H

Hawks and Doves

Hawks, and their opposites, doves, came into prominence in the USA during
theVietnam War. Hawks were those who favoured tough military activities
and a generally forceful solution to problems. Doves were those who took a
gentle, conciliatory or pacifistic stance on any issue. Hawks, for example,
would be in favour of President Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1971, and
might oppose arms-control negotiations unless sure that the USA would gain
an advantage. Since then the word ‘hawk’ has expanded its range to refer to any
tough approach to almost any problem. One might be, or be seen as, hawkish,
if one supported Israel against thePLO, but, to take another example, the
stringent regulation of picket lines in industrial disputes could be hawkish.
Although it often has overtones of conservative or right-wing political views,
the emphasis is more on the use of force and coercion rather than diplomacy
and negotiation. Thus a left-wing pressure group might have its hawks and
doves, in terms of preparedness to participate in demonstrations or street
confrontations with authority. Although the terminology was notably absent
in the USA during the often fierce debates as to whether or not to go to war
over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it gained renewed currency with regard to the
Middle East peace process in the 1990s and received some use from commen-
tators on the USA’s ’war on terrorism’ launched in the aftermath of the atrocity
perpetrated on the USA in September 2001.

Hayek

Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), though born and educated in Vienna,
spent most of his career in London (he became a naturalized British citizen in
1936) and Chicago. In Chicago he was one of the founders of theChicago
School. Primarily an economic theorist, his work was highly influenced by his
libertarianapproach towards politics, especially in his first major work,The
Road to Serfdom(1944), in which he attacked proposals for post-war economic
planning as being akin tototalitarianism. His attitude to planning, and
indeed most of his economic theory, derived from a more general position
he held on the question of social science. He scorned the social sciences,