From Chapter 8, The Quest for Justice, from Hayek’s indispensable, yet largely forgotten, trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
“Strictly speaking, only human conduct can be called just or unjust. If we apply the terms to a state of affairs, they have meaning only in so far as we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to come about. A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust.2 To apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake. Only if we mean to blame a personal creator does it make sense to describe it as unjust that somebody has been born with a physical defect, or been stricken with a disease, or has suffered the loss of a loved one. Nature can be neither just nor unjust. Though our inveterate habit of interpreting the physical world animistically or anthropomorphically often leads us to such a misuse of words, and makes us seek a responsible agent for all that concerns us, unless we believe that somebody could and should have arranged things differently, it is meaningless to describe a factual situation as just or unjust. But if nothing that is not subject to human control can be just (or moral), the desire to make something capable of being just is not necessarily a valid argument for our making it subject to human control; because to do so may itself be unjust or immoral, at least when the actions of another human being are concerned.”
I’ve been pondering lately the correlation I’ve noticed between writing that can’t qualify as “good” in any critical sense, and the originality of a creative genius. I regard Hayek’s trilogy as a true work of genius, yet it is overlong, repetitive, meandering in places. It’s like a road trip along an unmapped highway filled with tourist traps and side quests. Yet without these qualities, would Hayek’s points come through? I think not. I know not. I’ve read books that have been heavily edited, and they are terrible. Yes, there is a sterile perfection about them, clean as a dentist’s office, but the soul of the work has been bleached to death. There are books, however, that are terribly difficult to read, yet burn with ideas and insights, originality and ephemera and charm. A difficult book that happens to be product of a true creative genius getting his entire, big, messy idea down in print in raw, and relatively coherent, form, is a treasure. This isn’t to say that Hayek is a bad writer, but that his writing has been mostly spared the crippling effect that editing has on works of genius.
This reminds me of the introduction to Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, which I will leave here:
“I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.”
