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Socialism appealed to the idealism of intellectuals, yet it brought the most hideous tyrannies. Just from the standpoint of human liberty, socialism was a catastrophe everywhere.
More than anyone else, Friedrich Hayek
explained why central planning undermines human liberty and, if
pursued far enough, will lead to tyranny.
He told why thugs end up dominating socialist regimes.
He told how the essential institutions of a free society develop
without central planning.
He became more radical as he grew older.
For instance, this passage from The
Political Order of a Free People
(1979), about abolishing government monopolies: "any governmental
agency allowed to use its taxing power to finance such services ought to
be required to refund any taxes raised for these purposes to all those who
prefer to get the services in some other way.
This applies without exception to all those services of which today
government possesses or aspires to a legal monopoly, with the only
exception of maintaining and enforcing the law and maintaining for this
purpose (including defense against external enemies) an armed force, i.e.
all those from education to transport and communications, including post,
telegraph, telephone and broadcasting services, all the so-called 'public'
utilities', the various 'social' insurances and, above all, the issue of
money."
Hayek was an extraordinarily learned man.
His knowledge and insights spanned not only economics, for which he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, but also philosophy, history and even
psychology. Nobel Laureate
Ronald H. Coase hailed Hayek's "high standards of scholarship"
and "the power of his ideas."
Hayek transcended nationality like few others in the 20th century.
Stephen Kresge, Editor of The
Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, which the University of Chicago Press
is publishing in 22 volumes, likens Hayek's global reputation to that of
the physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein.
Today Hayek is revered by intellectuals throughout Europe, Asia and
the Americas.
"Over the years," Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman
remarked, ?I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free
society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist
intellectual environment. No
name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment and
understanding than Friedrich Hayek's...I, like the others, owe him a great
debt...his powerful mind...his lucid and always principled exposition have
helped to broaden and deepen my understanding of the meaning and the
requisites of a free society."
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote that
"the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist
state which I read at this time [the late 1940s], and to which I have
returned so often since [is] F.A. Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom." Harvard
University philosopher Robert Nozick remembered, "While in graduate
school I encountered the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises,
which shook me out of my then socialist beliefs."
Hoover Institution scholar, prolific author and popular columnist
Thomas Sowell acknowledged that Hayek influenced his book
Knowledge and Decisions (1980), citing Hayek's "deeply
penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and
clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood."
Internationally-acclaimed philosopher Karl R. Popper confided to Hayek,
"I think that I have learned more from you than from any other living
thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski...but not even excepting [Bertrand]
Russell." University of
Chicago Law School distinguished professor Richard Epstein: "I have
been heavily influenced by the work of Friedrich Hayek."
Nobel Laureate John Hicks saluted Hayek who "left a deep mark
on my thinking." Respected
business thinker Peter F. Drucker called him "our time's preeminent
social philosopher."
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Yergin reported in The Commanding Heights (1998), written with Joseph Stanislaw:
"Concepts and notions that were decidedly outside the mainstream have
now moved, with some rapidity, to center stage and are reshaping economies
in every corner of the world...Hayek, the fierce advocate of free
markets...is preeminent." Nobel
Laureate Herbert Simon: "No one has characterized market mechanisms
better than Friedrich von Hayek."
He was a thin, distinguished-looking man who stood an inch or two
over six feet. He had a small
gray moustache and, in his later years, neatly-combed white hair. He spoke in a slow, thoughtful manner with a thick Austrian
accent. He was an ardent
hiker, spending as many summers as he could in the Alps. "I was a guideless mountaineer," he recalled,
"finding my way on difficult, but not exceedingly difficult, terrain
-- combinations of ice and rock."
He loved to collect rare books on economics, philosophy and
history, and he assembled three formidable libraries during his life.
While some students found his lectures hard to follow, others were
enthralled. Majorie
Grice-Hutchinson, for instance, who saw him at the London School of
Economics during the 1940s: "He generally strolled up and down while
lecturing, and he talked in a conversational tone, without emphasis or
pedantry. His excellent
memory and wide humanistic background allowed him to present attractively
the ideas of philosophers, jurists, politicians and businessmen of many
countries and every period, and he had no difficulty in holding the
attention of the large numbers of students who always filled his
classroom."
Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, London,
observed that Hayek "takes an obvious delight in hearing a new point
of view, and of quickly and delightedly exploring its implications along
many lines of thought with an agility and economy which is the envy of
many younger men."
"His sense of humour was delightfully impish," recalled
David O'Mahony, a friend, "as, for example, when he used to turn off
his hearing aid with obvious relish rather than endure a pompous speaker. He was always courteous and polite."
A 1983 International Herald
Tribune profile reported, "He is everything you want an
83-year-old Viennese conservative economist to be.
Tall and rumpled. A pearl stickpin in his tie.
A watch chain across his vest, even though he wears a digital
wristwatch."
Although Hayek defended controversial views for decades, he usually
managed to maintain the goodwill of his adversaries.
He developed a warm relationship with the English economist John
Maynard Keynes whose advocacy of government intervention in the economy he
emphatically disagreed with. As
a gesture of good will, Hayek dedicated his best-known work,
The Road to Serfdom (1944), to "socialists of all parties."
Nobel Laureate George J. Stigler observed that "Hayek has
always been both a gentleman and a scholar."
Friedrich August von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899 in Vienna which
was the political and intellectual capital of Austria-Hungary, the
multi-national Habsburg empire which controlled much of Central Europe.
Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar, editors of Hayek on Hayek, noted that "He was born into the class which
was largely responsible for the maintenance of the Austro-Hungarian empire
and which did not survive its collapse."
His father, Dr. August von Hayek, was a botany professor at the
University of Vienna. His
mother, Felicitas Juraschek, called him Fritz.
He had two younger brothers, Erich and Heinz.
As a child, he collected specimens of minerals, insects and
flowers. Then he became
fascinated with fossils and evolution.
Gradually, as a teenager, he focused on human psychology and
society. According to
biographer Alan Ebenstein, he also enjoyed photography, bicycling, skiing,
mountaineering and the theatre -- early on, he had wide-ranging interests.
Hayek was drafted into the Austrian army in March 1917 and spent
about a year on the Italian front. He
contracted malaria but passed time reading about the Austrian School of
economics which maintained that market prices are driven by the subjective
valuations of customers. "I
really got hooked," he recalled, "when I found [Carl] Menger's
Grundsatze [Principles of
Economics] such a fascinating book, so satisfying."
Hayek was especially interested in Menger's "conception of the
spontaneous generation of institutions."
After his return in 1918, he enrolled at the University of Vienna.
Things were so bad that in 1919 the university closed because it
didn't have enough fuel to heat the rooms.
In an effort to shake the malaria, he went to Switzerland, then
Norway.
At the university, Hayek recalled, "you were not expected to
confine yourself to your own subject.
I must have spent as much time in lectures on other fields, with
other people, as I did in economics.
Nominally I was studying law, but still it left me time, or I took
time. I spent my day at the university from morning till evening,
but shifting from subject to subject, readily hearing lectures about art
history or ancient Greek plays or something else."
Hayek earned degrees in law (1921) and political science (1923).
In October 1921, with a letter of introduction from his economics
professor Friedrich von Wieser, Hayek met Ludwig von Mises who was a
financial advisor at the Chamber of Commerce.
Mises' 1912 book The Theory
of Money and Credit had made him a respected economist, and in 1920 he
wrote a controversial article which declared that government control of
the means of production -- socialism -- guarantees inefficiency and waste. Mises found Hayek a job at the
Abrechnungsamt [Office of Accounts] which helped clear up debts
suspended during the war. This
was amidst Austria's postwar inflation; Hayek's initial salary was 5,000
old kronen per month; in an effort to maintain purchasing power, the
salary was tripled within 30 days, and nine months later the salary was
about a million old kronen per month.
Mises' 1922 book Die
Gemeinwirtschaft [Socialism]
had a major impact on Hayek's thinking.
"It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of
the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War
I," Hayek recalled. "I
know, for I was one of them.
"We felt that the civilization in which we had grown up had
collapsed. We were determined
to build a better world, and it was this desire to reconstruct society
that led many of us to the study of economics.
Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more
just world. And then came
this book. Our hopes were
dashed. Socialism told us that
we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction."
Mises helped Hayek's career many ways.
"When, after only a year and a half," Hayek remembered,
"it was he [Mises] who smoothed my way not only by getting for me the
necessary leave of absence but on financial conditions so favorable as to
make my plan practicable." Hayek
was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant, offered to help European
intellectuals broaden their horizons by visiting the United States. From March 1923 to June 1924, based at New York University,
he attended classes at Columbia University and the New School.
He broke into print in English, a letter published in the August
19, 1923 New York Times, about
the German financial situation. He also spent some time at New York Public Library, reading
news accounts of World War I, and he was astonished that they differed so
dramatically from what he had read back in Austria. This led to his profound skepticism about government.
Upon his return, Hayek began attending Mises' twice-monthly private
seminar on free market economics. It
met in Mises' office at the Chamber of Commerce.
"During the middle twenties," Hayek noted, "this was
much the most important center of economic discussion at Vienna..."
In January 1927, Hayek, with Mises' help, established
Osterreichische Konjunkturforschunginstitut [Austrian Institute for
Business Cycle Research], perhaps inspired by Columbia University
professor Wesley Mitchell whose lectures Hayek had attended while visiting
the United States. Mitchell
gathered statistics on business cycles.
In 1929, Hayek became a
Privatdozent at the University of Vienna, which meant he could teach
students there -- without being paid.
Hayek had fallen in love with his cousin Helene Bitterlich, but he
never got around to asking her to marry him before he left for America,
and when he came back 14 months later, she was with another man whom she
subsequently married. At the
Abrechnungsamt, Hayek met Berta Maria von Fritsch, known as Hella.
They got married in the summer of 1926.
They had two children, Christina Maria Felicitas (1929) and Lorenz
(Laurence) Josef Heinrich (1934).
Hayek wrote an essay, "The Paradox of Saving," which
critiqued the prevalent view that depressions occurred because people
saved too much, and this essay impressed Lionel Robbins who was head of
the economics department at the London School of Economics.
He read German and knew the Austrian economics literature, although
he embraced the approach of Cambridge University's Alfred Marshall. Robbins' book The
Nature and Significance of Economic Science, as Hayek put it, was
"a brilliant exposition of ideas which were largely familiar to the
Austrian tradition." Robbins
arranged to reprint the work of a number of economists in the classical
tradition. He assigned Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, by the University of Chicago's Frank
H. Knight. He encouraged the
translation of Ludwig von Mises'
Socialism (London, 1934).
Robbins invited Hayek to deliver four lectures there in February
1931. He surveyed the history
of monetary theory and introduced English-speaking economists to the
Austrian view that economic fluctuations were substantially driven by
monetary fluctuations, and that depression was the inevitable consequence
of prior inflation. The
lectures caused quite a stir, and they were published as the book
Prices and Production (September 1931).
Robbins wanted to appoint a professor who was competent in economic
theory and familiar with thinking outside England, and Hayek satisfied
those qualifications. He was
offered the post of visiting professor for 1931-1932.
Then he was appointed Tooke Professor of Economic Science and
Statistics. Hayek became a
naturalized British citizen and remained at the London School of Economics
until 1949.
Why was Hayek, rather than Mises, invited to London? According to Hayek, because he had become reasonably fluent
in English during his 14-month visit to America and because he had written
a critique of the emerging view -- soon to be promoted by the English
economist John Maynard Keynes -- that in a market economy people sometimes
save too much and spend too little, bringing on a depression. In addition, he had started a book on the history of monetary
theory, and so he was knowledgeable about the history of English monetary
theory, which impressed the professors in London.
Hayek's seminars drew friends and foes alike.
Harvard University socialist economics professor John Kenneth
Galbraith remarked that "The urge to participate (and correct Hayek)
was ruthlessly competitive." Ronald
H. Coase remembered, "At LSE in the 1930s, economists were very
receptive to new ideas. For
this, a good deal of credit must go to Hayek...encouraging rigour in our
thinking and in enlarging our vision."
Hayek had Austrian-born philosopher Karl R. Popper speak at a
seminar, and Popper expanded it into his most controversial book,
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a passionate attack on Plato
and Karl Marx; Hayek helped find a publisher and persuaded colleagues at
the London School of Economics to give Popper a teaching position --
rescuing him from a hostile academic environment in New Zealand.
Through the ups and downs of Hayek's life, Popper remained his
closest friend.
Soon Hayek found himself a rival of Cambridge-based John Maynard
Keynes whom he had met on a previous visit to London, perhaps in 1929. Three years earlier, in an Oxford lecture, "The End of
Laissez Faire," Keynes had used some reassuring language ("the
important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are
doing already"), but he embraced potentially far-reaching government
intervention. For instance,
he asserted that government should determine "the scale on which it
is desirable that the community as a whole should save, the scale on which
these savings should go abroad in the form of foreign investments, and
whether the present organization of the investment market distributes
savings along the most nationally productive channels."
Keynes, as editor of the
Economic Journal, authorized his colleague Piero Sraffa to launch an
attack on Hayek's book Prices and
Production. Hayek wrote
an extended attack on Keynes'
Treatise on Money in the journal
Economica (August 1931, February 1932) which was edited by Robbins.
Keynes shrugged off the criticism, saying he had abandoned the
views expressed in the book. This
made Hayek wonder why he bothered to refute the book.
Keynes counter-attacked Hayek's
Prices and Production: "The book, as it stands, seems to be to be
one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read...an extraordinary
example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up
in Bedlam." Hayek and
Keynes exchanged at least 11 letters debating monetary issues, and Hayek
continued the debate in 10 articles.
Throughout the 1930s, Hayek devoted most of his energies to
exploring the theories of money and capital, and initially his reputation
was high. His 1929 book Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie (1929) appeared in English as
Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933).
He delivered five lectures at the
Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, where
his former professor Ludwig von Mises had gone after Hitler came to power,
and these lectures were published as
Monetary Nationalism and International Stability (1937).
Hayek's Profits, Interest and
Investment came out in 1939. The Pure Theory of Capital, in 1940.
But soon all this work, noted Lancaster University (U.K.) scholar
G.R. Steele, "was misunderstood, attacked, misrepresented and finally
neglected." Partially
because he needed money and partially because he was moving on, Hayek sold
his library on the history of money to a Swiss bank.
Hayek's theory, the Austrian theory of the great depression, struck
people as bad news ? politically unacceptable.
It maintained that once government began inflating the money
supply, a depression became unavoidable.
A depression just had to work itself out.
When wages and prices found their new lower level, and unsound
businesses were liquidated, then the recovery process could begin.
Government could do nothing but stay out of the way.
Then came Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) which
promised good news. He
claimed that a free market economy sometimes failed to generate high
enough levels of consumption, but this could be remedied by increasing
government expenditures -- "pump priming," the policy was
called.
According to Hayek, he never mounted a major attack on the General Theory because he was so turned off by Keynes
macro-economic approach which aimed to manipulate an economy through
aggregates like investment and consumption.
This was utterly alien to Hayek's micro‑economic view that an
economy could be understood only through the action of individual people.
More likely, Hayek didn't expect Keynesian doctrines would be as
seductive as they were, and he didn't see how to deliver a decisive blow
against them. Keynes
swept the economics profession. Evan
Durbin, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and others at the London
School of Economics -- eventually Robbins himself -- succumbed to
Keynesian doctrines. Government
officials loved Keynes since he told them to do what they wanted to do
anyway, which was spend money.
As Keynes gained influence, in 1936, Hayek delivered a talk before
the London Economic Club, and
Economica reprinted it the following year.
Called "Economics and Knowledge," it was a sophisticated
critique of schemes for a government-run economy.
"How," Hayek asked, "can the combination of
fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results
which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a
knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can
possess?" This essay
didn't have any apparent effect on the Keynesian Revolution, but Hayek
subsequently developed it into a powerful attack against central planning,
and he viewed it as his most original insight.
Keynes' stunning success banished Hayek to the minor leagues as far
as the economics profession was concerned, but the two men became good
friends. "Even to those
who knew Keynes but could never bring themselves to accept his monetary
theories, and at times thought his pronouncements somewhat
irresponsible," Hayek wrote, "the personal impression of the man
remains unforgettable. And especially to my generation (he was my senior by 16
years) he was a hero long before he achieved real fame as an economic
theorist. Was he not the man
who had had the courage to protest against the economic clauses of the
peace treaties of 1919? We
admired the brilliantly written books for their outspokenness and
independence of thought, even though some older and more acute thinkers at
once pointed out certain theoretical flaws in his argument.
And those of us who had the good fortune to meet him personally
soon experienced the magnetism of the brilliant conversationalist with his
wide range of interests and bewitching voice."
Hayek did know how to answer the case for central economic planning
which had become fashionable around the world, a consequence of the
apparent success of Soviet central planning.
He proceeded with vigor. "For
more than a half century," he wrote, "the belief that deliberate
regulation of all social affairs must necessarily be more successful than
the apparent haphazard interplay of independent individuals has
continuously gained ground until to-day there is hardly a political group
anywhere in the world which does not want central direction of most human
activities in the service of one aim or another."
Hayek realized that decisive critiques of central planning, which
had been published in German, were virtually unknown among
English-speaking readers. Accordingly,
he gathered English translations of essays by Ludwig von Mises, N. G.
Pierson and Georg Halm into a book,
Collectivist Economic Planning (1935).
The essays emphasized that without the signals provided by free
market prices, it's impossible to determine what consumers want and how to
organize production most effectively -- chronic inefficiency means chronic
poverty. The most important
essay was the one by Mises, written in 1920 while Lenin was still
struggling for mastery of Russia.
This launched the "economic calculation" debate about
whether a socialist economy could be made to deliver decent living
standards. Mises was
ridiculed because he had somewhat overstated his case ("in a
socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible,
there can be -- in our sense of the term -- no economy whatsoever").
Socialist economists dismissed him, claiming central planning could
mimic market prices without actually being tainted by a market.
None of these pipedreams were ever tried out, but it didn't seem to
matter, because wasn't the Soviet Union a wondrous showcase for socialism?
George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Harold Laski and other
intellectuals visited Moscow and testified to the blessings of life under
Joseph Stalin.
Meanwhile, Hayek found himself "differing very strongly in the
interpretation of the political events in Germany from the view then
generally current in England and particularly held by the majority of my
socialistically inclined colleagues in the other departments of the London
School of Economics. They all
tended to interpret the National Socialist regime of Hitler as a sort of
capitalist reaction to the socialist tendencies of the immediate postwar
period, while I saw it rather as the victory of a sort of
lower-middle-class socialism, certainly thoroughly anti-capitalistic and
anti-liberal but taking over all the methods of socialism."
The May 1940 issue of
Economica published Hayek's article "Socialist Calculation: The
Competitive 'Solution,'" in which he addressed the political
consequences of government control over the economy.
He wrote, "This is of course precisely the authoritarian
doctrine preached by Nazis and Fascists...in a planned system all economic
questions become political questions, because it is no longer a question
of reconciling as far as possible individual views and desires, but one of
imposing a single scale of values, the 'social goal' of which socialists
ever since the time of Saint-Simon have been dreaming."
He added: "an examination in greater detail would clearly
exceed the scope of an article...an adequate treatment would require
another book..."
Hayek began his most famous attack on central planning in September
1940. It was a book that took
almost four years to write. After
the Germans started bombing London, the London School of Economics moved
from their quarters on Houghton Street to Peterhouse College, Cambridge,
and Keynes found rooms for Hayek at King's College, Cambridge.
He lived there about a year. "Hayek's
son," reported biographer Ebenstein, "remembers that the
rooms...were very comfortable but cold...Ultimately, he succeeded in
finding a semi-converted barn in Cambridge, in which he and his family
lived until 1945. This former
barn where Hayek did his work was approximately two stories high and was
subsequently used as an auditorium for amateur dramatics."
Hayek remarked that he worked midst "the continuous
disruptions of falling bombs."
English intellectuals -- promoters of central planning -- claimed
socialism was the opposite of Nazism, but Hayek insisted that socialism,
communism and Nazism were part of the same collectivist trend which had
gathered momentum during the 20th century.
Hayek predicted that if the trend went far enough in England, the
breeding ground of liberty in the modern world, it would bring
totalitarianism.
He noted there is general agreement about a few functions of
government -- such as punishing violent criminals.
But as government takes on more functions, it necessarily goes
beyond the realm of general agreement and infringes ever more on personal
liberty. Central economic
planning, Hayek explained, inevitably means massive assaults on liberty by
giving bureaucrats the power to decide which kinds of cars, pens, apples
and everything else should be produced -- and who should get them.
He observed that power tends to be corrupted because it naturally
attracts people who enjoy taxing, imprisoning and even executing others.
Hence, "the worst get on top." Hayek warned that central planning is on a collision course
with liberty and democracy.
Called The Road to Serfdom
-- after Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase "the road to servitude"
-- the book was published in England on March 10, 1944.
Only about 2,000 copies were printed initially, but the book
provoked controversy, and the press run sold out.
Newspaper commentators and Members of Parliament began talking
about the book.
To secure an American publisher, Hayek sought help from fellow
Austrian economist Fritz Machlup, then working in Washington, D.C. at the
federal government's Office of Alien Property Custodian.
Machlup submitted English page proofs to three American publishers,
and none were interested. One
publisher rated the book "unfit for publication." Then Machlup showed the page proofs to Aaron Director, Milton
Friedman's brother-in-law. Presumably
it was Director who sent the page proofs to Frank Knight, the most
influential thinker in the University of Chicago's economics department.
Knight, in turn, seems to have urged the book on William Couch,
editor of the University of Chicago Press, and the decision was made to
publish it. There would be an
introduction by John Chamberlain, a respected book reviewer.
But University of Chicago Press editors didn't expect much.
They had only 2,000 copies printed.
Then came libertarian journalist Henry Hazlitt's 1,500-word review
on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, September 24, 1944.
He declared that "Friedrich Hayek has written one of the most
important books of our generation...It is a strange stroke of irony that
the great British liberal tradition, the tradition of Locke and Milton, of
Adam Smith and Hume, of Macaulay and Mill and Morley, of Acton and Dicey,
should find in England its ablest contemporary defender -- not in a native
Englishman but in an Austrian exile."
This dwarfed the impact of Orville Prescott's dour review in the
daily New York Times, September
30th -- Prescott belittled "this sad and angry little book."
The University of Chicago Press ordered another 10,000 copies, and
there were requests for rights to translate the book into German, Spanish
and Dutch.
Reader's Digest
editor-in-chief Dewitt Wallace bought serial rights, and he devoted the
first 20 pages of the April 1945 issue to a condensation of
The Road to Serfdom. At
the time, Reader's Digest had a ciculation around 8,000,000, so the
condensation was what made Hayek a name to reckon with in America.
Moreover, Book-of-the-Month Club, the largest book marketer,
distributed some 600,000 copies of the condensation.
All this stimulated interest in the book, but paper shortages
induced by price controls forced the University of Chicago Press to issue
the book in a smaller format. In
the more than a half-century since the book appeared, it has sold over
80,000 hardcover copies and 175,000 paperback copies in the United States,
plus authorized editions in almost 20 languages and unauthorized editions
in Eastern European languages.
Keynes, of all people, wrote Hayek this enthusiastic letter:
"In my opinion it is a grand book.
We all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so
well what needs so much to be said. You
will not expect me to accept quite all the economic dicta in it.
But morally and philosophically, I find myself in agreement with
virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a
deeply moved agreement."
Socialist author George Orwell: "In the negative part of
Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth.
It cannot be said too often -- at any rate it is not being said
nearly often enough -- that collectivism is not inherently democratic,
but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the
Spanish Inquisitor never dreamed of."
The University of Chicago Press had contemplated a lecture schedule
at five American universities, but the
Reader's Digest splash led to a five week schedule for popular
audiences. "At first it
didn't make any impression on me," Hayek told an interviewer.
"Only on the next morning, when I was picked up at my hotel
[in New York]...I asked, 'What sort of audience do you expect?'
They said, 'The hall holds 3,000 but there's an overflow meeting.'
Dear God, I hadn't an idea what I was going to say.
'How have you announced it?' 'Oh,
we have called it 'The Rule of Law in International Affairs.'
My God, I had never thought about that problem in my life.
So I knew as I sat down on that platform, with all the unfamiliar
paraphrenalia -- at that time it was still dictating machines -- if I
didn't get tremendously excited I would break down.
So the last thing that I remember is that I asked the chairman if
three-quarters of an hour would be enough.
'Oh, no, it must be exactly an hour...you are on the radio."
Hayek was a hit.
During the 1945 parliamentary elections, Winston Churchill took a
campaign theme from Hayek's book. On
June 4th, he broadcast a speech which warned that a Labour Government
wouldn't "allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public
discontent." He warned:
"They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very
humanely directed inthe first instance.
And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as
it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme Party
and the Party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast
bureaucracies of Civil Servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.
And where would the ordinary simple folk -- the common people as
they like to call them in America -- where would they be once this mighty
organism had got them in its grip?"
Churchill added that socialism was "inseparably interwoven
with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State."
Laborite Clement Atlee hooted at Churchill's "Gestapo
speech," saying it was a "second-hand version of the academic
views of an Austrian professor, Friedrich August von Hayek."
Hayek remembered meeting Churchill at a dinner: "I could see
him swilling brandy in great quantities; and by the time I was introduced
to him, he could hardly speak but at once identified me as the author of The Road to Serfdom. He
was stock drunk. He just said
one sentence: " 'You are completely right; but it will never happen
in Britain.' Half an hour
later he made one of the most brilliant speeches I ever heard."
The Labour Party won the election, Atlee became the next Prime
Minister, and he attacked the right of individuals to choose their work.
"Ask yourself," Atlee declared in a March 1947 radio
broadcast, "whether you are doing the kind of work which the nation
needs in view of the shortage of labor.
Your job may bring you in more money but be quite useless to the
community. You may complain
of the shortage of coal or houses...towels and underclothing...but have
you any right to complain if you are content to do some better-paid but
quite useless work?" By
the fall of 1947, the Labor-dominated Parliament enacted peacetime forced
labor. As economist John
Jewkes explained, "no man between the ages of 18 and 50 years and no
woman between the ages of 18 and 40 years could change his or her
occupation at will. Every such change had to be registered at the Employment
Exchange, and the Minister of Labour had the power to direct workers
changing their jobs to the employment he considered best in the national
interest.
"It is extremely significant, and indeed sinister,"
Jewkes continued, "to watch how, by the logic of events, the ardent
planner, still retaining his respect for individual freedom acquired from
his upbringing in another type of society, was driven to hedge, to
temporize, to qualify and finally to capitulate before the inexorable
demands of the Plan." This
was exactly what Hayek warned about.
Fortunately, there was a public outcry against forced labor, and
this contributed to the Labor Party's defeat in the 1950 elections.
Hayek further developed the case against socialism by gathering a
dozen of his essays into Individualism
and Economic Order (1948). "The
peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order," he
wrote, "is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the
circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or
integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and
frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals
possess. The economic problem
of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given'
resources -- if 'given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which
deliberately solves the problem set by these 'data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of
resources, known to any of the members of society, on ends whose relative
importance only these individuals know.
Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilitization of
knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality."
A market, he went on to show, is a discovery process which
continuously gathers knowledge, updates it and relays it to participants.
Meanwhile, in 1947 Hayek called a meeting of scholars concerned
about liberty. "After
the publication of The Road to
Serfdom," Hayek recalled, "I was invited to give many
lectures. During my travels in Europe as well as in the United States,
nearly everywhere I went I met someone who told me that he fully agreed
with me, but that at the same time he felt totally isolated in his views
and had nobody with whom he could even talk about them. This gave me the idea of bringing these people, each of whom
was living in great solitude, together in one place. And by a stroke of luck I was able to raise the money to
accomplish this."
Thirty-six participants from 10 countries gathered at the Hotel du
Parc, Mont Pelerin, near Vevey, Switzerland, April 1st to April
10th, 1947. Among
the 17 from the United States were University of Chicago economist Milton
Friedman, Newsweek columnist
Henry Hazlitt, University of Chicago economist Frank H. Knight, New York
University economist Ludwig von Mises, Foundation for Economic Education
President Leonard E. Read and Brown University economist George J.
Stigler. There was considerable debate about how much government
intervention in the economy would be compatible with a free society -- the
Americans being more radical than the Europeans.
The participants couldn't agree on specific economic policies, but
they did agree to form an ongoing group whose name, in a compromise, would
be the Mont Pelerin Society. Four
of the original members later won Nobel Prizes, and over the years Mont
Pelerin Society members did much to lead the revival of liberty throughout
the world.
The University of Chicago Law Review
(Spring 1949) published Hayek's essay "The Intellectuals and
Socialism" which explored prospects for the future of liberty.
"The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the
success of the socialists," he wrote, "is that it was their
courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals
and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making
possible what only recently seemed utterly remote."
This view became a battle cry, and the essay was reprinted by the
thousands.
Hayek's personal situation made things more difficult in England.
While visiting Austria to see family members who had survived the
war, he learned that his first love Helene Bitterlich had become a widow
and was therefore free to marry him. He and his wife Hella separated in December 1949.
Friends were upset because they loved Hella.
Lionel Robbins, for one, reportedly broke with Hayek over the
separation and subsequent divorce in July 1950.
Soon afterward, Hayek married Helene Bitterlich, and they remained
together.
Biographer Alan Ebenstein remarked that "Publication of The Road to Serfdom was the great event in Hayek's professional and
personal lives. It brought
him general reknown and established him as the most prominent exponent of
classical liberalism. If he
had not written the book, he might never have left England or been able to
seek his divorce. His entire
subsequent life was different because of the work.
It may, indeed, be well argued that -- had he never written The
Road to Serfdom -- he would have ended his days as merely an academic
footnote: a respected, if old-fashioned, economics professor at LSE who
had some battles with Keynes at the beginning of the '30s and wrote a book
on capital that no one understood. This
would slight his contribution in the field of the division of knowledge,
but even here his work has become much more known than it would have been
otherwise, as a result of The Road to Serfdom and later work based on
it."
Hayek had to get away from London, and the most obvious destination
was the United States. But
most members of the University of Chicago economics department didn't seem
to want him. Herman Finer, in
the political science department, wrote a bitter attack on Hayek called The Road to Reaction. Hayek
spent a year teaching at the University of Arkansas, hardly a happy place
for a cosmopolitan scholar.
For several years, Harold W. Luhnow, President of the William
Volker Charities Fund, Kansas City, had urged Hayek to write an American
version of The Road to Serfdom,
and he replied that he might do it if he were at an American university.
Hayek's first choice reportedly was Princeton where Jacob Viner had
gone after being a mainstay in the University of Chicago's economics
department. Viner, who
specialized in international trade and the history of economic thought,
would have been a stimulating companion.
But others at Princeton wanted nothing to do with Hayek, so there
wasn't any offer. Hayek spent
a couple months at Stanford University, but no offer was forthcoming from
there, either. John U. Nef,
Chairman of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought,
invited him to be Professor of Social and Moral Science.
Although the University of Chicago wouldn't pay him a salary,
Luhnow agreed to cover that. Accordingly,
he settled into his new office, Room 506 of the Social Sciences building
on 59th Street. "I was
allowed there to devote myself to almost any subject I cared and to do as
much or as little teaching as I wanted," Hayek reflected.
One of his students, Shirley Robin Letwin, remembered that
"Every week he conducted a seminar of staggering catholicity.
On Wednesdays, after dinner, a large assortment of the wise and
callow, coming from all disciplines and all nations, assembled around a
massive oval oak table in a mock Gothic chamber to talk about topics
proposed by Hayek....philosophy, history, social science, and knowledge
generally...Hayek presided over this remarkable company with a gentle
rectitude that made his seminar an exercise in the liberal virtues...The
general subject was liberalism and no one was in any doubt about Hayek's
convictions..The seminar was a conversation with the living and the dead,
ancient and modern; the only obligation was to enter into the thoughts of
others with fidelity and to accept questions and dissent gracefully."
Hayek recognized that views about history were a major factor
shaping views about current policies.
In particular, escalating regulatory burdens on free markets were
due, in part, to the view that untrammelled capitalism generated
tremendous wealth while it impoverishing millions.
In 1954, Hayek gathered work of economic historians T.S. Ashton and
Louis Hacker, economists W.H. Hutt and Bertrand de Jouvenal into a book,
Capitalism and the Historians. Far
from grinding down the poor, Hayek explained, the 19th century Industrial
Revolution enabled millions to survive.
He wrote, "for the greater part of history, for most men the
possession of the tools for their work was an essential condition for
survival or at least for being able to rear a family.
The number of those who could maintain themselves by working for
others, although they did not themselves possess the necessary equipment,
was limited to a small proportion of the population.
The amount of arable land and of tools handed down from one
generation to the next limited the total number of whom could survive. To be left without them meant in most instances death by
starvation or at least the impossibility of procreation.
There was little incentive and little possibility for one
generation to accumulate the additional tools which would have made
possible the survival of a larger number of the next, so long as the
advantage of employing additional hands was limited mainly to the
instances where the division of the tasks increased the efficiency of the
work of the owner of the tools."
"Economic suffering both became more conspicuous and seemed
less justified, because general wealth was increasing faster than ever
before," Hayek continued. "But
this, of course, does not prove that the people whose fate was beginning
to cause indignation and alarm were worse off than their parents or
grandparents had been. While
there is every evidence that great misery existed, there is none that it
was greater than or even as great as it had been before."
Hayek concluded that "The freedom of economic activity which
in England had proved so favorable to the rapid growth of wealth was
probably in the first instance an almost accidental byproduct of the
limitations which the revolution of the seventeenth century had placed on
the powers of government; and only after its beneficial effects had come
to be widely noticed did the economists later undertake to explain the
connection and to argue for the removal of the remaining barriers to
commercial freedom."
Hayek received a Guggenheim Foundation grant in 1954, enabling him
to pursue research on the English economist John Stuart Mill --
specifically, Mill's travels through Italy and Greece.
Hayek stopped in Cairo where he delivered a series of lectures for
the National Bank of Egypt. He
chose as his subject "The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law." He surveyed the history of efforts to limit government power
by achieving a rule of law, meaning laws that apply to everybody, apply
equally and are predictable so that people know what they must avoid doing
to stay out of trouble. Hayek
discussed the difficulties of applying rule of law principles to
administrative law which has interfered so much with everyday life.
Hayek developed these ideas more fully in
The Constitution of Liberty. His
aim was "that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is
reduced as much as is possible in society."
Like John Milton, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and others, Hayek
began by making a practical case for liberty.
Because there are so many things human beings don't know, he
maintained it's essential that we be free to pursue the truth. He affirmed that "the chief reason why we should be held
wholly responsible for our decisions is that this will direct our
attention to those causes of events that depend on our actions."
He stressed that the most important benefits come from the
unforeseen ways people use their liberty.
He explained that civilization depends on progress, and progress
requires inequality: somebody -- in a free society, rich people -- must
try out and finance the development of new things before they can become
available for ordinary people.
How to protect liberty? Each
individual must have a sphere where he or she can be free without
interference from others, including government -- as long, of course, as
they don't interfere with anybody else.
This means secure private property.
"The recognition of property is clearly the first step in the
delimitation of the private sphere which protects us against
coercion," Hayek wrote. "We
are rarely in a position to carry out a coherent plan of action unless we
are certain of our exclusive control of some material objects..."
Hayek embraced democracy as a mechanism for peaceful political
change, but he cautioned: "The conception that government should be
guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent
of government. The ideal of
democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government
emerges from an independent and spontaneous process.
It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent
of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are
formed."
Hayek went on to summarize a legal framework for liberty. First, laws should be rules rather than commands dictating
specifically what people must do. A
related principle: an individual shouldn't be charged with a crime unless
there was already a law on the books saying that the individual's action
was illegal. "The
rationale for securing to each individual a known range within which he
can decide on his actions is to enable him to make the fullest use of his
knowledge," Hayek noted. Moreover,
laws should be general, applying to government as well as the people. This
won't prevent all bad laws from being passed, but if lawmakers know that
laws apply with full force to them, they'll be less prone to mischief.
Hayek discussed the separation of powers principle articulated by
Montesquieu, that the branch of government making laws should be different
from the branch of government enforcing laws.
Hayek recognized American contributions to liberty: a written
constitution delegating limited powers from the people to government and a
bill of rights to further limit government power.
Ironically, Hayek explained, during the late 18th century in
Prussia, which later got a reputation as a police state, liberals advanced
the principle that independent courts should have the power to strike down
practices by government bureaucrats.
While he didn't discuss procedural safeguards such as trial by
jury, he emphasized that "they presuppose for their effectiveness the
acceptance of the rule of law as here defined and that, without it, all
procedural safeguards would be valueless."
Hayek noted that "today the conception of the rule of law is
sometimes confused with the requirement of mere legality in all government
action. The rule of law, of
course, presupposes complete legality, but this is not enough: if a law
gave the government unlimited power to act as it pleased, all its actions
would be legal, but it would certainly not be under the rule of law.
The rule of law, therefore, is also more than constitutionalism: it
requires that all laws conform to certain principles...The rule of law is
therefore not a rule of the law, but a rule concerning what the law ought
to be..."
Despite the importance of these ideas, Hayek accepted surprisingly
conventional views toward government schooling, subsidized housing, land
use zoning and other forms of government intervention.
The Constitution of Liberty has proven to be valuable because
of its legal principles rather than its discussion about public policy.
Author William F. Buckley. Jr. observed that "Hayek has always
taken scrupulous care to give credit, if it is faintly plausible to do so,
to others who articulated ideas before he did, and indeed sometimes, on
reading the footnotes to The
Constitution of Liberty, one almost has the feeling that the book is a
collection of after-dinner toasts by Hayek to great philosophers,
political thinkers, and economists, from Thales to Ludwig von Mises.
But he cannot shrug off the credit for having brought much if it
all together: the integrated perception of the relation between law, and
justice, and liberty."
Hayek had high hopes for The
Constitution of Liberty, published on February 9, 1960, which he seems
to have considered his best work. Promotion
didn't come naturally for him, but he helped finance mailings to editors,
academics, business leaders and government officials.
He solicited plugs. He
encouraged reviews. "Hayek's
attempts to promote The Constitution of Liberty were without parallel
elsewhere in his career up to that time," noted biographer Ebenstein.
Ludwig von Mises expressed his disagreement with Hayek's commentary
on public policies but nonetheless hailed the book as "a brilliant
exposition of the meaning of liberty and the creative powers of a free
civilization." While
Hayek did get reviewed in friendly publications, like the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Fortune and Henry Hazlitt's
Newsweek column, the book was generally ignored -- as was Milton
Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom
which came out a couple years later.
Reader's Digest declined to condense it. Hayek became depressed.
In April 1962, the William Volker Charities Fund was dissolved, and
Hayek feared that his salary would be cut off.
Apparently, the University of Chicago didn't offer to pick it up.
In any case, Hayek was mindful that at the University of Chicago he
would get a single lump sum payment upon retiring at the age of 65, which
he considered early. Consequently,
when he received an offer to teach at the University of Freiburg,
southwestern Germany, he took it. Retirement
there would bring a pension.
There was a farewell dinner at the University of Chicago's
Quadrangle Club, put on by the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists
and New Individualist Review, a magazine which several of his graduate
students published. Milton
Friedman, George J. Stigler and Fritz Machlup were among those attending.
Ludwig von Mises, teaching at New York University, sent this
message which reportedly was read: "We are not losing Hayek
entirely...we are certain that from time to time he will come back for
lectures and conferences to this country.
And we are certain that, on these visits, he will have much more to
say...In this expectation, we may take it as a good omen that the name of
the city of his future sphere of activity is Freiburg. 'Frei'-- that means free."
Hayek developed his thinking beyond
The Constitution of Liberty, but he suffered ill health and for
several years was unable to finish his next major work.
In 1969, he became a visiting professor at the University of
Salzburg, Austria. "I am
increasingly inclined to believe that my miserable state in the early
1970s," he told an interviewer, "was chiefly due -- after some
initial heart disturbance in 1969 -- to my personally very nice and
well-regarded Salzburg doctor treating me erroneously for diabetes and
giving me a medicine that produced too low a sugar content of my blood,
that was the main cause of that 'inner trembling,' as I called the state,
which intellectually disabled me."
He did recover and then, in 1974, was energized by international
acclaim that followed his winning the Nobel Prize.
"In retrospect," wrote Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
in The Commanding Heights
(1998), "it was the awarding of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics
that first captured, almost by chance, the great intellectual change. The Swedish academy wanted to honor Gunnar Myrdal,
distinguished Keynesian...and a great figure of Swedish socialism. But the grantors, worried about the appearance of choosing so
local a favorite, decided that they ought to balance the ticket with a
more conservative figure, and they awarded the prize to Myrdal jointly
with Friedrich von Hayek. A
good part of the economics profession was scandalized by the choice of
Hayek; many economists in the United States, if polled, would have hardly
even considered him an economist. He
was regarded as right-wing, certainly not mainstream, even something of a
crank as well as a fossil from an archaic era.
As for Gunnar Myrdal, the lore among other Nobelwinners is that he
was so irritated that he hardly even spoke to Hayek during the ceremonies.
"Yet the award documented the beginning of a great shift in
the intellectual center of gravity of the economics profession toward a
restoration of confidence in markets, indeed a renewed belief in the
superiority of markets over other ways of organizing economic
activity."
He completed his long-dormant trilogy
Law, Legislation and Liberty, consisting of
Rules and Order (1973), The
Mirage of Social Justice (1976) and
The Political Order of a Free People (1979).
He attributed much of the decline of liberty to the mistaken belief
"that democratic control of government made unnecessary any other
safeguards against the arbitrary use of power." He attacked "social justice" as a wholly arbitrary,
meaningless idea aimed to justify the endless expansion of government
power during the 20th century. The
most disastrous consequences occurred in countries which adopted
parliamentary government -- but lacked a constitutional tradition
limiting, at least to some degree, what legislators might do.
"It turned out," Hayek wrote, "that the Americans
two hundred years ago were right, and an almighty Parliament means the
death of the freedom of the individual...Personal freedom requires that
all authority is restrained by long-run principles which the opinion of
the people approves."
He observed that the U.S. Constitution didn't prevent a highly
centralized government from developing.
He thought this was because Congress had the power both enact what
he called "rules of just conduct" and to direct the federal
government. He recommended
that these functions be separated: a "Legislative Assembly" to
enact "rules of just conduct" and a "Government
Assembly" to direct the federal government.
He thought the Legislative Assembly should be incapable of giving
out favors; candidates should be between 45 and 60, and they should be
elected to 15 year terms, giving them something like the independence of
judges. The Government
Assembly should deal with topical issues subject to interest group
lobbying; the whole body should be elected periodically, like the U.S.
House of Representatives, and membership in the Government Assembly should
render a person ineligible for the Legislative Assembly. Hayek hoped that assigning separate functions to two
assemblies would reduce the overall level of coercion and in particular
reduce the amount of discriminatory legislation.
For example, budgets which authorize spending to benefit some
interest groups, financed by taxes on other interest groups.
Hayek added that "I certainly do not wish to suggest that any
country with a firmly established constitutional tradition should replace
its constitution by a new one drawn up on the lines suggested...[but] very
few countries in the world are in the fortunate position of possessing a
strong constitutional tradition."
In 1976, Hayek produced The
Denationalization of Money, a report for the Institute of Economic
Affairs (London), which challenged what he called "the source and
root of all monetary evil, the government monopoly of the issue and
control of money." He
referred to the scourge of inflation and deflation, the consequence of
volatile central bank policies. He
made a case that private institutions would do a better job than
government at maintaining stable money.
He cited historic precedents and explained why competition, the
scrutiny of currency exchanges and the financial press would provide more
discipline than there is in central banks subject to political pressures.
Meanwhile, Hayek had moved to picturesque Salzburg because it was
closer to his wife's family in Vienna, and the university there agreed to
buy his library and let him continue using it.
But Salzburg became frustrating.
As he reported in a letter to the newspaper
Die Presse, "The [Austrian] Federal Ministry of Education [must]
be notified of foreign travel by university professors even when it occurs
during lecture breaks, as well as when it lasts more than eight days...I
then discovered that Salzburg University was not empowered to grant the
[appropriate academic degree] and therefore there were not serious
students of political economy here, and since according to existing laws
my teaching career would be terminated at age 75, while at Freiburg
University I would be able to teach as a professor emeritus for the rest
of my life, it became obvious to me that I had made a mistake in moving to
Salzburg. What held me here
for a while was that the law faculty had acquired my library...But after
standing by for seven years and seeing the library practically unused
because the Ministry could not bring itself to take on the cost of setting
up a subject catalog...I lost all joy in it."
With some of his Nobel money, Hayek offered to buy back his
library, but the university refused.
He returned to Freiburg in 1977.
When ideological winds began shifting in the late 1970s and 1980s,
Hayek emerged as a thinker people around the world could relate to. His writings inspired Ronald Reagan in the United States and
Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. Hayek
was especially revered among dissident intellectuals in Easterm Europe,
the Soviet Union and China where first-hand experience confirmed Hayek?s
insights about the shoddy tyranny of socialism.
Hayek's last work was The Fatal Conceit, the Errors of Socialism (1988), substantially
edited by William Bartley III whom he had picked to put together his
collected works and write a biography.
Bartley died in 1990, the biography unwritten.
Although Hayek was lucid almost to the end, he was physically
unable to do any writing after about 1985.
Besides the infirmities of old age, he suffered a bout with
pneumonia. Hayek seldom
ventured out of the third floor apartment in a big stucco house on
Urachstrasse 27, Freiburg, West Germany, next to the Black Forest.
It was the same apartment he and his wife had lived in when they
first moved there. Biographer
Ebenstein described it as "not a particularly posh apartment by
American upper income standards. His
library contained perhaps 4,000 volumes across a number of disciplines,
including economics, psychology, anthropology, and political philosophy. The furniture was not new, nor the interior recently painted.
The ceilings were high and the kitchen -- of which, according to
his daughter (who helped care for him during his last years), he was proud
to boast he 'never stepped foot' -- slightly run down...He had on his desk
a picture of his second wife as a beautiful young woman in Vienna many
years before."
He died on Monday, March 23, 1992 in the apartment. He was 92. About
a hundred family members and invited guests attended a funeral service
April 4th, conducted by Father Johannes Schasching.
Hayek was buried in the hilly Neustift am Wald cemetery,
overlooking the Vienna woods. Hayek had lived just long enough to see the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disappear from the map. He had insisted, as Mises did before him, that socialism would never deliver decent living standards -- and he was vindicated. He warned that socialism means tyranny, and after World War II dozens of countries embraced socialism and suffered through savage tyranny. He did perhaps more than anyone else to show that free people, not government planners, are the key to a flourishing civilization.
As John Cassidy wrote in the
February 7, 2000 New Yorker: "If there are two things most
people can agree on these days, they are that free-market capitalism is
the only practical way to organize a modern society and that the key to
economic growth is knowledge. So prevalent are these beliefs that
their origins are rarely examined, which is somewhat surprising, since
both statements can be traced back, in large part, to one man, Friedrich
August von Hayek." His moral courage and dazzling insights made clear that ideas shape
our destiny. "The Worst on Top" in Jim Powell, The Triumph of Liberty, A 2,000 Year History Told Through The Lives Of Freedom's Greatest Champions (New York: Free Press, 2000). Information about purchasing The Triumph of Liberty. Friedrich Hayek Scholar's Page
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