Chapter 28. F. A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion
In his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek attempts to establish a systematic political philosophy on behalf of individual liberty.
He begins very well by defining freedom as the absence of coercion, thus upholding negative liberty more cogently than does Isaiah Berlin.
Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek's system appears when he proceeds to define coercion, for instead of defining coercion as is done in the present volume, as the invasive use of physical violence or the threat thereof against someone else's person or just property, Hayek defines coercion far more fuzzily and inchoately, for example, as control of the environment or circumstances
for Hayek, coercion, of course, includes the aggressive use of physical violence, but the
The term unfortunately also includes peaceful and non-aggressive actions as well.
Thus, Hayek states that the threat of force or violence is the most important form of coercion,
but they are not synonymous with coercion, for the threat of physical force is not the
only way in which coercion can be exercised.
What then are the other non-violent ways in which Hayek believes coercion can be exercised?
One is such purely voluntary ways of interacting as a morose husband or a nagging wife who
can make someone else's life intolerable unless their every mood is obeyed.
Here Hayek concedes that it would be absurd to advocate legal outlawry of sulkiness or
for Nagging, but he does so on the faulty grounds that such outlawry would involve even
greater coercion.
But coercion is not really an additive quantity.
How can we quantitatively compare different degrees of coercion, especially when they
involve comparisons among different people?
Is there no fundamental qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between a nagging wife
and Using the Apparatus of Physical Violence to Outlaw or Restrict Such Nagging?
It seems clear that the fundamental problem is Hayek's use of coercion as a portmanteau
term to include not only physical violence but also voluntary, non-violent and non-invasive
actions such as nagging.
The point, of course, is that the wife or husband is free to leave the offending partner
and that staying together is a voluntary choice on his or her part.
Nagging might be morally or aesthetically unfortunate, but it is scarcely coercive in
any sense similar to the use of physical violence.
Only confusion can be caused by lumping the two types of action together.
But not only confusion, but also self-contradiction, for Hayek includes in the concept of coercion
not only invasive physical violence, that is, a compulsory action or exchange, but also
certain forms of peaceful voluntary refusal to make exchanges.
Surely the freedom to make an exchange necessarily implies the equivalent freedom not to make
an exchange.
Yet Hayek dubs certain forms of peaceful refusal to make an exchange as coercive, thus lumping
The Theory of Money and Credit
and appreciate tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike.
Yet dismissal is simply a refusal by the capital-owning employer to make any further exchanges with
one or more people.
An employer may refuse to make such exchanges for many reasons, and there are none but subjective
criteria to enable Hayek to use the term arbitrary.
Why is one reason any more arbitrary than another?
If Hayek means to imply that any reasons other than maximizing monetary profit are arbitrary,
then he ignores the Austrian school insight that people even in business act to maximize
their psychic rather than monetary profit, and that such psychic profit may include all
sorts of values, none of which is more or less arbitrary than another.
Furthermore, Hayek here seems to be implying that employees have some sort of right to
continuing employment, a right which is in overt contradiction to the property rights
of employers to their own money. Hayek concedes that dismissal is ordinarily not coercive.
Why then in conditions of acute unemployment, surely in any case not of the employer's making,
Hayek commits a similar error when he deals with the refusal to exchange made by a monopolist,
the single owner of a resource.
He admits that if I would very much like to be painted by a famous artist, and if he refused
to paint me for less than a very high fee, or at all, it would clearly be absurd to say
that I am coerced. Yet he does apply the concept of coercion to a case where a monopolist owns
water in an oasis. Suppose, he says, that people had settled there on the assumption
that water would always be available at a reasonable price, that then other water sources
had dried up and that people then had no choice but to do whatever the owner of the spring
demanded of them if they were to survive.
Here would be a clear case of coercion, since the good or service in question is crucial
to their existence.
Yet since the owner of the spring did not aggressively poison the competing springs,
the owner is scarcely being coercive.
In fact, he is supplying a vital service and should have the right either to refuse a sale
or to charge whatever the customers will pay.
The situation may well be unfortunate for the customers, as are many situations in life.
But the supplier of a particularly scarce and vital service is hardly being coercive
by either refusing to sell or by setting a price that the buyers are willing to pay.
Both actions are within his rights as a free man and as a just property owner.
The owner of the oasis is responsible only for the existence of his own actions and his
own property.
He is not accountable for the existence of the desert or for the fact that the other
springs have dried up.
Furthermore, as Professor Ronald Hamowy points out in a brilliant critique of Hayek's concept
of Coercion and of the Rule of Law.
We are faced with what appears to be an insurmountable problem.
What constitutes a reasonable price?
By reasonable, Hayek might mean competitive.
But how is it possible to determine what the competitive price is in the absence of competition?
Economics cannot predict the cardinal magnitude of any market price in the absence of a market.
What then can we assume to be a reasonable price, or, more to the point, at what price
does the contract alter its nature and become an instance of coercion?
Is it at one cent a gallon, at one dollar a gallon, at ten dollars a gallon?
What if the owner of the spring demands nothing more than the friendship of the settlers?
Is such a price coercive?
By what principle can we decide when the agreement is a simple contractual one, and when it
is not.
Moreover, as Hamowy states, we must face yet a further difficulty. Is the owner acting
coercively if he refuses to sell his water at any price? Suppose that he looks upon his
spring as sacred and its water as holy. To offer the water to the settlers would contravene
his deepest religious sentiments. Here is a situation which would not fall under Hayek's
Hayek's definition of coercion since the owner of the spring forces no action on the settlers.
Yet it would appear that within Hayek's own framework this is a far worse situation since
the only choice left open to the settlers now is dying of thirst.
Let us postulate another situation. Suppose that there is only one physician in a community
and an epidemic breaks out. Only he can save the lives of numerous fellow citizens, an
action surely crucial to their existence. Is he coercing them if a. he refuses to do
anything or leaves town, or b. if he charges a very high price for his curative services?
Certainly not. There is, for one thing, nothing wrong with a man charging the value of his
services to his customers, that is, what they are willing to pay. He further has every right
to refuse to do anything. While he may perhaps be criticized morally or aesthetically as a
self-owner of his own body, he has every right to refuse to cure or to do so at a high price.
To say that he is being coercive is furthermore to imply that it is proper and not coercive
for his customers or their agents to force the physician to treat them, in short, to
justify his enslavement.
But surely enslavement, compulsory labor, must be considered coercive in any sensible
meaning of the term.
All this highlights the gravely self-contradictory nature of including a forced activity or exchange
in the same rubric of coercion with someone's peaceful refusal to make an exchange.
As I have written elsewhere, a well-known type of private coercion is the vague but ominous
sounding economic power.
A favorite illustration of the wielding of such power is the case of a worker fired from
his job.
Let us look at this situation closely.
What exactly has the employer done?
He has refused to continue to make a certain exchange which the worker preferred to continue
making. Specifically, A, the employer, refuses to sell a certain sum of money in exchange
for the purchase of B's labor services. B would like to make a certain exchange. A would
not. The same principle may apply to all the exchanges throughout the length and breadth
of the Economy.
Economic power, then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange.
Every man has this power.
Every man has the same right to make a proffered exchange.
Now it should become evident that the middle-of-the-road statist who concedes the evil of violence
but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the private
Coercion of Economic Power is caught in an impossible contradiction.
A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say, or what is the government to
do if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange?
This is the crucial question.
There are only two positions we may take on the matter, either that B is committing violence
and that. In the terms of both doctrines, the libertarian and the economic power arguments,
this violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If
we adopt the economic power argument, we must choose the latter position. If we reject it,
we must adopt the former. If we choose the economic power concept, we must employ violence
is to combat any refusal of exchange. If we reject it, we employ violence to prevent any
violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either or choice. The middle
of the road statist cannot logically say that there are many forms of unjustified coercion.
He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that
that there is only one form of illegal coercion, overt physical violence, or he must say that
there is only one form of illegal coercion, refusal to exchange.
And outlawing the refusal to work is, of course, a society of general slavery.
Let us consider another example that Hayek quickly dismisses as non-coercive.
If a hostess will invite me to her parties only if I conform to certain standards of
conduct and dress, this is certainly not coercion. Yet, as Professor Hamilley has shown, this
case may well be considered coercion on Hayek's own criteria. For it might be that I am a
very socially conscious person, and that my not attending this party would greatly endanger
under my social standing. Further, my dinner jacket is at the cleaner's and will not be
ready for a week, yet the party is tomorrow. Under these conditions could it be said that
my host's action in demanding my wearing formal attire as the price of access to his home
is in fact a coercive one, inasmuch as it clearly threatens the preservation of one of the things
In Attempting to rebut Hamowy's trenchant critique, Hayek later added that, to constitute
Without coercion it is also necessary that the action of the coercer should put the
coerced in a position which he regards as worse than that in which he would have been
without that action.
But as Hamowy points out in reply, this does not salvage Hayek's inconsistent refusal to
adopt the patent absurdity of calling a conditional invitation to a party coercive, for the case
The case just described seems to meet this condition as well, for while it is true that, in a sense, my would-be host has widened my range of alternatives by the invitation, the whole situation, which must include my inability to acquire formal attire and my consequent frustration, is worse, from my point of view, than the situation which had obtained before the invitation, certainly worse than had existed before my would-be host
Hayek and the rest of us are duty-bound to do one of two things, either to confine the concept of coercion strictly to the invasion of another's person or property by the use or threat of physical violence, or to scrap the term coercion altogether, and simply define freedom not as the absence of coercion, but as the absence of aggressive coercion.
and simply define freedom not as the absence of coercion but as the absence of aggressive physical violence or the threat thereof.
Hayek indeed concedes that coercion can be so defined as to make it an all-pervasive and unavoidable phenomenon.
Unfortunately, his middle-of-the-road failure to confine coercion strictly to violence pervasively
flaws his entire system of political philosophy.
He cannot salvage that system by attempting to distinguish, merely quantitatively, between
mild and more severe forms of coercion.
Another fundamental fallacy of Hayek's system is not only his defining coercion beyond the
sphere of physical violence, but also in failing to distinguish between aggressive and defensive
coercion or violence.
There is all the world of distinction in kind between aggressive violence, assault or theft
against another, and the use of violence to defend oneself and one's property against
such aggression.
Defensive violence is criminal and unjust.
Defensive violence is perfectly just and proper.
The former invades the rights of person and property.
The latter defends against such invasion.
Yet Hayek again fails to make this crucial qualitative distinction.
For him, there are only relative degrees or quantities of coercion.
As Hayek states that, coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided, because the only way
to prevent it is by the threat of coercion.
From this, he goes on to compound the error by adding that free society has met this problem
by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state, and by attempting to limit this
The State's power of the State to instances where it is required to prevent coercion by
private persons.
Yet we are not here comparing varying degrees of an undifferentiated lump we can call coercion,
even if we define this as physical violence.
For we can avoid aggressive violence completely by preventing it through purchasing the services
of Defense Agencies, agencies which are empowered to use only defensive violence.
We are not helpless in the throes of coercion if we define such coercion only as aggressive
violence, or, alternatively, if we abandon the term coercion altogether and keep the
distinction between aggressive and defensive violence.
Ludwig's crucial second sentence in the above paragraph compounds his error many times further.
In the first place, in any and all historical cases, free society did not confer any monopoly
of coercion on the state.
There has never been any form of voluntary social contract.
In all historical cases, the state has seized, by the use of aggressive violence and conquest,
Such a Monopoly of Violence in Society.
And further, what the state has is not so much a monopoly of coercion as of aggressive,
as well as defensive violence.
And that monopoly is established and maintained by systematically employing two particular
forms of aggressive violence, taxation for the acquisition of state income, and the compulsory
Outlawry of Competing Agencies of Defensive Violence within the State's Acquired Territorial
Area Therefore, since liberty requires the elimination
of aggressive violence in society, while maintaining defensive violence against possible invaders,
the State is not and can never be justified as a defender of liberty.
For the State lives by its very existence on the twofold and pervasive employment of
aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed
to be defending.
The State is qualitatively unjustified and unjustifiable.
Thus Hayek's justification of the existence of the State, as well as its employment of
of Taxation and Other Measures of Aggressive Violence, rests upon his untenable obliteration
of the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, and his lumping of all
violent actions into the single rubric of varying degrees of coercion.
But this is not all, for in the course of working out his defense of the state and state
Hayek not only widens the concept of coercion beyond physical violence, he also unduly narrows
the concept of coercion to exclude certain forms of aggressive physical violence.
In order to limit state coercion, that is, to justify state action within such limits,
Hayek asserts that coercion is either minimized or even does not exist if the violence-supported
and edicts are not personal and arbitrary but are in the form of general universal rules
knowable to all in advance, the rule of law.
Thus Hayek states that the coercion which a government must still use is reduced to
a minimum and made as innocuous as possible by restraining it through known general rules,
so that in most instances the individual need never be coerced unless he has placed himself
He puts himself in a position where he knows he will be coerced.
Even where coercion is not avoidable, it is deprived of its most harmful effects by being
confined to limited and foreseeable duties, or at least made independent of the arbitrary
will of another person.
Being made impersonal and dependent upon general abstract rules whose effect on particular
Hayek's avoidability criterion for allegedly non-coercive though violent actions is put
baldly as follows.
Provided that I know beforehand that if I place myself in a particular position I shall
be coerced, and provided that I can avoid putting myself in such a position, I need
never be coerced.
At least insofar as the rules providing for coercion are not aimed at me personally, but
are so framed as to apply equally to all people in similar circumstances, they are no different
from any of the natural obstacles that affect my plans.
But as Professor Hamowy trenchantly points out, it follows from this that if Mr. X warns
me that he is going to kill me if I buy anything from Mr. Y, and if the products available
from Mr. Y are also available elsewhere, probably from Mr. X, such action on the part of Mr.
X is non-coercive.
For purchasing from Mr. Y is avoidable.
Hamowy continues, avoidability of the action is sufficient, according to this criterion,
to set up a situation theoretically identical to one in which a threat does not occur at
all.
The threatened party is no less free than he was before the threat was made, if he can
avoid the threatener's action.
According to the logical structure of this argument, threatening coercion is not a coercive
act.
Thus, if I know in advance that I will be attacked by hoodlums if I enter a certain
neighborhood, and if I can avoid that neighborhood, then I need never be coerced by the hoodlums.
Hence, one could regard the hoodlum-infested neighborhood in the same way as a plague-infested
both avoidable obstacles, neither personally aimed at me, and hence, for Hayek, not coercive.
Thus Hayek's avoidability criterion for non-coercion leads to a patently absurd weakening of the
concept of coercion and the inclusion of aggressive and patently coercive actions under a benign
non-coercive rubric.
And yet Hayek is even willing to scuttle his own weak avoidability limitation on government,
for he concedes that taxation and conscription, for example, are not and are not supposed
to be avoidable.
But these too become non-coercive because they are at least predictable and enforced
irrespective of how the individual would otherwise employ his energies.
This deprives them largely of the evil nature of coercion. If the known necessity of paying
a certain amount in taxes becomes the basis of all my plans, if a period of military service
is a foreseeable part of my career, then I can follow a general plan of life of my own
making and am as independent of the will of another person as men have learned to be in
society.
The absurdity of relying on general, universal, equally applicable, predictable rules as a
criterion or as a defense for individual liberty has rarely been more starkly revealed.
For this means that, for example, if there is a general governmental rule that every
person shall be enslaved one year out of every three, then such universal slavery is not
at all coercive.
In what sense, then, are Hayekian general rules superior or more libertarian than any
conceivable case of rule by arbitrary whim?
Let us postulate, for example, two possible societies.
One is ruled by a vast network of Hayekian general rules, equally applicable to all.
For example, such rules as, Everyone is to be enslaved every third year.
No one may criticize the government under penalty of death.
No one may drink alcoholic beverages.
Everyone must bow down to Mecca three times a day at specified hours.
Everyone must wear a specified green uniform, etc.
It is clear that such a society, though meeting all the Hayekian criteria for a non-coercive
rule of law, is thoroughly despotic and totalitarian.
Let us postulate, in contrast, a second society which is totally free, where every person
is free to employ his person and property, make exchanges, etc. as he sees fit, except
that, once a year, the monarch, who does literally nothing the rest of the year, commits one
arbitrary invasive act against one individual that he selects.
Each society is to be considered more free, more libertarian.
Thus we see that Hayek's constitution of liberty can in no sense provide the criteria or the
groundwork for a system of individual liberty.
In addition to the deeply flawed definitions of coercion, a fundamental flaw in Hayek's
theory of individual rights, as Hamowy points out, is that they do not stem from a moral
Theory, or from some independent non-governmental social arrangement, but instead flow from
government itself.
For Hayek, government and its rule of law creates rights, rather than ratifies or defends
them.
It is no wonder that in the course of his book, Hayek comes to endorse a long list of
of Government Actions Clearly Invasive of the Rights and Liberties of the Individual Citizens.