Hayek, Pinochet e Salazar

Hayek von Pinochet, por Corey Robin (via José Pedro Monteiro).

Além do apoio de Hayek a regimes autoritários, o autor chama a atenção a atenção para outro aspecto interessante - como contra as suas próprias teorias da "ordem espontãnea", Hayke acava na prática por ser um construtivista:

But, it seems to me, in the course of defending Pinochet and Salazar—and the whole idea of temporary dictatorship— Hayek was prepared to entertain an even deeper betrayal of his own stated beliefs. As he said to Sallas in 1981, when any “government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created.” That is what a dictator does: create the rules of social and political life. (Again, Hayek is not referring to a situation of civil war or anarchy; he’s talking about a social democracy in which the government pursues “the mirage of social justice” through administrative and increasingly discretionary means.)

Yet Hayek is famous—arguably most famous—for his notion that the rules of social order are neither known nor made; they are tacit and inherited.(...)

Hayek was hardly the first conservative intellectual to write paeans to the slow accumulated wisdom of the ages by day, only to  praise Jacobin interventions of the right by night. Edmund Burke, I’ve argued, did much the same thing. Hayek even went so far as to defend his preferred brand of politics as a kind of dogmatic utopianism.

A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency.

Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today…But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to be aimed at, is nevertheless not only the indispensable precondition of any rational policy, but also the chief contribution that science can make to the solution of the problems of practical policy.

How one squares Hayek’s praise of dictatorship with his conception of a spontaneous order, I’m not yet sure. But with his vision of an unmoved mover knowingly and forcibly creating rules, by design, from a lawless firmament (not to mention his conception of democratic drift), Hayek puts himself within the orbit of Carl Schmitt, with whom he maintained a running dialogue, and who famously described the moment when a new order is brought into being—a new order of rules and routines—as a “an absolute decision created out of nothingness,” as the moment when “the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism [the democratic state] that has become torpid by repetition.”

Eu acrescentaria que andar a mandar cópias dos seus livros a Salazar e Pinochet acompanhados de notas recomendando que estes modelassem os seus regimes de acordo com os referidos livros é do mais "construtivista" que há.

[Ainda a respeito de "ordem espontânea" e "construtivismo", ver este meu post de 2008]