Cass Sunstein: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is this why Hayek turned against Mill? Or you think there’s some other reason? He was too grumpy, too Viennese, too something? I think Hayek didn’t get Mill. I love Hayek’s book on Mill, and I think it’s enduringly mysterious. There’s a book to be written about Hayek’s book on Mill. Hayek’s book on Mill, I expected to be a book on Mill. What does he think of On Liberty? I’ve learned from Hayek scholars that Hayek was very ambivalent about On Liberty. He thought the harm to others was a license to regulate. That’s interesting, but he didn’t write that in his book on Mill. Instead, he basically reported, after obsessive work — I think two years of work — on the correspondence between Mill and Taylor, and the correspondence is one of the closest things we have to the fictional correspondence in my favorite book, which is Byatt’s Possession, where the letters are ones of surpassing beauty. The ones Mill wrote Taylor, and particularly, Taylor wrote Mill, were out of this world in their grace and connection and delicacy. They make delicacy into something that is not at all like a beautiful piece of silverware, something much more bloody than that. Hayek did that. Hayek did that. But in the end, he says Taylor wasn’t that great, and Mill was kind of feminine and wanted to subordinate himself to a strong woman. I think, “Hayek, you don’t understand anything about Mill.” The book, On Liberty, is not about rationalism in the sense that Hayek didn’t like. It’s about liberty in the sense that Hayek should like. It’s not about free markets, but it’s about finding a path. The path might be a love affair, or the path might be a passionate commitment to — and then fill it out. There is something romantic about that, and Hayek didn’t get it. I find this super interesting because Hayek himself, around the time he did this book, was in the midst of an illicit romance of his own that had some overlap with Mill’s. It can’t be that that’s irrelevant, so how could Hayek not get it? I want to say to the revered Professor Hayek, “You aren’t a cold fish, are you?” If we look at second-term Trump-world America, do you sometimes think — especially when you’re on Twitter — well, the woke were right after all. There were all these excesses. They were bad. We shouldn’t cancel people, but when you see what things look like when they’re not so active, and maybe it’s a bit like some parts of Jewish law, that to stay kosher, you have to overreach and have these impossibly strict standards, which maybe don’t make sense, but if you don’t have those, no one follows anything at all. Do you ever have that thought, like the woke are now quite underrated?…

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