398
GEORGE LlCHTHEIM
think in terms of structural patterns as historically conditioned and
possessing a logic of their own. This is denied on the grounds that
the mind is not capable of raising itself to this level of generalization.
Thus, e.g., Professor Hayek, who though by birth an Austrian has
won his principal renown in Britain and America, affirms that it is
hubris
to aim at general laws of social development in the manner
of Hegel or Comte. This is so, it seems, because the human mind
cannot grasp its own development and the principles governing its
operation. The list of thinkers who committed the lamentable mistake
of overlooking this truism is indeed a lengthy one.
It
begins with
Descartes, or even Plato, and includes (always according to Professor
Hayek) Montesquieu, d'Alembert, Turgot and Condorcet in France,
as well as Herder, Kant and Fichte in Germany, through whom,
as he puts it, "the Cartesian heritage was passed on to Hegel and
Comte." Following this catastrophe, the rationalistic
hubris
was
generalized by Feuerbach, Marx and Engels in Germany, by Renan,
Taine and Durkheim in France, by Mazzini and Croce in Italy, and
by John Dewey in the United States. In England, J . S. Mill helped to
spread the same pernicious notions, and through him Comtean
positivism made its entry into Germany among those who had not
already been infected earlier. All these writers came to share the
belief that it is possible for the human mind to discern historical
laws, and so of course did the Marxists. Nor was this all. The whole of
French sociology was corrupted, and so were influential British and
American writers, such as
L.
T. Hobhouse, Henry Carey and Thor–
stein Veblen. Practically all the German economists and economic
historians succumbed, with the sole exception of Max Weber. Indeed,
but for the latter, Professor Hayek would have been left with hardly
anyone to name on the opposing side, save for his personal friend
Karl Popper. In parenthesis one may add that the blight spread to
the humanities, and even to literary criticism. Like the Egyptian
plague, it slew all that stood in its path.
The nature of this aberration has already been indicated. It
rested upon dle presumptuous belief that the theorist can see human
history as a whole, or that the human mind can get a grip on its
own operation. This done, history could become a science, in the
sense that its regularities could be predicted and hence influenced.
