Cato the Elder: Proto-Hayek?

By -
"Rome is exemplary -- new and exemplary --in that it shows the limits of individual virtues. According to Scipio's report, Cato explained that there was never a genius so vast that he could miss nothing, nor could all the geniuses brought together in one place at one time foresee all the contingencies without the practical experience afforded by the passage of time.

"Thus one must ascribe to Cato the Elder one of the first formulations of the theory of spontaneous order and of Hayek's idea that the functioning of the social order rests on an immense amount of information that could not be mastered by any individual or group of individuals, however zealous and capable one might imagine them to be." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City, p. 190

I must admit, finding Hayek popping up 190 pages into this book was as surprising as it would be to discover, say, that my landlord in Brooklyn was married to my high school prom date.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:02 PM

    I'm surprised to learn that you had a high school prom date.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:47 AM

      Metaphors can be fictional, can't they?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more