By the 1950s, radical discourses were making the so-called “cultural turn” many critics continue to hold responsible for the left’s apparent lack of unifying vision today.1 New Left intellectuals and activists, working both within and outside of the academy, emphasized the revolutionary potential of critical, historical, and imaginative activity, constructing culture as a domain in which to carry out privileged projects for liberty and equality. Recent scholarship has started to excavate anew a parallel turn to culture within right intellectual circles, tracking what Quinn Slobodian has called “a symmetry” between one strain of conservative thinking and “the post-Marxist Left”: “Rather than resisting the cultural turn that emerged from the 1960s,” Slobodian writes, “an important faction of the neoliberal movement absorbed it.”2 Around the same time, left and right thinkers advanced critiques of the simple economism other free market fundamentalists embraced (among them, Milton Friedman), and advocated instead views of human life, in Slobodian’s words, “rooted primarily in culture, adaptable over time through social learning and selective evolution.”3

A closer look at the ways in which reactionary neoliberal discourses absorbed, and transformed for their own strategic purposes, the category of “culture” brings out one of the basic antagonisms that still structures political struggle today. If the New Left’s project was to prove that culture is political, and, in so doing, to render its activities available as grounds and means to fight against modes of oppression broadly conceived, reactionary neoliberals theorized culture anew in order to delegitimize it altogether as a potential site of purposeful collective transformation, mobilizing it instead toward conservative attempts to shore up inequality under late capitalism.4

In this essay, I elaborate these positions and their consequences by putting in conversation two representative mid-century theories of culture, one by Nobel-Prize-winning conservative economist Friedrich Hayek and the other by socialist cultural critic Raymond Williams. Considered together, Hayek and Williams yield a robust picture of their shared Cold War moment and clarify the significance of the discourses of culture their work exemplifies from our present perspective. Influential figures for two disciplines that gained institutional power in the university after the Second World War—economics and cultural studies—Hayek and Williams, whether or not they explicitly engaged with each other’s writing, each targeted positions the other exemplified.5 Reading their projects in tandem, however, also reveals some striking similarities. Both formulate modernity’s problems in parallel ways, challenging valorizations of reason and its deployment for authoritarian ends. Both turn to the domain of culture, understood, in Williams’s words, as “a whole way of life,” in order to respond to them, taking as common objects of study “creative activity” (Williams) or “creative power” (Hayek) in general, a category of human endeavor each sees operating, not only through practices historically associated with culture (arts, letters, faith), but also through all of the forms of organization and order that humans generate.6

Within this domain, so conceived, Williams and Hayek alike oppose the older, elitist theories of culture that emerged with industrialization on both the right and the left, the history of which Williams traces in Culture and Society, and each tries instead to give meaning to the cultural activities of common people, generating what we might call post-Romantic accounts of creativity that do not locate it in the individual artist or intellectual, whose genius purports to transcend economic and political constraint.7 Both likewise depart from popular characterizations of culture, dominant by the 1990s, which define it as a site of war or battle.8 Toward these analogous projects, Williams disseminates a mode of cultural criticism alive to economic conditions, while Hayek urges economists to take up an evolutionary history of culture, and both openly direct the field-defining methods they respectively develop toward ideological ends.

These commonalities, of course, give way to the irremediable antagonisms that grow out of the opposing political, economic, and human objectives Williams, a socialist, and Hayek, a neoliberal libertarian, pursue. They construct culture’s nature and function differently and invent different methods for investigating, and, ultimately, transforming it. AlthoughHayek might share Williams’s sense that culture changes over time and shapes human life as it does, he does not endorse the left’s constituting view, a related one, that by engaging in deliberate collective activity across domains we can improve our common life. Instead, Hayek’s understanding of culture serves his conservative conviction that humans cannot, and therefore should not attempt to, organize collective life using intelligence and imagination, whether we try to do so through state building, economic planning, or cultural mediation.9 Hayek rather argues in his late work that a process of “cultural evolution,” the telos of which is mass belief in Christian traditions intellectuals such as Hayek know to be specious, is necessary to help generate and maintain capitalist order. This properly neoliberal theory of culture withholds from those it pretends to empower the possibility of purposeful participation in the expansive creative narrative it projects. It also unites contemporary rightwing interests (the religious right, free-market fundamentalists) apparently at odds and sets them against a left it casts as out of touch and self-aggrandizing.

Williams, by contrast, extends creative power to everyone and refuses to conceptualize it as weapon. He famously develops his theory of culture as a site of “tending” growth, emphasizing both the limits and the possibilities of creativity practiced in common for irreducibly diverse collective ends.10 If Hayek empties out culture as a site of needed reflection for the mass of “anonymous persons” he purports to champion, Williams casts it as a site of perpetual labor, in which all participants exercise creative faculties with and in relation to each other.11 Culture is, for Williams, a sphere of permanent difference; it is neither a domain for “tinkering” with traditions that accidentally emerge to ensure they facilitate economic growth, as we will see it is for Hayek, nor is it an arena in which opponents fight to “impact” or control each other.12 This democratic vision admits that culture emerges unbidden even as it recommends a commitment to purposeful cultivation.

Pairing Williams and Hayek, a method Williams’s early work inspires, helps us look back at Williams’s theory of culture from our contemporary vantage, a moment at which the brand of neoliberal thinking with roots in Hayek’s legacy has become common sense, and value in new ways these resources for strategically constructing culture from the left.13 Different elements of conservative discourse have become more powerful than the exclusionary, elitist screeds Williams initially targeted. We can thus emphasize different elements of the vision of culture Williams was promoting—specifically, his investment in democratic creativity—even as we continue to recognize and remedy, as he himself did across a long and self-reflective career, some of his theory’s shortcomings (I have in mind, in particular, its failure to address identitarian barriers to establishing a culture in common14). Against forces that at once try to monopolize and conceal imagination, Williams urges us to continue to desire and extend to all a post-Romantic understanding of creative power, at the same time as he encourages us to keep before us our limitations.

In a recent review essay, Slobodian and Leigh Claire La Berge claim that literary and cultural studies seem still to be searching for ways to properly engage the problems associated with neoliberalism from a disciplinary vantage.15 To do so, and to avoid along the way some of the missteps they argue critics make when we rely exclusively upon secondary accounts of neoliberal discourses (Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and David Harvey are standard), Slobodian and La Berge urge us to read neoliberalism’s primary texts.16 I turn to Hayek with this provocation in mind. Cultural studies scholars are uniquely equipped to trace and evaluate neoliberal theories of our field’s defining terrain. While theoretical texts, as Hayek himself emphasized, do not determine state or corporate action in direct or facile ways, they deserve our attention because they consolidate broader logics and help us bring out for resistance their contradictions.

This attention might also sharpen and update some professional practices within cultural studies. First, oppositional critics might recognize that conservatives now share with radicals the sense that culture is deeply imbricated in political and economic projects. We might therefore engage, not only the outmoded conservative critics of previous generations who too often continue to serve as primary antagonists, but also important interlocutors elsewhere within and outside of academia.17 Economic discourses of culture devoted to destroying the historical vision of life humanistic study sanctions require consideration. In addition, we might take from Williams the insight that we need not see culture as a battleground. Rather than trying to revive culture as a site of war, a tactic some critics recommend, what might change if we were to reinvigorate our sense of it as a site of democratic tending?18

Friedrich Hayek’s Cultural Evolution

While an earlier New Right’s appropriation of certain left tactics by the 1970s is well-documented (the Powell Memo of 1971 is often paired with the Port Huron statement as an exemplary counterpart text; it calls free market champions to borrow from radicals and win the hearts and minds of acolytes through the university and other institutions of education and culture), the explicit theories of culture conservative neoliberal intellectuals developed just after the New Left advanced its influential revitalization of terms such as “culture and society” have yet to bear deep scrutiny.19 These theories continue to inform some of the ways that the contemporary right in general tactically constructs “culture” to serve its defenses of existing wealth and power distributions. They also give a sense of how the right came to revise in response to New Left tactics the older theories of culture that conservatives such as T. S. Eliot advocated.20

One such updated theory the right owes to Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek. Oppositional critics have already exhaustively excavated and condemned many of the claims for which Hayek is best known. Philip Mirowski offers the most sustained challenge to Hayek’s fundamental premise, an epistemological one Hayek enlists to naturalize capitalism from his most celebrated work, The Road to Serfdom(1944), to his posthumously published (and controversially attributed) final treatise, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism(1988).21 In brief, Hayek argues that markets organize human life better than can any human individual or group. Because our knowledge of the broad-scale consequences of our actions is far more limited than Enlightenment celebrations of reason hold, Hayek cautions, we should not expect to accomplish with intelligence what radical traditions dream we might through the state. Instead, we must follow our own material self-interests, and thereby allow the logic of market competition to generate for us a beneficent global order. As Mirowski glosses it, Hayek insists that the market, an omniscient “information processor,” “really does know better than any one of us what is good for ourselves and for society,” and neoliberalism comes to leverage this “core conviction” not only against socialism, but also against some of the key tenets of liberalism economists like Hayek claim to inherit and advance.22 Neoliberal policies inspired by this representative commitment to ignorance undercut democracy, outmode notions of citizenship, defund public institutions dedicated to education, and attack intellectuals who claim authority from sources other than markets.

While critiques of Hayek’s (and, by extension, neoliberalism’s) assault on intelligence proliferate, critics have not for the most part devoted the same attention to the supplementary view of culture, and the creative human faculty associated with it, imagination, that is as essential to Hayek’s theory of human life.23 Not only does Hayek configure in novel ways the relationship between politics and economics as he celebrates what he calls the “spontaneous” order capitalism generates; he just as significantly modifies the understandings of culture and human “creative powers” that conservative, and classically liberal, traditions previously endorsed.24 In work he presented and published in the 1970s and ’80s, Hayek elaborated a concept of “cultural evolution” that supplemented his claim that free-market capitalism was not only the best form of human order, but also the form that biology guaranteed the human species was destined to fulfill and defend.25 “Culture,” as Hayek conceives it, is the process by which collectives unconsciously generate and uphold “the morals and institutions that capitalism requires.”26 It is a domain in which we imagine irrational and unverifiable metaphysical fictions (such as Christianity) in order to guarantee outcomes favorable for the market order, itself a transcendental system of organization we do not understand and should not try to resist. Through myth and magical thinking, Hayek argues, evolution transmits from generation to generation only those “cultural properties” useful to members of a market economy.27

I return to this vision in a moment, but it is first worth marking its difference from those associated with an earlier conservatism. When Raymond Williams wrote Culture and Society, he had in mind as an opposing vision T. S. Eliot’s global Christian utopia and its complementary defense of class hierarchy. Reactionary men of letters such as Eliot once battled to maintain a canon of sacred literary, historical, and religious texts, and to keep questions of wealth and power out of elite conversations about the arts. From Burke to Carlyle and Arnold, traditionalists defended in the face of radical change established mores and manners, claiming settled ways of life, by virtue of their long background of emergence, were truer, righter, better, and, therefore, worthy of protection from the uneducated throngs whose uncultivated—or, by the twentieth century, mass-produced—needs and desires threatened them.28 The old right controlled creative and imaginative activity by insisting on religious truth and elite values and attacking those who opposed these. Conservatives pitted culture against democracy and reduced nonelites to masses.

As Hayek’s theory of culture indicates, devotees of the market order have changed tactics over the last few decades, in some ways breaking with and in others bringing up to date traditionalist discourses of this kind. In general, the struggles over the content of high culture conservative intellectuals such as Eliot once waged with left counterparts in privileged institutions have been outmoded. If, as one historian of culture recently put it, “right and left agreed on the value of the humanities, however narrowly or broadly they defined the curriculum” during the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, conservatives on the whole do not now present intellectual, imaginative, and humanistic activity as a critical site of engagement at all.29 They work instead to defund institutions devoted to these practices, revising the project of the university, privatizing intellectual resources, and attacking state funding for arts and education.30 This approach strategically erodes liberalism’s cultural institutions so that elites can exploit the very forms of critical thinking and organizing they deny exist. It also jettisons older conservative narratives of cultural progress—the Great Man theories of history Thomas Carlyle favored, for example—because these stories purport that some ideas and forms are essentially superior to others. The neoliberal right controls creative and imaginative activity by dismissing it as a ground for battle altogether, even as it deploys imagination in the service of its own anti-democratic projects.

At the same time, however—and paradoxically—as “culture war” combatants will recognize, the right continues to construct culture as a significant sphere for conflict. Powerful contemporary right factions double down on Christian ideologies and practices and set these against a range of secular claims upon public life. Religious conservatives insist that Christian values are fundamentally superior to all others and therefore require protection and evangelism. Evangelicals have remained crucial to all three so-called “New Right” coalitions that emerged in the US after the Second World War, and they continue to conceive of culture as a vital and final frontline for adjudicating morality and tradition according to their metaphysical belief system.

The contemporary right, then, at once fabricates culture as an illegitimate domain for collective transformation and as a site of war. Hayek’s theory of culture brokers a compelling and ingenious rapprochement between these two apparently contradictory counterrevolutionary strains. He decouples the religious right’s need to defend one way of life as more correct than any other from the neoliberal right’s need to empty out culture as a field for engagement. His theory simultaneously refuses that culture can be a sphere of purposeful human activity and claims that traditional and conservative cultural forms are superior because they are necessary for the survival of the species. This is not because Hayek is a Christian—he tells us he is not—but rather because he believes Christian values of discipline, family, and individual responsibility support “the extended order,” another one of Hayek’s pet terms for capitalism.31 For Hayek, then, the content of culture can still matter, but not because any particular way of life has a claim to verity, to faith, or to representing human achievement at its highest. Culture does not function as a free, open, democratically constructed sphere of activity. Rather, it becomes a play of smoke and mirrors, holding masses in thrall, for their own good, to a tradition valuable only for its meta-effects.

Hayek develops the scaffolding for this view at mid-career. At the end ofThe Constitution of Liberty,in a concluding essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” he outlines one of the dominant means by which right discourses replaced an allegiance to “things as they are” under the ancien regime with a revised counterrevolutionary program under liberal capitalist democracy.32 Capital’s reactionaries are, of course, monarchy’s liberals, and Hayek’s exemplary essay demonstrates how one powerful faction within the twentieth-century right, one we’d associate today with libertarianism (although Hayek himself says he finds the term “libertarian” too modish), traded conventional defenses of inequality under aristocracy and the Church for new defenses of inequality under capitalism. Instead of trying to preserve Christian traditions or the nobility’s God-given right to rule, neoliberal conservatives who gained influence after WWII promoted worshipful approaches to a new metaphysical force, capitalism itself. Hayek’s so-called “liberals,” he explains, aim “to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly has erected.”33

To do so, Hayek encourages adherents to stake out a position between “the crude rationalism of the socialist, who wants to reconstruct all social institutions according to a pattern prescribed by his individual reason” and “the mysticism to which the conservative so frequently has to resort.”34 Hayek’s neoliberal does not believe that human intelligence orders life, but neither does he believe that God does. Although he does not believe humans know, or ever can know, how best to organize the activities of large collectives, he does not seek to redeem this ignorance by turning to “the authority of supernatural sources of knowledge where his reason fails him.”35 Instead of organizing with reason or turning to the supernatural, Hayek, relying on a familiar version of Adam Smith, encourages individuals to pursue their own economic interests as a way to participate in the market’s spontaneous processes and thereby to ensure the collective good.

At the same time, however, Hayek also opens space in his ontology for the practices associated with the religions he has just dismissed. Although Hayek’s “liberal” is not himself a believer, he “does not disdain to seek assistance from whatever nonrational institutions or habits have proved their worth.”36 It is this early move—the neoliberal values faith’s ideologies and practices even as he denies their claim to truth—to which Hayek will return in his late work, expanding it into a fuller theory of “cultural evolution.” This theory casts culture as the primary site of activity that protects capitalism’s logic from purposeful and foolish human intervention. Morals and traditions, practiced without reflection by common people, function as a bulwark against the vain and mistaken attempts of socialists and intellectuals to change our ways of life. From “the countless number of humble steps taken by anonymous persons in the course of doing familiar things in changed circumstances,” Hayek argues as early as The Constitution of Liberty, “spring the examples [of traditions] that prevail. They are as important as the major intellectual innovations which are explicitly recognized and communicated as such.”37

In Hayek’s 1970s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, in addresses he delivered in the early 1980s, and in his final book, The Fatal Conceit,he invests this commonplace culture with its own supplementary metaphysical power; it becomes more explicitly the transcendental process by which we produce and transmit rules for life favorable to the market economy.38 As Hayek explains in the Q&A after a lecture on socialism’s specious devotion to reason, “Our Moral Heritage” (1983),

It was not man’s intelligence that created society, but cultural evolution that created man’s intelligence. Our brain does not manufacture intelligence; our brain is merely an apparatus for absorbing and learning a traditional way of thinking, a tradition both of interpretations of the world, and of rules of conduct that we have learned to follow. Thus the social order depends on a system of views and opinions which we imbibe, inherit, and learn from a tradition we cannot modify.39

Whatever “intelligence” we have, Hayek suggests, we owe not to the rational faculties Enlightenment traditions revere, but rather to what emerges from the unknowable inheritance of rules and values we enliven anew in the present. We do not produce knowledge in order to conceive and implement plans, as intellectuals and socialists claim we can and should. On the contrary, the fact that we believe ourselves to be entities capable of such activities we owe to the ongoing progression (or “tradition”) we are barely aware determines our thinking, our behaviors, and our experiences. Culture is an unknowable and unalterable system of received actions, rules, and values we unconsciously take on, and these opinions and interpretations, through us, help maintain the market order. Culture works directly upon the brain and produces what we mistake for our own intelligence, and, subsequently, for our own creative powers.

U.S. academics interested in radical discourses will hear some resonances between Hayek and poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, contemporaries of whom Hayek might or might not have been aware.40 Hayek shares with these figures the sense that discursive forces outside of our control, and often beyond our conscious apprehension, shape us and our worlds. He breaks with poststructuralism, however, when he installs “spontaneous growth” as the new sublime signifier that explains and gives value to all human action. As Hayek puts it, a bit uneasily:

There is no ready English or even German word that precisely characterizes an extended order, or how its way of functioning contrasts with the rationalists’ requirements. The only appropriate word, “transcendent,” has been so misused that I hesitate to use it. In its literal meaning, however, it does concern that which far surpasses the reach of our understanding, wishes and purposes, and our sense perceptions,and that which incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual brain, or any single organization, could possess or invent.41

When figures such as Foucault and Derrida recognize in tandem the powers and limits of human discourse, they attack transcendentalisms of all stripes. Hayek, by contrast, and despite his misgivings (might not “emergent” better serve?), abandons both positivism and religion in favor of a new capitalist theology, which depends at its center upon the troubled dialectical synthesis of traditionalism and a kind of rightwing materialism.

A passage from The Fatal Conceit lays out this theory simply,synthesizing some of the claims Hayek makes in earlier texts:

We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true—or verifiable or testable—in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation […] [E]ven an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilization but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.42

Worth noting first is the way this theory bears the distinctive mark of Hayek’s Cold War milieu. The threat of extinction and nuclear holocaust haunts these sentences. Hayek establishes the superiority of his extended order based solely on population, on the modest persistence of “our very lives.” Instead of claiming Western greatness is based in achievement, imagination, or intelligence, as did the Christian (and humanist) civilizing project Europe invoked to justify its practices of colonial extraction and violence—a brutal project any post-Romantic account of human creative power must remember and expiate—Hayek defines species or group progress solely in terms of population increase and basic survival. If Hayek claimed in The Road to Serfdomthat socialism would impoverish all of us, by the 1980s, as the title of his final book indicates, he was claiming that it threatened the very existence of the species. In a world defined by climate crisis, this argument, which rests on the assumption that such increases are uncomplicatedly benign, has become indefensible.

For Hayek, in any case, culture’s job properly conceived is to furnish most people with a false belief system (monotheism), one in which intellectuals insist they should continue to believe despite its erroneousness, because doing so serves a different, and in fact real, form of transcendental ordering (capitalism). Cultural evolution neither increases self-knowledge nor spreads sweetness and light. It is not the grand narrative of species advancement through intelligence and imagination that liberal and Enlightenment thinkers celebrated, that epic parade of monumental heroes and geniuses. Hayek does away with conservative staples such as heroes and the truth. Instead, he sanctions mass belief in a tradition he himself regards as superstition, refiguring the hollow faith of the masses, propped up by elites who know better, as proof of human progress. His apparent celebration of “anonymous persons…doing familiar things” amounts to a good faith version of false consciousness.

This theory also, it is clear, transforms conventional progressive and reactionary understandings of the nature and function of intellectuals attentive to culture’s histories and forms. Mirowski has outlined the paradox at the heart of the task Hayek sets for his model economist, who does not produce knowledge, but works rather to convince others that they, too, can know very little.43 Corey Robin has elaborated the elitist element fundamental to Hayek’s mid-career writings on giants of culture and industry, those in whose names Hayek argues we must guarantee liberty so that they can shape the tastes and desires of laboring simpletons incapable of imagining and making.44 We can add to these versions of Hayek’s intellectual the economist as cultural evolutionist, who presumably supersedes critics and scholars engaged in established modes of humanistic inquiry. Through “historical—even natural-historical—investigation,” the economist “tries to make intelligible why some rules rather than others have prevailed.”45 Such a “conjectural history, or evolutionary account of the emergence of cultural institutions,” would aim to determine how these evolved to support the “extended order,” and it would do so, neither for the purpose of disinterested inquiry nor revolutionary transformation, but rather in order to finally suggest ways we might “tinker” with our traditions in order to better shore up existing capitalist structures.46 (Hayek offers as an example studies in economics “devoted to ascertaining how the traditional institution of property can be improved to make the market function better.”47)

With characteristic diffidence, Hayek explains why economists—rather than, say, literary critics, philologists, historians, writers, artists, or, within the social sciences, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists—would be best suited to this vocation:

At this point I find myself in the embarrassing position of wanting to claim that it must be the members of my own profession, the economists, specialists who understand the process of formation of extended orders, who are most likely to be able to provide explanations of those moral traditions that made the growth of civilization possible. Only someone who can account for the effects such as those connected with several property can explain why this type of practice enabled those groups following it to outstrip others whose morals were better suited to the achievement of different aims.48

A sort of rightwing answer to the vulgar Marxists he loathes, Hayek insists that economists are best equipped to explain how and why cultural traditions emerge and endure—and, consequently, to make recommendations for cultural transformation and development—because they alone can understand how these formations serve material interests. And indeed, although Hayek insists that the “reconstruction” of history he advocates as a precursor to any cultural tinkering is very different from “constructivism,” which he reviles in both its Marxist and postmodernist forms, this vision too has its analogue on the left. If Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary historian turns to the past at a moment of danger to wrench free from ruling class interests even the dead, Hayek’s evolutionary economist turns to the past to secure into the future precisely those interests. Instead of seizing fragments for revolution, the evolutionary economist seizes what will prop up and support capitalism’s hierarchies.49 He does not claim to be an antiquarian, reconstructing the past to see things as they really were. He labors to understand and strengthen the ways values and practices that might not seem at first blush devoted to shoring up the market economy can nonetheless serve its logics.50

In place of judgment or creativity, Hayek offers intellectuals devoted to such a project a limited set of managerial capabilities. We cannot assess, know, make, or decide. We can “bring about an ordering of the unknown only by causing it to order itself.”51 We can “initiate processes that will coordinate individual actions transcending our observation.” We cannot build “abstract structures of inter-personal relations…All we can do is to induce their formation” by securing “the assistance of some very general conditions, and then allow[ing] each individual element to find its own place within the larger order. The most we can do to assist the process is to admit only such elements as obey the required rules.”52 As a description of the study, evaluation, and perpetuation of cultural practices, this paints a devastating picture. The tinkerer’s aim is to accommodate others to the hierarchies that produce us, to suit us to the rules, to maintain things as they are, to homogenize any errant elements, to ensure the uninterrupted continuation of processes, to exclude the recalcitrant or delinquent. Hayek celebrates the one who is blessed with “the skill to fit oneself into, or align oneself with, a pattern of whose very existence one may barely be aware and of whose ramifications one has scarcely any knowledge;”he castigates any who believe they act with purpose and vision for identifiable ends irreducible to individual financial interests.53

By grounding his theory of human life in “cultural evolution,” Hayek appears to sanction an historical view of human life similar to the one humanists and leftists have developed.54 He also appears to share with radicals a desire to value the creative efforts of common people. In fact, Hayek deploys the category of culture to prop up a competing, managerial historicism that at once denies and cartelizes creative power. His theory of culture is hostile to historical materialist understandings of the human; it dismisses, not only reason and intelligence, but also imagination and the sensuous, as faculties by which humans, whether identified as elite coteries or as workers and consumers, might try to influence life for the better. It renders reflection, vision, pleasure, and judgment as unavailable for purposeful collective action as it renders reason. Neoliberal scripts of this kind invest abstract processes with authority and ambition while insisting the diverse human actors who participate in them across classes do not exercise either, or can do so only falsely, for obscure purposes beyond our ken. In so doing, this discourse forecloses conversations about value, which, supposedly, only unknowable forces can arbitrate.

Within right circles, as we have seen, such a theory of culture also harmonizes opposing commitments. The neoliberal right, in its efforts to mobilize a diverse coalition with competing needs, can now have it both ways: it can preserve Christian traditions by putting them in the service of capital, but it need not grant their central claims. It is thereby free to defund cultural institutions and pursue projects at odds with Christian values, along the way dismissing the left’s attempts to center culture as a ground for negotiation, a ground upon which the left has proven itself more likely to triumph. The conceptual synthesis Hayek delivers does not map directly onto contemporary public life, of course, but it does mirror the uneasy fusion we see in a figure such as Donald J. Trump, the divorced, wealthy atheist who manifested the popular will of globalists, evangelicals, and white nationalists alike.

Raymond Williams Tending Culture

Raymond Williams’s theory of culture digs in exactly where Hayek encourages intellectuals, artists, and workers to give up. One reason to return to and value Williams anew is that different threads within his body of work now seem important, given the reigning neoliberal status quo. As the previous section demonstrates, a transformed reactionary construction of culture has gained influence in recent decades, and so contemporary conditions, the early manifestations of which Williams himself began to consider late in his career, call for a shift in emphasis when we return to his project for resources.55 We must no longer persuade those who admit that culture is valuable and so argue over what should count as culture. We must rather address, impossibly, alongside those who view culture as the struggle of good versus evil, those who pretend to have given up culture entirely as a basis for struggle.

Williams outlined his radical understanding first inCulture and Society: 1780 – 1950,and later, more fully and more controversially, inThe Long Revolution.Williams himself came to feel the earlier book was hopelessly marked by its moment of composition—he reports despairing over the possibility for direct political action in the U.K.—and, indeed, since its publication, critics have rehearsed, sometimes in conversation with Williams, a familiar set of challenges.56 Williams’s interlocutors have questioned the partial and exclusionary UK canon of texts Williams engages, the adjacent fields, such as sociology, he overlooks, and his supposedly forgiving attitude toward the reactionary politics of some of the writers whose critiques of industrialization he admired.Above all, critics have attacked the book’s purported idealization of culture as a venerated category of activity by which radicals might produce transformations with meaningful political and economic valences.57 Williams valued these critiques and addressed them variously over the course of his long career, and yet, he remained committed to the category of culture as a worthwhile site of activity and theory. Despite its professed deficiencies, many of which have sparked colleagues and inheritors to further inquiry,Culture and Societynonetheless exemplifies two of the enduring contributions Williams made to twentieth-century discourses on culture, politics, and economics.58

First, Williams develops in it a democratic theory of “culture in common” that opposes the mainstream liberal idea that culture is a protected, apolitical sphere of human achievement autonomous from material relationships.59 He identifies and valorizes a strain of Anglophone writing that constellates culture, not as the refined object of civilizing practices, and not merely as vanguard arts and letters (although this definition, he shows, persists and is not unrelated to the broader conception he ultimately advocates), but rather as “a whole way of life,” material, intellectual, and spiritual.60 In Williams’s hands (rather than, say, Eliot’s), this strain democratizes the creative imagination associated by conservatives and Romantics alike with high culture, opening up to larger collectives the capacity for envisioning and making. It challenges intellectuals across the political spectrum who would treat working class and impoverished consumers of mass culture as deceived fools. Williams’s theory, above all, refuses to wield culture to dominate and homogenize, fabricating instead an uncontainable common field that will always be composed in and with difference.

Second, Williams, in conversation with other Birmingham School interlocutors, elaborated a method for the study of culture that takes language and its history as its object. Part Leavis-ite close reader, part philologist, Williams devotes to words and images an excruciating attention that emerges from his sense of language’s dual character—it is potentially liberatory on one hand, and on the other, a potentially enclosing expression of communal history. Individuals can deploy language for particular purposes at particular moments even as language bears with it the burden of the past, the events and relationships, epic and ordinary, which produce the semiotic systems we take up for our different reasons in the present. Williams’s method in this way lays the groundwork for the nuanced understanding of the limitations and powers of creative human activity fundamental both to his theory of his object and to his critical practice.

Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race and its apocalyptic horizon, Williams is as attuned as Hayek purports to be to the dangers of over-determination. Like Hayek, Williams recognizes how threatening is the prevailing coercive attitude toward others and toward life he too at times roots in rationalist Enlightenment discourses. Whereas Hayek defines the problem solely in terms of reason, however, Williams also defines it in terms of images, and of their correlating faculty, imagination, and he recognizes that right and left alike struggle this way for control:

It is as if, in fear or vision, we are now all determined to lay our hands on life and force it into our own image, and it is then no good to dispute on the merits of rival images. This is a real barrier in the mind, which at times it seems almost impossible to break down: a refusal to accept the creative capacities of life; a determination to limit and restrict the channels of growth; a habit of thinking indeed, that the future has now to be determined by some ordinance of our own minds. We project our old images into the future, and take hold of ourselves and others to force energy toward that substantiation. We do this as conservatives, trying to prolong old forms; we do this as socialists, trying to prescribe the new man.61

Williams, searching, as Hayek does, for a language to describe the immaterial but objective forces we associate with imaginative human activity, here figures “the creative capacities of life”—directed, he insists throughout, not only toward the arts, but toward ordering and generating in general—as energies that flow and grow along channels that cannot be predicted or restricted without violence. These capacities we exercise in the domain of culture, and they are at some level certain to erupt and roil, to change and move, despite our efforts to contain or direct them. Although Hayek positions himself on the side of liberty, Williams’s account reveals that thinkers of Hayek’s stripe still write in the dominative mode, trying as they do to stay inevitable (if indeterminate) changes. Conservatives get “creative power” wrong because they simultaneously overestimate our capacity to arrest culture and underestimate our capacity to make purposeful changes to a supposedly static tradition through collaboration and will.

The organic metaphor of channels and energies Williams prefers in this passage is similar to Hayek’s picture of “spontaneous growth,” but the comparison breaks down, once again, at the teloseach projects into the future. Against market fundamentalist and certain Marxian discourses alike, Williams refuses to see in the movement of the uncontrollable forces of human organization a definitive aim, determined in advance. And yet, he does not therefore conclude that this basic indeterminacy relieves humans of the need to value and judge and decide. Even as Williams accepts that it is impossible to fully legislate culture or to direct it toward political ends determined in advance, he does not, like Hayek, despair that because humans cannot consciously control everything, we cannot consciously influence anything. (This move Hayek repeats across his oeuvre; it is the foundation, for instance, of his dismissive review of John Kenneth Galbraith’sAffluent Society62).

Drawing upon and extending the complex etymology of the word “culture,” Williams sketches the strength and limits of our creative faculties through the metaphor of the “tending of natural growth”:

The idea of culture brings together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once the idea of natural growth and that of its tending. The former alone is a type of romantic individualism; the latter alone a type of authoritarian training. Yet each, within a whole view, marks a necessary emphasis. The struggle for democracy is a struggle for the recognition of equality of being, or it is nothing. Yet only in the acknowledgement of human individuality and variation can the reality of common government be comprised. We stress natural growth to indicate the whole potential energy, rather than the selected energies which the dominative mode finds it convenient to enlist. At the same time, however, we stress the social reality, the tending. Any culture, in its whole process, is a selection, an emphasis, a particular tending. The distinction of a culture in common is that the selection is freely and commonly made and remade.63

As this passage indicates, Hayek and Williams agree that culture is a mighty and irrepressible province we cannot control and direct for predetermined ends. Williams brings us up to the same precipice as Hayek brings the new conservative; we have God or the romantic on one hand, and our will to impose order on the other. Williams and Hayek differ, however, on what we should do once we recognize our liminal position. For Williams, it is precisely culture’s intractability and its emergent properties that call for increased attention, care, and commitment. Rather than turning unthinkingly to existing, stabilizing fictions, and rather than investing faith in metaphysical logics operating beyond our knowledge or influence, Williams incites students of culture to take up, alongside and in concert with others, the ceaseless work of tending an immeasurably large and permanently unknowable field. More, he extends this work of tending to all members of a collective, while Hayek reserves the task of tinkering for the enlightened economist intellectual.

As contemporary movements to end state-sanctioned violence against people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups signal, barriers to taking up a “common” project persist. Williams repudiated with similar concerns in mind his early use of the potentially nationalist or ethnic term “community.” Given precisely these conditions, however, the desire to trade metaphors of war for metaphors of shared labor in difference seem as vital as ever. As Stuart Hall, the New Left figure most attuned to the complexities of what he preferred not to call “multiculturalism,” put it in 2007, “[p]eople find themselves obliged to make a common life or at least find some common ground of negotiation…The multicultural question, then, is: how can we do that without giving up the investments which people have made in what makes them who they are, which is what I call difference.”64 Toward an answer, we can find in Williams an incitement to strategically re-conceptualize culture itself.

As we do, Williams urges us to affirm our inability to foretell or determine the future without allowing this to alleviate the imperative to think and decide. On the contrary, he suggests that our very limitations require total attentiveness, careful consideration, unflagging devotion. “We need to consider every attachment, every value, with our whole attention,” Williams writes, “for we do not know the future, we can never be certain of what may enrich it; we can only, now, listen to and consider whatever may be offered and take up what we can.”65 Williams asks us to act precisely because we understand that we cannot arrive at an everlasting system of value, precisely because we cannot rely in every domain upon our limited ability to reason, precisely because we cannot know everything. Perpetual is the work of making, as well as the work of taking responsibility for what we have made. We must also admit to ourselves that we can never know exactly what we are making, confirm whether or not we are making what we think we are, or see that we have made what we intended or wanted to make. This is the labor and the encumbrance of creative power and collective life in a democratic society of equal but distinct beings.66

Williams returns to this theme again in “Culture Is Ordinary,” where he differentiates the approach to cultural criticism he practices from the prescriptive one he associates both with the right and with a naive Marxism. Cultural studies can and should aim to influence thinking—the critic asks which texts and structures and styles we should value, and considers their complicated connections to the historical conditions out of which they emerge—but it should not attempt to do so in ways that limit, exclude, and police from the top down.67 This mode of thinking about culture can find its way, as Williams puts it in The Country and the City, by keeping always before it the question: “where do we stand, with whom do we identify”?68 Hayek and Williams answer this question differently, and those allegiances, above all, help us distinguish tinkering from tending. Hayek, of course, casts his lot with elites, whose prosperity, he believes, guarantees bare survival for the rest of us. Williams, on the other hand, kept always before him his working-class background, which he did not see as at odds with his Cambridge pedigree.

While Hayek’s methodology for evolutionary economics relieves the intellectual and the mass alike of the burden of judgment, Williams’s methodology for cultural studies centers the critical faculties across class hierarchies. Out of our positions of interest and allegiance, Williams encourages everyone to investigate, persuade, and decide. At the same time, Williams gives us reason to remember that, while culture is inextricable from political and economic conditions, some of its activities are often pursued aimlessly, accidentally, emergently. Recognizing this, and, perhaps, valuing it, is not the same as insisting on a sphere of creative autonomy, nor as returning to an ethic of art for art’s sake. Williams’s theory of culture reminds us that we need a better dialectical sense of the ways in which art can be both bound up in complex ways with political and economic domains of activity (neither determining nor strictly determined) at the same time as culture need not always have a didactic or obvious ideological aim. This is not to say that critics should not continue to read for and bring out these interrelationships and effects through the historical study of language; it is only to emphasize the value of constructing culture as to some extent indeterminate and chaotic, impervious to absolute tending or control, and distinct from the art of war.

Conclusion

Liberal thinkers conceived of culture as a free realm of creative pursuit at once separate from and guaranteed by economic and political activity, a domain in which individuals could make sense of life and in which species progress, not always possible under industrialism in the public and commercial spheres, could continue. The US state promoted this vision during the Cold War, deploying it as evidence that liberal capitalist democracy guaranteed freedom. A major project of oppositional or radical academic criticism over the course of the twentieth century—and Williams looms large in this tradition—has been to deconstruct liberalism’s understanding of culture, to demonstrate that the idea of a sphere of creativity, protected from economic and political exigencies, has itself significant economic and political consequences, in part because it emerges from and shores up a bourgeois worldview. Edward Said, extending Antonio Gramsci’s view of culture as the “elaboration” of power, puts it this way: culture “is what gives the State something to govern […]. The real depth and strength of the modern Western State is the strength and depth of its culture.”69 Culture is at once produced by and helps to produce material relationships, and critics continue to deploy this insight to repudiate earlier generations of conservative academics in literary and cultural studies.

Hayek’s theory of culture, however, indicates that the right now constructs and evaluates culture in precisely this way. Neoliberal thinkers need no longer view culture as a protected, autonomous sphere. On the contrary, Hayek shares with his socialist adversaries the conviction that cultural activity is indissolubly connected to economic and political conditions. He agrees that cultural activity ultimately serves the production and maintenance of particular social orders. He holds that the market order he celebrates could not have emerged without the cultural traditions and values, bolstered by myth, faith, art, and law, that guarantee its functioning.

Might oppositional critics therefore consider a change—or at least, an expansion—of tactics? Instead of framing the work of cultural studies as the ongoing attempt to reveal the supposedly hidden economic and political dimensions of imaginative works, as does one critical tradition with roots in Fredric Jameson, confronting Hayek’s theory encourages us to bring out and reconsider with renewed effort the different constructions of imagination and culture that inform and sanction our cultural and political commitments.70 Unlike his left counterparts, Hayek endorses a vision of culture that forecloses imaginative human activity altogether and celebrates instead unthinking service to tradition. He also suggests that economists are culture’s best historians. Critics might oppose visions of this kind by turning, with the eyes of the present, to the creative and critical archive of post-Romantic theories of imagination and culture.

Theoretical interest in “imagination” has long been out of vogue in cultural studies. The word carries with it the taint of an outmoded Romanticism, as if any writer interested in its nature and function affirms the quasi-religious aura that comes down to us from Coleridge’s idealism.71 If we accept that one major difference between left and right theories of culture, as Williams and Hayek help us see, is that the left insists we can exercise our imaginative faculties in order to work purposefully and openly (although, within limits) to influence culture, we might reinvigorate interest in imagination itself as a faculty of value. By the premature end of his career, Williams was calling for similar attention as he confronted the ways Thatcherism strategically eviscerated institutions of public life.72 Jameson famously described the left’s failure to unite against the immiserations of capital in the post-war period as a failure of imagination. Perhaps we might take this a step further and return to the question of what it means to imagine at all, recovering this term in the face of a right that denies its very possibility. Among other emphases (Williams was aware that theory is not everything, but at least, he comforted us, it couldn’t hurt), this might mean excavating or privileging past and present secular theories of creativity, such as those we find in W.E.B. Du Bois, Wallace Stevens, and Claudia Rankine.73

We might also take on economists’ influential engagements with culture and creativity, our objects of study, more directly, as I try to, here. Doing so would allow us to sharpen our allegiances and our methods against those hostile accounts that inform the ongoing defunding of widely accessible humanities programming. Hayek’s vision of the economist as a cultural historian who tinkers with tradition in order to better serve market interests is still ascendant inside and outside of the academy. Articles that take an evolutionary approach to economics—one typical example, “Evolution and the Growth Process: Natural Selection of Entrepreneurial Traits,” claims to prove that “risk-tolerant” actors drive species progress—have long been published in the field’s top journals.74 Research of this kind in turn informs, or at least gives a veneer of legitimacy to, policy decisions, which, in recent decades, have systematically dismantled disciplines offering competing views of what culture is and does. (Although, as Slobodian has recently noted, economic theory that justifies the profit motive is not necessarily more influential than the motive itself simply operating in finance and industry.75)

Rather than continuing to focus mostly on methodological disputes internal to the humanities, in other words, scholars and critics might foreground our differences from other fields and address ourselves to antagonistic extra-disciplinary formations.76 We can target in publication and in the classroom those rival methods of cultural study that economists support, methods the many students enrolled in private and public institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and abroad are as likely to encounter as humanistic outlooks. Such an approach could provide a counter-model to dominant interdisciplinary formations that, as Stefan Collini has suggested, primarily serve management and corporate interests working within and through the university.77 Instead of absorbing the methods of other disciplines—taking on their language and aims as we attempt to shore up budgets and win dwindling majors—cultural studies might foreground how and why it deviates from the most powerful modes of knowledge production. Williams models this work, which takes as its basis the study of language and images, and he reminds us why it matters that our field’s historical vision of the human is at stake. He urges us to keep alive that vision’s present and possible strategic resources, not in the spirit of war, but in the spirit of expanded democratic access to the ordinary.

1. In “Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics,” New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000) 627-648, Grant Farred traces the ways the New Left both inspired and excluded the identitarian movements that emerged in the late twentieth century. Stuart Hall looks back on the achievements and failures of mid-century radical movements in “Life and Times of the First New Left,” New Left Review 61(January-February 2010): 177-196.
2. See Andrew Hartman, “Culture Wars and the Humanities in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Raritan36.4 (2017) 128-140 and “The Culture Wars Are Dead, Long Live the Culture Wars!,” The Baffler 39 (May 2018), and Quinn Slobodian, “Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right,” Cultural Politics 15.3 (2019) 372-386, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-7725521. Much earlier, Michel Foucault compares neoliberal conservative views of culture to socialist intellectual visions in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). In a footnote to a lecture, Foucault suggests the former elaborate more complex theories of culture’s economic function than do the latter. The left, limited by relatively simple base-superstructure models, often conceives of culture either as a means for the “reproduction of relations of production” or as “social solidification of economic differences.” By contrast, in “the neoliberal analysis,” culture is “directly integrated in the economy and its growth of a formation of productive capital” (233). Neoliberals deploy this more sophisticated and totalizing construction of culture’s relation to other domains to consolidate their worldview and to influence policy. Slobodian, “Anti-‘68ers” 3, 13.
3. Slobodian, “Anti-‘68ers” 3-4.
4. I follow Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) 4, who defines conservatism since the French revolution as “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
5. Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) comes up for censure as a representative radical text in The Fatal Conceit. Williams critiques evolutionary theories of culture and society in “Social Darwinism,” Culture and Materialism (New York: Verso, 1980) 86-102.
6. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 – 1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956) viii. F. A. Hayek, “The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization,” The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) 22. Although critics have rightly emphasized the ways Williams and Hayek alike were antagonistic to poststructuralist discourses, both endorse basically “constructivist” views of human life. On Williams’s complex relationship to postmodernism, see John Higgins, Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism, and Cultural Materialism (New York: Routledge,1999), and Tony Pinkney, “Raymond Williams and Post-Modernism,” The British Critical Tradition: A Re-Evaluation, ed. Gary Day (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1993) 213-229. On Hayek’s constructivism, see Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Edgework(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 37-59. See Williams’s posthumously published Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989) for his own fraught engagement with postmodernism.
7. For another reassessment of Williams’s approach to culture with contemporary neoliberal discourses in mind, see Jason M. Baskin, “Romanticism, Culture, Collaboration: Raymond Williams beyond the Avant-Garde,” Cultural Critique 83 (2013) 108-136. Baskin most values collectivist elements of Williams’s view of creative activity and distinguishes them from naïve Romantic celebrations of imagination.
8. James Davison Hunter consolidated the concept in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1992).
9. Critics emphasize how neoliberal intellectuals often advocate building strong states that serve market interests at the same time as many ostensibly disavow state power. See Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013).
10. Williams, Culture and Society 295-338.
11. Hayek, Constitution 28.
12. F.A Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 69. Williams abhors the popularity of “impact” as a term for influencing or capturing the attention of others in “Advertising: The Magic System,” Culture and Materialism 190.
13. Williams’s Culture and Society pairs opposing figures on the right and left and brings out their commonalities along with their disagreements. Doing so allows him to emphasize shared interests usually concealed and to model the stance he takes against what he calls the “dominative mode” (337).
14. Williams has been challenged in important ways by left discourses coming from two positions, the first, so-called identity politics, demanding attention to the roles categories of race, sexuality, gender, ability, and more play in producing and maintaining inequality, and the second, poststructuralism, calling into question grand narratives of class transformation, which Williams himself, a careful and qualifying thinker, never really endorsed. See Farred and Pinkney for accounts of these controversies.
15. Leigh Claire La Berge and Quinn Slobodian, “Reading for Neoliberalism, Reading like Neoliberals,” American Literary History 29.3 (Fall 2017): 602-614.
16. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Foucault.
17. Harold Bloom might have been the last prominent figure defending conservative values in literary studies, although his early theoretical work seemed radical to an old guard trained in New Criticism. On the occasion of Bloom’s death in 2019, academics on social media condemned his exclusionary practices. Figures such as Bloom have come to function as straw men in contemporary literary and cultural studies. For an overview of his controversial career, see Dinitia Smith, “Harold Bloom, Critics Who Championed the Western Canon, Dies at 89,” New York Times October 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html
18. “By rekindling the culture wars,” Hartman argues, “the humanities could once again become relevant to broader arenas of public debate” (“Culture Wars and the Humanities” 140).
19. Lewis F. Powell, Jr. “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on the Free Enterprise System,” 23 August 1971; Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York: Student Department of the League for International Democracy, 1962).
20. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harvest, 1949) was a primary antagonist for Williams’s Culture and Society.
21. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). As Hayek’s health failed in his final year, scholars believe the editor of his final book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), William Warren Bartley III, likely authored some of its content.
22. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis 79.
23. For exemplary critical engagements with Hayek’s epistemological and ontological claims, see, in addition to Mirowski and Robin, Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). In Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Naomi Beck challenges Hayek’s view of cultural evolution from the perspective of contemporary evolutionary theory.
24. Hayek initially elaborates the idea of “spontaneous” order, which he first introduced in lectures in the 1950s, in Constitution 33. Hayek, Constitution 22.
25. For a history of the emergence of evolutionary economics in general, see Philip Mirowski, “On the Origins (at Chicago) of Some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics,” Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, eds. Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Beck also situates Hayek’s evolutionary theory within the social sciences more broadly.
26. Hayek, Fatal Conceit 9.
27. Fatal Conceit 136.
28. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press 1993); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014); Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
29. Hartman, “Culture Wars” 23.
30. Stefan Collini describes and evaluates the emergence of the corporate university in What Are Universities For? (New York: Penguin, 2012) and Speaking of Universities (New York: Verso, 2017).
31. Fatal Conceit, 6 and passim.
32. F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Constitution, 397-411.
33. Hayek, “Why I Am Not” 410.
34. “Why I Am Not” 406.
35. “Why I Am Not” 406.
36. “Why I Am Not” 406.
37. Constitution 28.
38. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (New York: Routledge, 2012); “Our Moral Heritage,” The Heritage Lectures 24, 29 November 1982, Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., Lecture; “The Rules of Morality Are Not the Conclusions of Our Reason,” Twelfth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, 25 November 1983, Chicago Marriott, Chicago, Plenary. Because these earlier texts and late lectures elaborate many of The Fatal Conceit’s central premises, I follow Beck, who suggests that Hayek’s final book “can be consulted in combination with” the reliable texts that introduce its claims (Hayek and Evolution of Capitalism 82).
39. Hayek, “Our Moral Heritage,” 11-12.
40. Critics have questioned whether or not Hayek or Bartley, his editor, cited Foucault in The Fatal Conceit (64). The book criticizes Foucault, mistakenly, as a typical leftist intellectual preoccupied by alienation.
41. Fatal Conceit 72, emphasis in original.
42. Fatal Conceit 136-7.
43. Never Let a Serious Crisis 78-79. As Hayek puts it: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” (Fatal Conceit 76).
44. Robin, The Reactionary Mind 159-160.
45. Fatal Conceit 69.
46. Fatal Conceit 69-70.
47. Fatal Conceit 69.
48. Fatal Conceit 70. See also Hayek’s lecture, “The Rules of Morality,” for a condensed account of an economist’s function.
49. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, [1950] 1968) 253–64.
50. Hayek champions the field of economics here, but at least one edited collection produced by US literary critics takes up some of the work he recommends. In Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox, avowed students of Austrian school economics, set out to apply Hayek’s vision of “spontaneous order” to literary works from Cervantes to the present. They and their contributors bring out market-friendly themes across literary history.
51. Fatal Conceit 83.
52. Fatal Conceit83.
53. Fatal Conceit 78.
54. Hans Robert Jauss’s 1970 essay, “Modernity and Literary Tradition” (trans. Christian Thorne, Critical Inquiry31.2 [Winter 2005] 329–64) gives one important genealogical account of the development of this mode of historical consciousness.
55. Williams, Politics of Modernism.
56. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with ‘New Left Review’ (New York: Verso 1979) 106.
57. Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Francis Mulhern most famously discuss these challenges with Williams in a series of interviews published in Williams, Politics and Letters. Posthumous assessments of Williams’s career and contribution to socialist thought and cultural studies return to similar problems. Stanley Aronowitz summarizes and responds to formalist criticism of Williams in “On Catherine Gallagher’s Critique of Raymond Williams,” Social Text 30 (1992) 90-97. Elizabeth Eldridge and John Eldridge offer an overview of early and late critical engagements with Williams’s theory of culture in Raymond Williams: Making Connections (New York: Routledge, 1994).
58. Williams, Politics and Letters 97. Stuart Hall’s work on multiculturalism, race, and nation confronts many of the problems Williams did not theorize himself. See, for instance, Stuart Hall, “When Was the Postcolonial? Thinking at the Limit,” The Postcolonial Question, eds. I. Chambers and L. Curti, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
59. Culture and Society 333.
60. Culture and Society viii. Williams comes back to and consolidates his vision of culture first, and briefly, in the 1958 essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism(New York: Verso 1989) 3-14, and then, at length, forging new interdisciplinary methodologies, in The Long Revolution (Cardigan: Parthian, 1961).
61. Culture and Society 336.
62. F. A. Hayek, “The Non-Sequitur of the Dependence Effect,” Southern Economic Journal 27.4 (April 1961) 346-348.
63. Culture and Society 337. The etymology of culture Williams sketches in Keywords 49-54.
64. Stuart Hall, “Living with Difference: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Bill Schwartz,” Soundings(2007) 151.
65. Culture and Society 334-335.
66. In this way, Williams has more in common with the late work of poststructuralism’s key figures, chief among them Jacques Derrida, than Williams’s critique of what we might call trickle-down poststructuralism emphasizes.
67. “Culture Is Ordinary” 7.
68. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 38.
69. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) 171.
70. See Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982).
71. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
72. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?,” Politics of Modernism (New York: Verso, 1989) 31-35.
73. See my article, Racheal Fest, “What Will Modernism Be?,” b20: an online journal(May 2017), https://www.boundary2.org/2017/05/racheal-fest-what-will-modernism-be/, for a revaluation of Stevens in the context of neoliberalism.
74. Odad Galor and Stelios Michalopoulos, “Evolution and the Growth Process: Natural Selection of Entrepreneurial Traits,” Journal of Economic Theory 147.2 (March 2012): 759-780, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4116112/. See also Mirowski, “On the Origins.”
75. Quinn Slobodian, “Colossus Wears Tweed,” Dissent (Winter 2020) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/colossus-wears-tweed.
76. Developing an extra-disciplinary sense of antagonistic interlocutors might offer cultural critics an alternative to perpetuating decadent method wars, such as those conversations about post-critique that produce discourse today. For one recent provocation on internecine fighting and post-critique, see Anna Kornbluh, “It’s Complicated,” in “Responses to Rita Felski’s Hooked: Art and Attachment,” nonsite.org (35) https://nonsite.org/responses-to-hooked-art-and-attachment/.
77. Collini, Speaking of Universities 29.