look at their actual papers rather than run a google search. Elizabeth Anderson is an author of a well respected book on value in economics and discusses Hayek a bit in it, Joshua Cohen has discussed him in articles and in the classes he teaches on the history of liberalism. David Schmitz's views are actually quite close to Hayek's (Schmitz is a "classical liberal" and editor of a book on Nozick), and so on. It's not that these people don't know Hayek, or take him seriously- they just think either that there are better things to discuss or are interested in different problems, or think that we've moved beyond Hayek. Wouldn't it be a bit odd if we hadn't? I like Hayek- I've read Constitution of Liberty and the 3 volumes of Law Liberty and Morality- but it's not very rigerous to my mind. That may be a matter of taste, but it's wrong to suppose these people have ignored him or are afraid of him. (This is especially true of Schmitz, as I said, who holds a position quite like his.)

I was previously aware of the work of Anderson, Cohen and Schmidtz (although I haven't studied it closely) and their familiarity with Hayek. I'm planning to do a follow-up, asking the Left2Right folks to send me along references to their professional work addressing the ideas of conservative and classical liberal thinkers, espcially those addressing the work of Hayek. My own professional opinion is that Hayek's philosophical contribution runs very deep, and almost every academic writer on Hayek you can name has only skimmed the surface of Hayek's deeper train of ideas -- and this would indlude Anderson, Cohen and even Schmidtz. Posted by Greg Ransom