Mises considered himself a man of 1789, an heir of the enlightenment and of the French Revolution. Now, as just another modern ideology, just another ism, I don’t much care about Austrianism one way or the other. But when they try to pass themselves off as “Christian” or as in line with Catholic Social teaching, then I declare, “They shall not pass!”

And ever since the terms conservative and liberal have become associated with right and left, we need to acknowledge that in essence, in the current day and age, conservative and liberal have become two sides of the same Revolution.

I do think we need to seriously reconsider our attachement to Enlightenment categories of thinking. Hence my personal attachment ro Roepke or Schumacher and Chesterton – especially if one considers his political satires such as Tales of the Longbow, The Napoleon of Nottinghill and The Return of Don Quixote.

Hayek’s radical separation of spheres reminds me of Madison’s posture on religion. No longer are the kingdoms distinguished and related with care; they are entirely cut off from each other. Politically the Church becomes not a kingdom in its own right but just another faction. Factions have to be offset by rival factions, so a divided Church of competing sects becomes something helpful, desirable as a tool of policy.

I should confess, the reactionary impulse in me makes me worry that even Burke risks giving up the “permanent things” piecemeal through a willingness to acquiesce to change once it’s become a fait accompli. Maybe that fear is groundless, but it can be saved for another time. Anyhow, thanks for bearing with my meandering comment last night.

– Yes, some do wish to color Augustine as a realist (e.g. R.A. Markus and Niebuhr). But I think there are very serious flaws in that estimation, as argued by Elshtain, Mathewes, O’Donovan, von Heyking, and others.

– I think you’re dead right to associate Hayek with pessimistic realism. In the passage I quoted, his avowal of the separation of spheres is, I think, key to his distrust of planned society. Robert Nelson makes a similar argument about the “Protestant” economic leanings of Chicago School founder Frank Knight in Economics as Religion.

– Regarding Hayek’s later writings…

Progress still precedes social order. From my admittedly amateur understanding, Hayek argues that social order evolves into itself because of the inevitable improvements brought about by history (in contrast to deliberate “constructivism”). To over-simplify, capitalism works because it is unplanned; socialism fails because it is deliberate. As you mentioned, this position follows from a sort of radical political realism, which I sadly don’t have the time to delve into at present (so this amounts to just a cheap hit-and-run). But as Arthur Diamond has pointed out, Hayek creates categorical confusion with his foundational definitions of critical and constructivist rationalism.

And regarding his possible late rapproachement with conservatism: his argument for rejecting “absolute doubt” of “every single value of our society” seems to spring, not from an appreciation of established order itself, but from a pragmatic fear of undermining social order. I see no “permanent things” as such in later Hayek, but rather utilitarianism and social Darwinist inevitability.