Liberty and Coercion

Abstract

It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance that the concept of liberty or freedom (Hayek uses the two words interchangeably) has for his system of thought. This in itself may sound trivial, since almost all social philosophers have been at pains to stress that their systems of ideas are designed to advance liberty, but what distinguishes Hayek is his ideological, and that is his word,¹ insistence on the priority of freedom over other ideals and his obvious intellectual and moral disquiet at the attraction other values, especially those of equality and social justice, have had for other social thinkers in this century. Freedom can be properly said to be at the centre of gravity of his thought in that both his philosophy of social science and his system of morality find their places around this crucial idea. It was this dogmatic commitment to liberty that found him notoriety, first in The Road to Serfdom and later in The Constitution of Liberty, primarily because the conclusions in matters of social policy that he drew from a rigorous, not to say rigid, application of the principle were so much at variance with what had become the consensus of opinion in these matters. It is important, therefore, to distinguish liberty in his philosophy of social science from liberty in his idea of morality.