History, Reason and Hope: A Comparative Study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas: Dialogue on Personal and Political Ethics
Author(s)
Day, Richard B.
Abstract
The respect which Habermas accords to Kant’s moral and political ideals is what separates his interpretation of the Kantian project from Hayek’s. The differences between the two interpretations are most dramatically expressed in the role each assigns to language and political discourse. Hayek is quite aware that reason is a product of civilization and that our capacity to think is a “cultural heritage”. He would also agree with Habermas that language communicates “certain views about the nature of the world; and by learning a particular language we acquire a certain picture of the world, a framework of our thinking within which we move without being aware of it”. (118) But Hayek distrusts political language because he finds in it a sedimentation of attitudes that are antithetical to the Great Society. Our political vocabulary, inherited from Plato and Aristotle, is said to be “poisoned” by implicit beliefs which suggest that we can become the authors of our own destiny.
