The conflict between formal justice and formal equality before the law, on the one hand, and the attempts to realize various ideals of substantive justice and equality, on the other, also accounts for the widespread confusion about the concept of “privilege” and its consequent abuse. To mention only the most important instance of this abuse–the application of the term “privilege” to property as such. It would indeed be privilege if, for example, as has sometimes been the case in the past, landed property were reserved to members of the nobility. And it is privilege if, as is true in our time, the right to produce or sell particular things is reserved to particular people designated by authority. But to call private property as such, which all can acquire under the same rules, a privilege, because only some succeed in acquiring it, is depriving the word “privilege” of its meaning.
This is from Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, pp. 88-89.
I said in my previous post on privilege that I would give my own view. My view of privilege is similar to Hayek’s. The key is that government grants certain items or permissions to some that it withholds from others.
To take an example from current-day America, in New York City few people are allowed to carry concealed handguns or even handguns at all. Among those few are the bodyguards of Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg and they are privileged. You might argue that that’s because if he were unprotected, then he, being a high-profile person, would be at great risk of being murdered. But there are probably people in Harlem whom you and I have never heard of who are at as great, or greater, risk of being murdered but who are not allowed to carry handguns.
There is a very important way that I am privileged and that a lot of readers are privileged: we have U.S. citizenship. Now I had to work harder to get my citizenship than the vast majority of Americans. But still, they and I are privileged. Although we can get stopped at the border, once we answer some questions, we are free to enter the United States. Most of the people in the world are not free to enter the United States and look for a job. My U.S. citizenship is probably my most important privilege.
Reading through the above, I realize that there is a sense in which my holding property in coastal California is a privilege in the Hayekian sense. My wife and I bought a small house in 1986. Because of increasing restrictions on building, it has appreciated in real terms quite a lot. So we got something that other people starting out today are not as easily able to get–because government has made it harder for them than it made it for us.
READER COMMENTS
Steve Brecher
May 22 2022 at 6:34pm
Typos alert: “had to work harder to [sic] my citizenship that [sic] the vast majority”
(Please feel free not to post this “comment.”)
David Henderson
May 22 2022 at 8:19pm
Yikes! And I read it over twice before posting. Thanks, Steve.
Philo
May 22 2022 at 11:37pm
I wonder about your definition. It makes many “civil rights” privileges, since they are withheld from foreigners. It makes the right not to be killed or imprisoned a privilege, since it is withheld from some convicted criminals. Perhaps you should say that a privilege is a freedom that is wrongly withheld from others. Maybe that still leaves many “civil rights” as privileges; but, on the other hand, maybe the nation-state is a legitimate institution, and these rights are properly withheld from foreigners. As for non-imprisonment, one might say that conviction in court justifies imprisonment, even if the individual is in fact innocent.
Phil H
May 22 2022 at 11:54pm
I certainly think that it’s right to say that a privilege is an advantage that someone else gave you, and that advantages granted by a government are a classic example of privilege. And yes, money or property that you earned for yourself is not a privilege (in this sense).
But there are privileges that are not granted by the government. Most obviously, the privileges granted to you by your parents, which are also unearned (by you). You can also be privileged by non-government organisations (say, Google happens to choose your city as a test bed for providing high-speed Wi-Fi). You can be privileged by social conventions (e.g. good-looking people, who famously get more places in universities and orchestras than their relevant performance might suggest).
This sense of privilege is connected to, but not completely the same as the sense used in arguments, as in the previous post. When used as part of an argument, privilege means that a person has been privileged in some relevant ways (often by a combination of governmental, parental, and social blessings), and as a result is ignorant of some specific, relevant knowledge.
Jon Murphy
May 23 2022 at 10:28am
I don’t think your discussion of “non-government” privileges undermines Hayek’s point. Indeed, I think it strengthens it: some things are simply choices made under scarcity. Your Google example isn’t a privilege. A boon, yes, but not a privilege. Google just chose that particular town for a test run. Any town could have gotten it (as we see in real life when towns compete). To expand the definition of privilege to include any choice (as you suggest) would render the world so broad as to be moot.
(The same logic applies with the handsome example. The fact that there are many non-handsome folks in top programs suggests it is not a privilege.)
Privilege, by definition, grants a particular right. Handsome people do not have a right to top institutions. The town does not have a right to Google using them as a test.
Jens
May 23 2022 at 3:05pm
The word “privilege” is no longer used only in this narrow sense of an enforceable subjective right.
Everyday language has broader uses. Wikipedia needs disembiguation pages. There is sociological literature that greatly expands the term. Even my search engine, with reference to an academically euphonious English name, suggests to me a definition in which the words “special right” and “advantage” are on equal footing. Reference to a narrow definition in a particular dictionary cannot erase these established usages.
I remember reading somewhere once a comment of yours that language is an emergent order.
Jon Murphy
May 25 2022 at 3:32pm
Language is indeed an emergent order. Which is all the more reason to treat words as though they have meaning.
JFA
May 23 2022 at 10:52am
So what would be the differentiating factor between “privilege” and “advantage”? Is privilege just an unearned advantage? If that’s the case, given how much we are influenced by our social milieu and family structure and genetics, then “advantage” vs. “privilege” seems like a distinction without a difference. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because life is complicated, but then to say someone is “privileged” loses its analytic utility as there are many “privileges” that people have. Of course, given the current usage, saying someone is “privileged” is more of a rhetorical device to invalidate what that person is saying.
Phil H
May 23 2022 at 1:46pm
Yeah… I mean, words mean lots of different things in different contexts. Trying to nail down a single “correct” meaning is a mug’s game. It’s much more important simply to understand what the other person is trying to say in any context.
I think most uses of the word privilege do refer to a kind of advantage. Privilege sometimes has negative connotations, and particularly so in the current, politicised usage, and those connotations stem from, I think, ideas about experience, learning, and knowledge.
If you earn an advantage yourself, then it’s in some way fair, and it also means that you’ve picked up experience and knowledge along the way. So if we are competing in business, and started with the same, but today you are more successful than me, then you now have an advantage, but that advantage is earned, and along the way you’ve learned everything I know and more. So I think that wouldn’t generally be called privilege. It doesn’t fit the current ignorance-based model of what privilege means.
But Donald Trump appears to believe that he is a highly skilled business operator; many others disagree, and think that he is in fact not very talented, but is rich because he began with a lot. If the second group is correct, Trump is ignorant of something important (what it means to be a skillful businessman).
So if you want a distinction between advantage and privilege, I think that’s it: a privilege is a kind of advantage that is provided by someone/something external, so you didn’t have to get it for yourself, *and* as a result, you’re now stuck in a Dunning-Kruger type ignorance, where you believe that you have experience, but in fact are ignorant.
But individual usage will always vary.
JFA
May 23 2022 at 4:43pm
Thanks. Also, “It’s much more important simply to understand what the other person is trying to say in any context.” I wish there was more of this. Good comment.
Vivian Darkbloom
May 23 2022 at 4:56am
“But to call private property as such, which all can acquire under the same rules, a privilege, because only some succeed in acquiring it, is depriving the word “privilege” of its meaning.”
As I think Phil H is suggesting,,iIsn’t he rather skirting around the issue of gifted and inherited property? To say that one can acquire gifts and bequests “under the same rules” evades one of the most difficult questions surrounding “privilege”. I’m restricting my comment to “private property”, but there are obviously other types of “inheritance”.
On the other hand, Hayek did say this:
“I ought at once to add that inheritance taxes could, of course, be made an instrument toward greater social mobility and greater dispersion of property and, consequently, may have to be regarded as important tools of a truly liberal policy which ought not to stand condemned by the abuse which has been made of it.”
That, despite some apparent reservations of the inefficiencies of such a tax as applied in his time in the UK.
Jon Murphy
May 23 2022 at 10:22am
I do not see how inheritance and gifted property undermines Hayek’s point.
Vivian Darkbloom
May 23 2022 at 12:18pm
Despite my formidable powers I am afraid that I cannot restore sight to the blind!
Jon Murphy
May 23 2022 at 12:37pm
Ok? That doesn’t make your point clearer.
Jose Pablo
May 23 2022 at 5:40pm
Defining “property” as “property that will be expropriated by the State at the end of your life” changes significantly the definition (and the value) of property.
It certainly would make “property” less valuable to a bunch of potential buyers, but it does not affect in any way Hayek’s point related to “not restricted access to property FOR SALE”.
If access to property “not for sale” is not restricted then, the whole concept of property loses its meaning.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 23 2022 at 7:01am
This misses a lot of what is meant by privilege in common discourse. I remember one afternoon when out canvassing in Virginia walking up from the street quite a ways to a large expensive house and thinking, I could do this without anyone being concerned that I was going to break and enter whereas if I were young and Black they might very well do so. My “white privilege.”
Zeke5123
May 23 2022 at 10:56pm
So your example of privilege is compared to a figment of your imagination you were able to do XYZ.
I too am privileged as I can do many things figments of my imagination cannot do. Though likewise I am lacking as there are many figments of my imagination who can do more.
JFA
May 24 2022 at 6:43am
Interesting that you say that because I met a few young, black (even male) people canvassing last fall in Virginia around some very expensive homes. Additionally, people in my neighborhood regular call the cops on people knocking on doors (no matter the person’s race), even a couple of Mormon missionaries (white, if you’re asking) are not immune to this.
This is not to deny that people with darker skin sometimes face discrimination of one type or another, but the idea that this is the cause of all the disparities (in incarceration rates, income, education) is overstated.
Michael Rulle
May 23 2022 at 11:48am
This essay and discussion reminds me of the concept of fitting a square peg into a round hole.
The word “privilege” has a new meaning—that is political in nature—invented by people who believe that whites have unfair advantages over blacks (I am not saying that is true or not true—-just giving the recent “etymology” of the term “privilege”).
So we now take a word that has a specific meaning today, and try to apply it to anything we can randomly think of. If this interests people go right ahead. But if you really like this stuff, I suggest reading Bertrand Russell or Wittgenstein——and dozens of others including Aristotle.
Monte
May 23 2022 at 1:51pm
Privilege, as some here have observed, has recently become much more nuanced in its meaning. Jordan Peterson has spoken at length about ” white privilege”, which, I believe, is his main point of reference. Privilege in the Hayekian sense provides us with a more concrete example of the detrimental effects of government intervention.
Matthew Mitchell of George Mason University wrote an excellent paper, The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism, and one I think Dr. Henderson would align himself with without reservation.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130566https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130566,
Monte
May 23 2022 at 1:52pm
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130566
Jose Pablo
May 23 2022 at 5:20pm
Since the rights of the owner over any kind of property (coastal or not) are defined and protected by the government, does not make this any property a privilege by Hayek’s definition?
If “property” (as in “having special and exclusive rights over an asset”) can only exists under a government that defines and enforces those “exclusive rights”, then every property is a “privilege” by that definition.
[More asking for help for not having this opinion than expressing one]
Jon Murphy
May 24 2022 at 7:10am
I think the key here is the phrase: “which all can acquire under the same rules.”
Property does grant a certain degree of exclusivity, but that right is obtainable by anyone willing to outbid all others. Everyone is open to the possibility, not just certain groups. People are limited in their ability to acquire property by the means at their disposal, not government fiat.
Jens
May 24 2022 at 8:14am
People are limited in their ability to acquire property, not least by their property. (And conversely, property is an important ingredient for acquiring more property). It is precisely this fact that is obscured by the overemphasis or sole focus on the characteristic of “which all can acquire under the same rules.” It is a self-reinforcing advantage that is not limited quantitatively by itself. One needs completely authoritarian political systems to have similar legal privileges.
Jon Murphy
May 24 2022 at 12:31pm
Not at all. Privilege, by definition, deals with equality (or lack thereof) of rules, not outcomes. Equality under the law does not mean equal outcomes under the law.
The true confusion comes from confusion of rules and outcomes, not ability.
Jose Pablo
May 24 2022 at 4:13pm
Thank you, Jon!
I think that’s the main source of “confusion”: a large number of people tend to define “privilege” as “having different means at your disposal”. Once you define “privilege” as such:
a) it is everywhere: you can be “privileged” by your genetic lottery: beauty, intelligence, work ethics … by your good luck, by your family connections, by your (financial) inheritance, by the country you were born in, by the time of your access to property
b) to eradicate this “privilege” is a) impossible and b) would, very likely, made everybody worse off (there are multiple examples of that) … but it is a “temptation” nevertheless, and one that “statist” love to indulge in it.
The legal and regulatory equality you mentioned (following Hayek’s definition) is the absence of “privilege”, but having a government powerful enough to enforce property rights but not powerful enough to “create privilege” and, at the same time, restrained enough to not give a shot to try to “impose equality of outcomes” (to some degree) seems to be a very difficult treat.
Jens
May 24 2022 at 2:57am
One shouldn’t get too hung up on how other people use certain words. But I will use privilege in this commentary as Hayek/Henderson define and use it (or I will try to).
From the point of view of intersectionality, it is relatively easy to see the accumulation of privilege(s) as a problem. But on the other hand, privilege is often legally formulated in such a way that it cannot be readily combined. Privilege under democratic control does not scale as easily as property under total acquisitiveness. One is not a child and an adult at the same time. There are exceptions and – as I said – they can and should also be problematized.
On the other hand, accumulation of wealth and the qualitative changes that can accompany it (it makes a difference whether one owns a toothbrush or a factory for toothbrushes) is very difficult to problematize from the sole point of view of general acquisitiveness. In fact, one might wonder whether the main benefit of overemphasizing this point of view lies in preventing problematizability.
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