Britain can learn from China

Of all the insights that Friedrich August von Hayek bequeathed to us, one in particular shines out today. It is that running through the ideological and political divisions of human history are two distinct and different ways of looking at the world. One Hayek called constructivist rationalism; the other evolutionary rationalism.

Hayek spent a lifetime arguing that constructivist rationalism is economically and philosophically flawed because it assumes that ‘all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design’. He later called this The Fatal Conceit.

Those who follow this route believe they have it within their power to build, organise and mould society so that it conforms to their concept of what is just and efficient. But it leads, argued Hayek, to economic decline, poverty, social regression and, in extremis, famine, starvation and the collapse of civilisation. Historic examples, said Hayek, included Sparta, Revolutionary France, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany — and all the tyrannies that blighted the 20th century.