In response to my critical comments about Hayek a few weeks ago, Jameson Graber writes to clarify Hayek’s views. The rest of this post is from Graber:

I noticed recently that you wrote a blog post on free market economics , quoting Hayek’s views on social goals. I appreciate your point, but as someone who has been reading a lot of Hayek lately, I wanted to give Hayek his due.

I highly recommend Hayek’s essay, “Individualism: True and False” (from the collection “Individualism and the Economic Order”). Here is his description of “true” individualism:

“What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior. This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them. The next step in the individualistic analysis of society, however, is directed against the rationalistic pseudo-individualism
which also leads to practical collectivism. It is the contention that, by tracing the combined effects of individual actions, we discover that many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have
arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind; that, as Adam Ferguson expressed it, ‘nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the result of human design’; and that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend.”

I apologize that this is a rather long quote, but it does give a fairly complete summary of Hayek’s views on individuals in society. It should be stressed that Hayek was far from atomistic in his view of the individual. His principle that the individual be held “the ultimate judge of his ends” was a matter of protecting society from the arbitrary power of human rulers. His fundamental political insight consisted in this: whenever human leadership seeks to manifest the collective will of society, what we get is not truly a collective will, but rather an individual will imposed on the collective.

For that reason, I also think this quote from the same essay is appropriate: “What [true] individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”