Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) has posted Two Accounts of Freedom: Mill vs. Hayek on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek were defining theorists of freedom, but they offered very different accounts of both the scope of freedom and its justification. Mill put a bright spotlight on individuals, their knowledge, their potential, and their agency. By contrast, Hayek put a bright spotlight on free markets and traditions, and on government planners and what they do not know and cannot know. Hayek thought that Mill’s Harm Principle would protect both too much (because it would operate against the private sphere) and too little (because the notion of harm was too broad). Mill was a romantic about choosers (about individuals, and what they know, and what they are capable of). Hayek endorsed “individualism” above all, but he did not mean, by that term, what Mill meant by “individuality.” Hayek was no romantic about individual choosers; he explicitly drew attention to imperfect rationality and human error. Hayek was enthusiastic about undesigned orders and traditions, and a skeptic about planners. Mill was much more skeptical about traditions. These are two faces of liberalism. In important ways, they are complementary, not contradictory. Still, Mill and Hayek had radically different sensibilities.
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