Also on the philosophy front, here's an insightful essay on Hayek by Jesse Larner from the Winter 2008 issue of Dissent, an American quarterly magazine of the left for which your correspondent has from time to time scribbled.
If this is your sort of thing, the whole piece is very much worth a read, but here are two of the salient points:
1. Hayek, writers Larner, is "nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants. He admits that there are a few rare economic circumstances in which market forces cannot deliver the optimum result, and that when these occur, the state may legitimately intervene. He recognizes such a thing as the social interest and will even endorse some limited redistributionalism—he goes so far as to suggest that the state ensure a minimum standard of living."
2. Moving away from Hayek per se, Larner argues that conservatives have often critiqued liberalism, any form of it from the extreme to the mildly meliorative, by arguing that liberalism constantly wants to perfect society and to perfect individuals, turning them into soulless robots of the state. Larner shows that this is a terrible misreading of liberalism on conservatives' part; that liberals believe -- indeed, with conservatives -- "that human societies are jerry-built structures, rickety towers of ad hoc solutions to unforeseen problems. Their development is evolutionary, and as in biological evolution, they do not have natural end-states." What we disagree on is why the problems arise and how to respond to them.
You can't tell most conservatives this, in my experience. If I had a dime for every time I heard a conservative say that Hillary Clinton wants to control your mind and make you a captive of the state and indoctrinate your children, I'd be at my beach house right now.
