Quotes from The Viennese Students of Civilization

By Erwin Dekker (2016)

• The liberal movement in Vienna had started around the celebration of German cultural heroes such as Goethe or Schiller. Communities can never be sustained without a shared identity and shared symbols.#
  NormsHistory
• As Hayek stresses time and time again, his concept of freedom defends the individual from the arbitrary will of others, but it does not defends him from the impersonal forces of the market, social norms, a governing morality, or the acceptance of not fully understood and hence incompletely justified norms.#
  NormsPolitics
• The constitution is not a procedural prescription; it is a living and continued moral commitment to certain norms and values. Upholding it, cultivating it, therefore requires continued active support by the members of society.#
  Politics
• Civilization is always concerned with practices, how things are done: with greater or less foresight, with more or less specialization, with manners or without, with more or less technical sophistication.#
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H. Stuart Hughes, “Is the Intellectual Obsolete?” (1956)

• By the 18th century there had come about that radical change that converted the characteristic European intellectual from a defender and rationalizer of existing institutions into their implacable critic. #
  History

Kenneth Boulding, “Economics as a Moral Science” (1969)

• It has been the precise weakness of the institutions that we think primarily of as economic, that is, associated with exchange. . . . that they easily lose their legitimacy if they are not supported by other elements and institutions in the society which can sustain them as integral parts of a larger community.#
  NormsInstitutions

Anthony O'Hear, “Popperian Individualism Today” (2009)

• To think that a disposition to criticize might on its own be enough to hold a community together is itself utopian, and it could be as destructively utopian as some of the other utopias Popper correctly criticizes.#
  NormsScience

F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1978)

• [Freud’s] basic aim of undoing the culturally acquired repressions and freeing the natural drives, has opened the most fatal attack on the basis of all civilization.#
  Norms

F.A. Hayek, “The Trend of Economic Thinking” (1933)

• It is probably no exaggeration to say that economics developed mainly as the outcome of the investigation and refutation of successive Utopian proposals.#
  HistoryEconomics

Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871)

• Wherever we turn among civilized peoples we find a system of large-scale advance provision for the satisfaction of human needs.#
  EconomicsDevelopment

Bronisław Malinowski, “Man’s Culture and Man’s Behavior” (1941)

• For all this there is a price to be paid in terms of obedience to tradition. Man must submit to a number of rules and determinants that do not come from his organism but from submission to his own artifact and machinery, to cooperation, and to the tyranny of words and other symbols.#