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Frank Knight and the Tradition of Liberalism

Frank Knight was a very complex and subtle thinker, especially so in the area of political philosophy, and any appreciation of his views in short compass (or perhaps even at length) is bound to produce simplifications of the kind that would have made him groan. In the 60 years of his study and meditation upon man as a political animal (i.e., a rational one, not a behavioristically social one like the termites or ants), he generated far more questions than answers, more problems than solutions, and he was more distressed by ingenuousness in political philosophy than by error or evil. He had the uncommon gift (and the curse!) of the compound eye; human society appeared to his perception through many angles of view which compelled a projection that was a mosaic of great richness, complexity, and, ultimately, mystery. We may label him a "liberal" (in the midnineteenth-century meaning of that term) because he did so describe himself, but his own discussion of liberalism was more concerned with its weaknesses than its strengths. No one, indeed, has searched out its subterranean defects with more tenacity. The essence of the liberal philosophy, in Knight's view, was freedom, not as an instrument (for utilitarian efficiency) or even as a human preference, but as an ethical value in itself. This raises many philosophical problems, which are compounded by the fact that Knight was unwilling to accept any specific theory of ethics or even any of the extant general approaches to ethical theory. He rejected alike all reductionist theories (including the reduction of all values to freedom) and all deontological statements of absolute values. The closest he would come to advancing an ethical position of his own was to evince a belief (or a hope) that man is capable of attaining higher levels of social existence-to become more "civilized" in some sense. Yet he rejected altogether the idea that one may describe some ideal civilization and set it up as a goal, the ceaseless