Coercion

In The Constitution of Liberty, F A. Hayek defines coercion as occurring “when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his own but for the other's purpose.” Thus, coercion must be distinguished from other potential threats to freedom. First, coercion involves intervention in the form of human agency. Although it is a fact of human nature that we are not free to do certain things, these limitations cannot be understood as coercive because they are not the products of human choice or human institutions. Second, we cannot understand the concept of coercion as applying to all instances in which the agency of others comes to bear on our choices. For example, it would seem to stretch the term beyond its ...