HAYEK: The Iron Cage of Liberty.

By Andrew Gamble. Westview. 221 pp. $51 cloth, $19.95 paper

"Samuel Smiles or Horatio Alger would have regarded Professor Hayek's writings as slanderous of his fellow Christians, blasphemous of God, and ultimately subversive of the social order. I am not sure about the first two of these accusations, but I am fairly certain about the validity of the last." So wrote the "godfather" of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, in 1970. Gamble, a professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, is no neoconservative, but his new book essentially upholds Kristol's judgment. His well-crafted study establishes Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) as a great theoretician and polemicist on behalf of capitalism, even as it lays bare the gaps in the Austrian economist's vision.

The key to Hayek's philosophy, argues Gamble, "is that civilization arose through a process of spontaneous, unplanned development, not by design." This concept of "spontaneous order" includes the "invisible hand" of the market as described by Adam Smith. But Hayek reached further, seeking a grand explanatory device for how all human evolution has proceeded. Of course, as Gamble points out, this antirationalist proposition makes Hayek's long and passionate political fight against socialism almost unintelligible.

Further, writes Gamble, Hayek's concept of spontaneous order led him to accept "as benign whatever evolved spontaneously." So Hayek championed corporate capitalism, despite his admission that an economy dominated by corporations is one in which most individuals are "employees rather than independent producers." Hayek never demonstrated how capitalism, which presupposes the continued vitality of an entrepreneurial class, could survive in such an adverse environment.

Perhaps most timely is Gamble's observation that "the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s could have been defended on Hayekian principles." That the regime lacked democratic or moral legitimacy is of little matter; it was capitalist, after all. No wonder the American Left never devoted much time to refuting Hayek's ideas. It understood that an exclusively economic argument in favor of bourgeois society leaves that society defenseless against its radical critics.