#Friedrich A. Hayek

Hayek thus reconceptualized human agency and choice neither as informed technocratic guidance nor as the freedom to exercise reasoned decision making long linked to concepts of sovereignty. Rather, he reformulated agency as the freedom to become part of the market or network. He was very specific this point; theories of economy or politics based on collective or social models of market making and government were flawed in privileging the reason and objectivity of the few policy makers and governing officials over the many. This privileging he deduced results in Communism or Fascism. The state making plans quells the abilities of minorities, in his view, to take independent action. Hayek elaborated that freedom, therefore, was not the result of reasoned objective decision making, not the technocratic elite decision maker with volumes of data objectively and emotionlessly analyzed, but rather freedom from coercion. Coercion often coming to mean the effort to exclude individuals from chosen economic activities and markets. When linked to his discussions about subjectivity, ignorance, and the market as the only mechanism for making reasoned decisions as a collective, one can trace the bedrock of an argument against policy directed forms of equity making or civil rights and the assertion that all rights and freedoms are protections from the state, not services or support from the state. While in theory preserving the ‘freedom’ of an individual to participate equally in any market could be viewed as supporting the necessity of legal and humane infrastructures to allow all individuals this access, neo-liberal thinking and the Republican Party did not interpret in this direction (Hayek 1960).

In his initial paper that emerged from the Dartmouth program detailing the idea of a “perceptron,” Rosenblatt distances himself from his peers. These scientists, he claimed, had been “chiefly concerned with the question of how such functions as perception and recall might be achieved by a deterministic system of any sort, rather than how this is actually done by the brain” (ibid. 5). This approach, he argued, fundamentally ignored the question of scale and the emergent properties of biological systems. Instead, Rosenblatt based his approach on the theory of statistical separability, which he attributed to Hebb and Hayek, and a new conception of networked perception-cognition. According to Rosenblatt, neurons are mere switches or nodes in a network that classifies cognitive input, and intelligence emerges only at the level of the population and through the patterns of interaction between neurons.

Human beings, Hayek believed, were subjective, incapable of reason, and fundamentally limited in their attention and cognitive capacities. At the heart of Hayek’s conception of a market was the idea that no single subject, mind, or central authority can fully represent and understand the world. He argued that “The ‘data’ from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society ‘given’ to a single mind… and can never be so given” (ibid.). Instead, only markets can learn at scale and suitably evolve to coordinate dispersed resources and information in the best way possible.