From the Hayek Blog: Would Hayek approve gay marriage? Worth noting — portions of Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit were written by the editor of the book — who happened to have been gay — when Hayek fell ill before the final completion of the manuscript. There has yet to be a full scholarly accounting of these non-Hayek passages in the book, which can be found throughout the text. Hayek biographer Alan Ebenstein has called for a new edition of the book — one actually written by Hayek — and I’m in complete support of the idea. Until then, the publisher should be printing some sort of “reader beware” notice in the book, warning readers that all of the ideas in the book are not necessarily those of Friedrich Hayek. Ebenstein discusses the Bill Bartley / Fatal Conceit matter in his new book Hayek’s Journey From the National Review Blog: St. Lawrence University economics professor Steven Horowitz writes: Jonah, I think your state U poli sci prof has Hayek right. I’ve wanted to write a Hayekian defense of gay marriage paper for a few years, and eventually will. The key to the argument, it seems to me, is that Hayek has a quasi-functionalist view of social institutions — institutions have evolved for reasons, namely that they fulfill some social function. But in the “sifting” process of determining how a particular institution comes to be, certainly human judgments about the abililty of alternate institutions to do the job matter. The long-standing prohibition on homosexual acts/marriage may well be due to incorrect facts that people have held, and now with better factual knowledge, the old prohibitions aren’t seen to perform their function any more, or better yet: allowing people to engage in the prohibited behavior doesn’t undermine the function of the broader institution. Perhaps given the economic circumstances of a poorer, agricultural world, and the state of social and scientific knowledge, the various prohibitions on homosexuality made sense to people at the time, and perhaps they made sense in reality. But in a different era, with different knowledge, Hayek would be the first to say that the institution can and should evolve. After all, how different is it from prohibitions on interracial marriage, along these lines? Didn’t many people believe that the factual knowledge supported an inequality of the races? Didn’t changes in our factual knowledge contribute to the end of such laws? Lastly, as early as the early 70s, Hayek had a footnote about homosexual acts being an example of behavior that should not be prohibited, and spoke specifically of the British commission who examine it in the 50s or 60s (I don’t have my book with me). Also, Hayek argued that the job of the social scientist was to assess critically each institution of society, but just not all of them at once. Yes, he argued for the importance of traditions, but he did not revere them. I think the gay marriage issue is a case where his evolutionary half would have won out over his traditional half.
