Research Seminar - Wednesday 4th November

Dr Jessica Whyte, University of Western Sydney

In the context of a discussion of homo œconomicus in The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault turns to “the unavoidable text”, The Wealth of Nations, in which Adam Smith introduces his infamous account of the “invisible hand”. What is invisible, on Foucault’s account, is not a providential guiding force but the economic mechanism itself, which remains obscure both to economic subjects and to the sovereign, and therefore resists political intervention. As Foucault notes, this same account of ‘unknowability’ underpins Friedrich Hayek’s attempt to introduce the rule of law into the economy. It is only the blindness of the state, Hayek argues, that enables it to act impartially. In this paper, I start from this account of blindness and invisibility in order to illuminate Hayek’s account of human rights. Rejecting as “absurd” the view that one could claim rights from a spontaneous order, Hayek argues that the new social and economic rights could not be achieved without destroying the liberal order. Instead, he suggests that all civil and political rights could be reduced to a single rule: that no coercion can be used except in accordance with a generic rule applicable to an unknown (and unknowable) number of future instances. I argue that Hayek’s account of blindness serves to disqualify any political challenge to inequality by conceptualizing economic distribution as a consequence of unknowable market forces—to which the proper human attitude is submission. In Hayek’s work, the social mechanism may no longer be guided by the invisible hand of God’s providence, but it requires of people just what religion required: submission to incomprehensible forces and the acceptance of our station in life, and the inequality of the broader social order, as fate.