Herman Finer

Herman Finer (February 24, 1898 – March 4, 1969) was a Jewish Romanian-born British political scientist and Fabian socialist.

Quotes

Road to Reaction (1945; 1963)

• Reaction has been waiting yearningly for this message, for someone to smite democracy hip and thigh. It eases the conscience; approves the feeling that nothing need be done; attacks bureaucracy; says the planner is a scoundrel; and saves taxes! It is no surprise to students of politics, though it is to Hayek, that such a doctrine has been so widely acclaimed.
  • Preface

• Government is the instrument for the exchange of one kind of benefit among persons and groups for others; the exchange of some freedoms for others. Government results from the demand for rights by persons and groups; they can be free of government as soon as they reduce their demand for rights and benefits. In the present state of science and technology, and given the tradition of a high standard of living, this cannot happen.
  • Introduction: The Road to Reaction Transformed

• Most human beings like enjoyment without employment. Most human beings like the services of government while they clamor for local government and self-government. This is the paradox of human nature: to want the fruits of centralization while keeping local and personal and state rights that militate against the benefits of large-scale organization.
  • Introduction: The Road to Reaction Transformed

• If the champions of an economic and political delusion were its only victims, we could with a little charity leave them to their rude awakening. But in democratic countries delusions may become public policies, supported by power, and hungry for domination even at the cost of subverting democracy.
  • Chap. 2 : The Reactionary Manifesto

• No one intends to "plan" or "collectivize" or "socialize" all economic activities, but many do wish to administer solid remedies to an admittedly defective order. Hayek allows no refuge, however, to the moderate person. He does not let you be moderate: it spoils his theory!
  • Chap. 2 : The Reactionary Manifesto

• Professor Hayek's history is not history. Especially before the nineteenth century, but quite plentifully since the sixteenth century, legislation has more and more replaced the growth of custom as the regulator of morals in society in every sphere. Let Professor Hayek read the history of the English Poor Law, for example, from 1535 onwards. Hayek should remember that even the status of the Churches was and is in both the United States and Great Britain regulated by statute or constitution. In every field of individual and social life legislation embodies morals : marriage, divorce, duty to family, religion, property, theft, libel, slander, contract, business — the list is never-ending. This legislation does not come out of the blue, produced without careful reflection and weighing of choices. Hayek must know that.
  • Chap. 3 : Lunacy about Planning

• Hayek's unscrupulous travesty of the democratic process of securing legislation (for that is the first basis of any government plan) culminates in his general contempt for the democratic notion altogether.
  • Chap. 3 : Lunacy about Planning

• Hayek cannot see how, in a planned state, groups can settle their differences over the course to be followed when, the state is to undertake various business projects. He pretends that in this case it is necessary to leave it to "the discretion of the judge or authority in question" to decide what is "fair and reasonable." This again is hypothetical. The solution depends on how the law of the plan is constructed, and the ability and state of mind of the negotiators in parliament, in the courts, and in regulatory bodies such as the Tariff Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are solving problems and building up important experience. But principally it depends on nationwide debate conducted over the course of years, assisted by the sifted results of scientific research and experience. The plan, such as it is, emerges from the majority; and only that emerges from the majority which the majority can thereafter operate. That is the answer to Hayekian obscurantism.
  • Chap. 4 : The Rule of Law is Rule of Hayek

• Hayek's assumption is that political power is neither limited in scope, restricted in authority, responsible in operation, nor co-operative and decentralized in execution. This assumption is stupid.
  • Chap. 4 : The Rule of Law is Rule of Hayek

• To get competition among firms with large capital — how is that possible? Only by setting up competitors who have interesting ideas and good projects and yet may not accumulate the necessary capital before they die. This means that to maintain competition the government planner for free-for-all competition must provide or guarantee credit to would-be competitors. To anybody? If he does not take anybody but chooses his particular people, it would set up a rising howl throughout the land; while if he did not choose among them, there would be a great many failures, and charlatans would run the government into bad debts. If he selected the creditors, by what criterion would he choose? It would have to be a guess that they were good competitive material in some particular line of business. And here Hayek's own planner would have to make distinctions between persons jar particular objects — which he said was against natural law. It is to such absurdity that the insensate attachment to unmitigated bigotry is bound to lead.
  • Chap. 5 : Adam Smith and Planning for Competition

• Hitler was not a socialist. He was a nationalist and a racialist; and in Mein Kampf himself tells how he designed to use social services and equality for the purpose of the Reich for conquest of the world. The purposes of socialism — equality, prosperity, charity, and international peace — were not the aims of Hitler. He detested all of them. It is irrelevant altogether to quote to us, as Hayek does, a number of obscure economic professors who may have impressed him when he was a student, men who said they were socialists but who characteristically derided Great Britain because she was a nation of merchants, while Germany was a nation of heroes! The writings he refers to were written in the course of World War I and were war polemics.
  • Chap. 6 : "Dictatorship" Means Dictatorship

• On grounds of history; on grounds of logic; on grounds of the misuse of terms; of the abuse of authorities; of the neglect of verified information; of the use of the most infantile fallacy known to logic, viz. post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Hayek's attempt to identify socialism and planning and dictatorship and totalitarianism is not only a failure, it is a snare.
  • Chap. 6 : "Dictatorship" Means Dictatorship

• Karl Marx and Hayek have this in common: both believe in systems, not in men; both are fatalists; both are callous; both hold that the state is and should be the product and auxiliary of economic values, and that historically the state was a committee of the economically successful for the mastery of society. Even as Karl Marx believed that when the economic problem was settled the state would wither away, so Hayek believes that the economic problem is now settled and the state ought to vanish except to assist continued competition.
  • Chap. 7 : Labeled POISON

• I agree neither with Marx nor with Hayek. Even when society has become, as Lenin said, one vast office and factory with everybody governing the processes there in operation, there must still be government, for the economic impetus in man is not productive of spontaneous harmony or the continuance of competition without tears. Nor is man without other, deeper society-shaping needs such as justice, humanity, and equality; these can crash the economy, and these can be subverted or not helped by the economy.
  • Chap. 7 : Labeled POISON

• It is no accident that the system of economic competition leads steadily to centralization within the economic field itself; while in the state, centralization has been accompanied by the recognition of the need for decentralization and the practical establishment of it.
  • Chap. 8 : The Engineer's Dials

• Men have no freedom worth mentioning when they have no possibility of exercising their faculties and energy as they feel they must. Freedom in this dynamic sense cannot come to men, in all the abundance potential in our time, unless they collectively manage a large proportion of the social resources and economic equipment. The present economic waste by mismanagement is enormous; it is nothing but lost or unexploited strength; it constitutes a loss of freedom to many.
  • Conclusion