Ratio Working Papers
No 118:
Choosing One’s Own Informal Institutions: On Hayek’s Critique of Keynes’s Immoralism
Niclas Berggren ()
Abstract: In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all
and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This
led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e. the position that one should
be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal
institutions in place. However, it is argued here that immoralism may be
compatible with Hayek’s enterprise since Hayek misinterpreted Keynes, who
did not advo-cate the dissolving of all informal rules for everybody. By
avoiding this misinterpretation, immoralism can be seen as institutional
experimentation at the margin, which Hayek himself favored.
Keywords: Institutions; rules; traditions; morality; liberty; rule of law; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: B25; O17; P48; Z13; (follow links to similar papers)
26 pages, April 14, 2008
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- This paper is published as:
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Berggren, Niclas, (2009), 'Choosing One’s Own Informal Institutions: On Hayek’s Critique of Keynes’s Immoralism', Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 20, No. 2, pages 139-159
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