Science & Tech Quote by Friedrich August von Hayek

Hayek is taking aim at a very modern temptation: confusing science as a disciplined method for investigating the world with “Science” as an all-purpose warrant for running it. The sentence is built like a warning label. It grants science its authority, then quietly narrows the jurisdiction. What’s being smuggled in is his larger claim that the most important facts in social life are scattered, tacit, and situation-bound - the kind of knowledge that doesn’t sit neatly in a spreadsheet or a five-year plan. When governments (or technocratic institutions) promise “deliberate control according to scientific principles,” Hayek hears an overconfident leap from “we can measure some things” to “we can steer everything.”

The subtext is political: centralized planning sells itself as rational and humane, but it can end up coercive because it must force messy human behavior to match the model. “Deplorable effects” reads restrained, almost legalistic, which is part of the rhetoric; Hayek doesn’t need melodrama because he’s implying a slide from benevolent administration to authoritarian enforcement. If the plan fails - and it will, because the plan can’t access local knowledge fast enough - officials will blame noncompliance, not the plan.

Contextually, this is Hayek writing in the shadow of 20th-century planning states and the prestige of scientific management: from wartime mobilization to Soviet-style central planning to the Western faith in expert-driven bureaucracy. The line still lands today because it needles a persistent cultural reflex: treating complex moral and democratic questions as if they were engineering problems, and calling dissent “anti-science” instead of admitting the limits of what method can legitimately command.