Dewey and Hayek on Democratic Experimentalism

Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel invoke John Dewey’s “pragmatist account of thought and action” as the “backdrop” for their theory of democratic experimentalism, an approach to governance emphasizing judicially monitored local decision making within a system of decentralized administrative authority. Little credit is given to the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and, what we would call today, his “neo-liberal” ideas as seminal influences on the theory of democratic experimentalism. Indeed, Sabel has been highly critical of Hayek’s ideas. Yet, an argument can be made that democratic experimentalism is at least loosely Hayekian. Hayek’s notion of a spontaneous order bears some resemblance to what Dorf, Sabel and others call a democratic experiment. Minimizing democratic experimentalism’s debt to Hayek may seem unsurprising given the tendency among democratic theorists to bifurcate the forum and the market, preferring deliberation to catallaxy. However, Dorf and Sabel gladly embrace the model of flexible entrepreneurial firms in their theory of democratic experimentalism. By preferring Dewey to Hayek, though, they ignore the fundamental role of implicit knowledge in structuring decentralized information networks and underestimate the threat of strategic action to the dialogic process of rule-making. Institutions other than markets can spontaneously evolve once a legal framework is in place, thereafter structuring experimental problem solving and democratic decision making in a Deweyan-Hayekian spirit, that is, by choosing means in the absence of predetermined ends or preferred end-states. One implication of my analysis is that Dewey's and Hayek’s ideas are more compatible than most democratic theorists and political philosophers will admit. Evidence of this compatibility opens the door for creating and evaluating democratic experiments within a Deweyan-Hayekian theoretical framework, as well as extending the framework to other areas of political inquiry.