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Friedrich Hayek

 
Biography: Friedrich A. von Hayek
 

The Austrian-born British free market economist and social philosopher, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Auguste von Hayek (1899-1992) was one of the most distinguished social thinkers of the 20th century.

Friedrich A. von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899, in Vienna into a modest family that could lay claim to a great academic tradition. He left school to enlist in World War I in March 1917. Shortly after returning from the Italian front in November 1918 he began to study law at the University of Vienna. Hayek obtained his Juris Doctor degree only three years later, but continued to study political science, receiving his second doctorate from the same university in 1923.

Hayek in 1921 helped found the "Geistkreis, " a small circle of young social scientists in Vienna. More than half of its participants later became world-famous. In 1923 Hayek visited New York and worked part-time as a research assistant at New York University. Greatly stimulated by the newly developed advanced techniques for analyzing time series and forecasting industrial fluctuations, he returned to Vienna in 1924 and published several articles in this field and in monetary theory that paved the way for his later work. Together with his teacher Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), the eminent scholar of Liberalism, he founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in 1927 and directed it until 1931. In 1929 he became a lecturer at Vienna University. That same year his first book on Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie (1929) appeared and set a standard in modern business cycle theory.

Becoming an International Scholar

Hayek's series of guest lectures at the London School of Economics in 1931, published as his important Prices and Production (1931), led to his appointment as Tooke Professor of Economic Science that same year. There, Hayek immediately became the only intellectual opponent of the new theories of under-consumption and under-investment of Lord John Maynard Keynes. All eminent economists of the time were involved in this major intellectual controversy.

To the big debate (which continues to this day) over the impossibility of socialist calculation and 'market socialism' in the 1930s, with Mises and Hayek on one side and Lange and H. D. Dickinson on the other, Hayek contributed a number of essays which refuted the socialist approach to economic planning. They are collected in his Individualism and Economic Order (1948). His seminal essay on "Economics and Knowledge" (1937), in which he first formulated the 'division of knowledge' in society, led him increasingly to socio-philosophical problems, although his interest in technical economics culminated in his The Pure Theory of Capital (1942). He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1944.

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) made him world-famous overnight and aroused heated discussions. In this best-seller of the immediate post-war years, since translated into sixteen languages, he showed that socialism carries with it no adequate provision for the preservation of freedom and that the convergence of economic systems is rooted in an economic error.

Hayek's important contributions to the methodological problems of the social sciences and scientism were later collected in his The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952). In his crucial essay on "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), Hayek refined his idea of the price system as a mechanism for communicating information.

In 1947 Hayek founded the exclusive Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of like-minded scholars. By the end of 1949 he left London and accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago. The Sensory Order (1952), a discourse in pure psychology containing some of his most original and important ideas, was published in 1952, though the preliminary thoughts dated back to the early 1920s when he had been uncertain whether to become a psychologist or an economist. Hayek's socio-philosophic approach, however, led to his The Constitution of Liberty (1960), regarded as one of the great books of the mid-20th century. Here he further developed his idea of spontaneous order and laid down the ethical, legal, and economic principles of freedom.

Hayek's next move, in 1962, was to the University of Freiburg (Germany). Among many pathbreaking works, he published there his famous Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967). After becoming professor emeritus at Freiburg in 1968, he returned to his native Austria and joined the University of Salzburg. In this period, besides some important essays, the first and second volumes of his fundamental trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973-1976) were published.

In 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Hayek's courageous Nobel Prize lecture on "The Pretence of Knowledge" (1974) to some extent again initiated the intellectual revival of liberalism. After Hayek's return to Freiburg in 1977 he published his widely discussed Denationalization of Money (1978), his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (1978), and the third volume of his trilogy.

When not lecturing throughout the world, Hayek devoted himself entirely to the completion of his next work, significantly entitled The Fatal Conceit. This book presents a most important fundamental critique of rationalism, socialism, and constructivism. Hayek's career as scholar and teacher was international, and he held honorary degrees from universities all over the world. Among his honors, awards, and orders, he received the Order Pour le Merite from Germany and in 1984 the Companion of Honour from Britain.

Hayek's Leading Ideas

Hayek represented the subjective approach of the free-market oriented Austrian School of Economics, distinguished by its methodological individualism. His economic analysis, therefore, rested upon the insight that every individual chooses and acts in pursuit of his purposes and in accordance with his perception of his options for achieving them. His early writings, as shown above, were in pure economic theory.

Hayek's trade cycle theory explained that overinvestment leads to scarcity of capital compelling a cutback in investment and even the abandonment of a part of the real capital produced because of the excessive investment rate.

His most important discovery was the "division of knowledge" and the spontaneous order. The spontaneous interaction of millions of individuals, each possessing unique information of which beneficial use might be made, created circumstances that cannot be conveyed to any central authority. A system of signals - the price system - was therefore the only mechanism that communicates information and enables people to adapt to circumstances of which they know nothing. The whole modern order and well-being rested on the possibility of adapting to processes that were unknown. It was not scientific knowledge which matters, but the unorganized particular knowledge of time and place.

While for most social philosophers the chief aim of politics consisted in setting up an ideal social order through utopian reforms, Hayek's main task was the finding of rules that enable men with different values and convictions to live together. These rules were established so as to permit each individual to fulfill his aims and to limit government action.

In his "Denationalization of Money" (1976) he convincingly argued that inflation could be avoided only if the monopolistic power of issuing money was taken away from government and state authorities and the task given to private industry to promote competition in currencies.

According to Hayek, cultural evolution was not a result of human reason consciously building institutions, but a process in which culture and reason developed concurrently. The spontaneous social order generated by individuals interacting according to these general rules was distinguished from the constructivist approach exemplified by socialist ideas, which interpreted all order as the product of conscious design.

Hayek's seminal work arose and developed from a comprehensive approach to various intellectual disciplines that condition and influence one another. Although there were only a few direct disciples in academia, Hayek's influence on pure economics, public policy, and social, political, and legal philosophy were tremendous.

Classical Liberalism

During the 1980s, Hayek's interdisciplinary theories gained wider dissemination, especially his opposition to the concept that publc institutions could be designed to meet human requirements and intentions. He preferred an almost laissez-faire approach in which public order evolved from specific ideas and actions. Thus, he was opposed to the highly-centralized economics of the various forms of socialism, which denied the economics of the marketplace.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was greatly influenced by Hayek's ideas of personal liberty and market economics and based many of her government's conservative policies upon her interpretation of his concepts.

In 1991, Hayek published his final volume, Economic Freedom, in which he argued that political/economic coercion is the greatest threat to individual freedom and best achieved through the natural evolution of market forces.

Since Hayek's death in March 1992, there has been continuing debate concerning his interdisciplinary system. It was thought that he diminished the role of reason, and failed to reconcile the value of such liberal institutions as have evolved with their role as preservers and nurturers of reason and freedom.

Further Reading

Probably the best collection of Hayek's most important and influential essays and chapters available is Kurt R. Leube and Chiaki Nishiyama, The Essence of Hayek (1984), which includes a biography and an introduction. A good popular presentation of Hayek's ideas can be found in Eamonn Butler, Hayek: His Contribution to the Political and Economic Thought of Our Time (1983). His political philosophy is penetratingly treated in John N. Gray, Hayek on Liberty (1984), which includes a comprehensive bibliography compiled by John Cody. Two Festschrifts are dedicated to Hayek: Erich Streissler et al. (editors), Roads to Freedom: Essays in Honour of Friedrich A. von Hayek (1969), and Kurt R. Leube and Albert H. Zlabinger (editors), The Political Economy of Freedom: Essays in Honor of F. A. Hayek (1985). Hayek's publication list covered 19 books and some 240 essays and articles.

There were several in-depth studies of Hayek's interdisciplinary theories which seek to make his concepts accessible to the uninformed but interested reader. Margaret Thatcher's The Path to Power (1995) acknowledged her debt to Hayek's The Road to Serfdom for his insights into the economic and social slavery of the authoritarian forms of socialism which were coming into vogue in the late thirties and early forties. Keith Graham in The London Times obituary of Hayek (March, 1992) presented a concise but lucid analysis of his major concepts, and contained an extensive bibliography of Hayek's main publications and secondary reading.

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Political Dictionary: F. A. von Hayek
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(1899-1992) Austrian political economist who spent much of his life in Britain. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) he portrayed state intervention and collectivism, even in their moderate forms, as inevitably leading to an erosion of liberty. In both Britain and the United States, the book became a text for supporters of laissez-faire and opponents of Keynesian economics and the welfare state for more than three decades in which their views were largely unrepresented in government. Hayek was far from a simplistic supporter of laissez-faire and in The Constitution of Liberty (1961) he was concerned to explore the necessary framework of government and the rule of law in which freedom and commerce could prosper.

— Lincoln Allison

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Friedrich August von Hayek
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(born May 8, 1899, Vienna, Austria — died March 23, 1992, Freiburg, Ger.) Austrian-born British economist. He moved to London in 1931 and held positions at the University of London and the London School of Economics, becoming a British citizen in 1938. Later posts included a professorship at the University of Chicago (1950 – 62). Throughout his life Hayek criticized socialism, often contrasting it with a system of free markets. In his works he opposed the theories of John Maynard Keynes and argued that government intervention in the free market is destructive of individual values and could not prevent such economic ailments as inflation, unemployment, and recession. His books include The Road to Serfdom (1944), The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and The Political Order of a Free People (1979). His views have been highly influential among conservatives, including Margaret Thatcher. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize with Gunnar Myrdal.

For more information on Friedrich August von Hayek, visit Britannica.com.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: Friedrich Hayek
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Hayek, Friedrich (1899-1992) Austrian economist and philosopher. Born and educated in Vienna, Hayek taught at London and Chicago before returning to his native country in 1962. In a succession of economic analyses, and in more popular works (such as The Road to Serfdom, 1944), he propounded an extreme laissez-faire economic individualism, allied with the political belief that anything in the nature of state action or collective action (such as that of trade unions) undermines liberty and paves the way to totalitarianism. Similar analyses were applied to the history of positivism since Comte, in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (1952). He was a notable influence on the economic and political right wing in Britain and the USA, especially after his views were revivified by the award of the Nobel prize in 1974.

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Friedrich Hayek
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(1899 - 1992), leading proponent of markets as an evolutionary solution to complex social coordination problems.

One of the leaders of the Austrian school of economics in the twentieth century, Friedrich Hayek received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974. Born to a distinguished family of Viennese intellectuals, he attended the University of Vienna, earning doctorates in law and economics in 1921 and 1923. He became a participant in Ludwig von Mises's private economics seminar and was greatly influenced by von Mises's treatise on socialism and his argument about the impossibility of economic rationality under socialism due to the absence of private property and markets in the means of production. Hayek developed a theory of credit-driven business cycles, discussed in his books Prices and Production (1931) and Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). As a result he was offered a lectureship, and then the Tooke Chair in Economics and Statistics at the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE) in 1931. There he worked on developing an alternative analysis to the nascent Keynesian economic system, which he published in The Pure Theory of Capital in 1941, by which point the Keynesian macro model had already become the accepted and dominant paradigm of economic analysis.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hayek made his major contribution to the analysis of economic systems, pointing out the role of markets and the price system in distilling, aggregating, and disseminating usable specific knowledge among participants in the economy. The role of markets as an efficient discovery procedure, generating a spontaneous order in the flux of changing and unknowable specific circumstances and preferences, was emphasized in his "Economics and Knowledge" (1937), "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), and Individualism and Economic Order (1948). These arguments provided a fundamental critique of the possibility of efficient economic planning and an efficient socialist system, refining and redirecting the earlier Austrian critique of von Mises. They have also provided the basis for a substantial theoretical literature on the role of prices as a conveyor of information, and for the revival of non-socialist economic thought in the final days of the Soviet Union.

Hayek worked at LSE until 1950 when he moved to Chicago, joining the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. There Hayek moved beyond economic to largely social and philosophic-historical analysis. His major works in these areas include his most famous defense of private property and decentralized markets, The Road to Serfdom (1944), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1978), and the compilation The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988). These works, more than his economic studies, provided much of the intellectual inspiration and substance behind the anti-Communist and economic liberal movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg in Germany, and subsequently for Salzburg, where he spent the rest of his life. The Nobel Prize in 1974 significantly raised interest in his work and in Austrian economics.

Bibliography

Bergson, Abram. (1948). "Socialist Economics." In A Survey of Contemporary Economics, ed. H. S. Ellis. Home-wood, IL: Irwin.

Blaug, Mark. (1993). "Hayek Revisited." Critical Review 7(1):51 - 60.

Caldwell, Bruce. (1997). "Hayek and Socialism." Journal of Economic Literature, 35(4):1856 - 1890.

Foss, Nicolai J. (1994). The Austrian School and Modern Economics: A Reassessment. Copenhagen, Denmark: Handelshojskolens Forlag.

Lavoie, Don. (1985). Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Machlup, Fritz. (1976). "Hayek's Contributions to Economics." In Buckley, William F., et al., Essays on Hayek, ed. Fritz Machlup. Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press.

O'Driscoll, Gerald P. (1977). Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contribution of Friedrich A. Hayek. Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel.

—RICHARD E. ERICSON

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Friedrich August von Hayek
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Hayek, Friedrich August von (frē'drĭkh ougʊst' fôn hī'ək) , 1899–1992, British economist, b. Vienna. He was raised and educated in Austria and taught at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, where he gained attention for his criticism of Keynes. He expressed his commitment to free markets and his aversion to government intervention and its control of the means of production in The Road to Serfdom (1944). The economic policies of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were significantly influenced by his ideas, and his economic philosophy also helped to foster the global capitalism of the late 20th and early 21st cents. In his later years Hayek wrote works that focused on the fields of philosophy, psychology, and epistemology, including as The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974.

Bibliography

See The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents—The Definitive Edition, Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (2008), ed. by B. Caldwell.

 
Quotes By: Friedrich August Von Hayek
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Quotes:

"There are no better terms available to describe [The] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former objective and the latter subjective. ... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the facts of the social sciences are also opinions -- not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist."

 
Wikipedia: Friedrich Hayek
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Friedrich Hayek
Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Friedrich August von Hayek
School/tradition Old Whig, Classical liberalism and Austrian School
Main interests Economics, social philosophy, political philosophy, Hebbian theory, philosophy of mind
Notable ideas Economic calculation problem, Catallaxy, Extended order, Dispersed knowledge, Spontaneous order, Hebbian theory

Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), was an Austrian and British economist and philosopher, and a major critic of John Maynard Keynes. Hayek's account of how changing prices communicate signals which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics. This and other contributions have put Hayek at the top among a list of the most influential economists of the modern period.[1] One of the great polymaths of the 20th century, Hayek also contributed to jurisprudence, neuroscience, philosophy and the history of ideas.

In 1974 Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Gunnar Myrdal "for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena."[2] He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.[3]

Hayek lived in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany, and became a British subject in 1938.

Contents

Early life

Hayek was born in Vienna, then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of a doctor in the municipal health service. Hayek's grandfathers were prominent academics working in the fields of statistics and biology. The paternal line had been raised to the ranks of the Austrian nobility, for its services to the state, a generation before his maternal forebears, also raised to the lower noble rank. Hayek's father turned his work on regional botany into a highly esteemed botanical treatise, continuing the family's scholarly traditions.

His mother's family belonged to the wealthier bourgeoisie. Also on his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother often played with Ludwig's sisters. Inspired by the accident of this family connection, Hayek became one of the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when the book was published in its original German edition in 1921.

Already as a teenager, and at his father's suggestion, Hayek read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach.[4] In school Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics.

In 1917 he joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front. Much of Hayek's combat experience was spent as a spotter in an aeroplane. He survived the war without serious injury and was decorated for bravery.

Hayek then decided to pursue an academic career, determined to help avoid the mistakes that had led to World War I. Hayek said about his experience: "The decisive influence was really World War I. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization." He vowed to work for a better world. [5]

Student and economist

At the University of Vienna, he earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively, and he also studied philosophy, psychology and economics with a keen interest. For a short time, when the University of Vienna closed, Hayek studied in Constantin von Monakow's Institute of Brain Anatomy, where Hayek spent much of his time staining brain cells. Hayek's time in Monakow's lab, and his deep interest in the work of Ernst Mach, inspired Hayek's first intellectual project, eventually published as The Sensory Order (1952). It turned Mach's contribution on its head, locating connective learning at the physical, neurological levels in a direct rejection of the "sense data" associationism of the naive empiricists and logical positivists. Hayek presented his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.[6]

Initially sympathetic to socialism, Hayek's economic thinking began to shift after reading Ludwig von Mises' book Socialism. He was a student of Friedrich von Wieser. Hayek worked as a research assistant to Prof. Jeremiah Jenks of New York University from 1923 to 1924. He then aided the Austrian government with the legal and economic details of the Treaty of Versailles at the close of the First World War.[citation needed] It was at this time that Hayek began attending Ludwig von Mises' private seminars along with several friends, including Fritz Machlup, who had been participating in Hayek's own more general private seminar.

After his work for the government, Hayek founded and served as director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research before joining the faculty of the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1931 at the behest of Lionel Robbins. In the 1930s, Hayek enjoyed a considerable reputation as a leading economic theorist, but his models were not received well by the followers of John Maynard Keynes. Debate between the two schools of thought continues to this day. While at LSE in the 1930s, Hayek tutored David Rockefeller.[7] Others who studied with Hayek at the LSE include Arthur Lewis, Ronald Coase, John Kenneth Galbraith, Abba Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, George Shackle, Thomas Balogh, Vera Smith, L. K. Jah, Arthur Seldon, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and Oskar Lange. [8][9][10]

Unwilling to return to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the control of Nazi Germany in 1938, Hayek remained in Britain and became a British subject in 1938. He held this status for the remainder of his life, although he did not live in Great Britain after 1950. He lived in the United States from 1950 to 1962 and then mostly in Germany, although briefly in Austria as well.[11]

The Road to Serfdom

It was during this time that The Road to Serfdom was written. Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that Fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism. A chapter in the book is entitled, "The Socialist Roots of Nazism." The book was to be the popular edition of the second volume of a treatise entitled "The Abuse and Decline of Reason".[12] It was written between 1940-1943. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude".[13] It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing.[14] When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it achieved greater popularity than in Britain. At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics.

The libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while the The Road to Serfdom makes a strong case against centrally-planned economies, it appears only lukewarm in its support of pure laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism".[15]. In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information.[16]

Chicago

In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics for the University of Chicago, becoming a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Hayek's first class at Chicago was a faculty seminar on the philosophy of science attended by many of the University's most notable scientists of the time, including Enrico Fermi, Sewall Wright and Leó Szilárd. During his time at Chicago, Hayek worked on the philosophy of science, economics, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. Most of his economic notes from this period have yet to be published. He did not become part of the Chicago School of Economics.[17]

After editing a book on John Stuart Mill's letters he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, The Constitution of Liberty and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" (eventually the title for the second chapter of The Constitution of Liberty).[18] He completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned "with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society".[19] Hayek was disappointed that the book did not receive the same enthusiastic general reception as The Road to Serfdom had sixteen years before.[20]

Freiburg and Salzburg

From 1962 until his retirement in 1968, he was a professor at the University of Freiburg, West Germany. Hayek regarded his years at Freiburg as "very fruitful".[21] It was here where he wrote most of Law, Legislation and Liberty. This was intended for a technical audience, and it was published in three volumes in 1973, 1976 and 1979.

He became professor at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977; he then returned to Freiburg, where he spent the rest of his days. When Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote that "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg". The economics department was small and the library facilities were inadequate.[22]

Nobel laureate

On 9 October, 1974 it was announced that Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal. He was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal in order to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum.[23] During the Nobel ceremony in December 1974 Hayek met Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom and Solzhenitsyn was surprised that someone who had not lived in Russia could see so clearly the effects of socialism.[23] The Nobel Prize brought much greater public awareness of Hayek and has been described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life".[24]

Later life

In February 1975 Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. The Institute of Economic Affairs arranged a meeting between Hayek and Thatcher in London soon after.[25] During Thatcher's only visit to the Conservative Research Department in the summer of 1975, a speaker had prepared a paper on why the "middle way" was the pragmatic path the Conservative Party should take, avoiding the extremes of left and right. Before he had finished, Thatcher "reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table".[26]

In 1977 Hayek was critical of the Lib-Lab pact, in which the British Liberal Party agreed to keep the British Labour government in office. Writing to The Times, Hayek said: "May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power has lost all title to the name "Liberal". Certainly no liberal can in future vote "Liberal"."[27] Hayek was criticised by Liberal politicians Lord Gladwyn and Andrew Phillips, who both claimed that the purpose of the pact was to discourage socialist legislation. Lord Gladwyn pointed out that the German Free Democrats were in coalition with the German Social Democrats.[28] Hayek was defended by Professor Antony Flew who stated that the German Social Democrats, unlike the British Labour Party, had since the late 1950s abandoned public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and had instead embraced the social market economy.[29] In 1978 Hayek came into conflict with the Liberal Party leader David Steel who claimed that liberty was only possible with "social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth and power, which in turn require a degree of active government intervention" and that the Conservative Party were more concerned with the connection between liberty and private enterprise than between liberty and democracy. Hayek claimed that a limited democracy might be better than other forms of limited government at protecting liberty but that an unlimited democracy was worse than other forms of unlimited government because "its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise". Hayek stated that if the Conservative leader had said "that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot".[30]

In 1984, he was appointed as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on the advice of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics". Hayek had hoped to receive a baronetcy, and after he was awarded the CH he sent a letter to his friends requesting that he be called the English version of Friedrich (Frederick) from now on. After his twenty-minute audience with the Queen, he was "absolutely besotted" with her according to his daughter-in-law, Esca Hayek. Hayek said a year later that he was "amazed by her. That ease and skill, as if she'd known me all my life". The audience with the Queen was followed by a dinner with family and friends at the IEA. When, later that evening, Hayek was dropped off at the Reform Club, he commented: "I've just had the happiest day of my life".[31]

In 1991 President George H. W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States, for a "lifetime of looking beyond the horizon". Hayek died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany.

Work

The economic calculation problem

Hayek was one of the leading academic critics of collectivism in the 20th century. Hayek believed that all forms of collectivism (even those theoretically based on voluntary cooperation) could only be maintained by a central authority of some kind. In his popular book, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and in subsequent works, Hayek claimed that socialism required central economic planning and that such planning in turn had a risk of leading towards totalitarianism, because the central authority would have to be endowed with powers that would have an impact on social life as well, and because the knowledge required for central planning is inherently decentralized.

Building on the earlier work of Mises and others, Hayek also argued that while, in centrally planned economies, an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. The efficient exchange and use of resources, Hayek claimed, can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets (see economic calculation problem). In The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek argued that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronize local and personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization. He used the term catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation."

In Hayek's view, the central role of the state should be to maintain the rule of law, with as little arbitrary intervention as possible.

Spontaneous order

Hayek viewed the free price system, not as a conscious invention (that which is intentionally designed by man), but as spontaneous order, or what is referred to as "that which is the result of human action but not of human design". Thus, Hayek put the price mechanism on the same level as, for example, language. Such thinking led him to speculate on how the human brain could accommodate this evolved behavior. In The Sensory Order (1952), he proposed, independently of Donald Hebb, the connectionist hypothesis that forms the basis of the technology of neural networks and of much of modern neurophysiology¹.

Hayek attributed the birth of civilization to private property in his book The Fatal Conceit (1988). He explained that price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other, in order to solve the economic calculation problem.

Investment and choice

Perhaps more fully than any other economist, Hayek investigated the choice theory of investment involving the inter-relations between non-permanent production goods and "latent" or potentially economic permanent resources, building on the choice theoretical insight that, "processes that take more time will evidently not be adopted unless they yield a greater return than those that take less time."[32] Hayek's work on the microeconomics of the choice theoretics of investment, non-permanent goods, potential permanent resources, and economically adapted permanent resources mark a central dividing point between Hayek's work on central planning, trade cycle theory, the division of knowledge, and entrepreneurial adaptation and that of most all other economists, most especially that of the macroeconomic "Marshallian" economists in the tradition of John Maynard Keynes and the microeconomic "Walrasian" economists in the tradition of Abba Lerner.

The business cycle

Capital, money, and the business cycle are prominent topics in Hayek's early contributions to economics. Mises had earlier explained monetary and banking theory in his Theory of Money and Credit (1912), applying the marginal utility principle to the value of money and then proposing a new theory of industrial fluctuations based on the concepts of the British Currency School and the ideas of the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. Hayek used this body of work as a starting point for his own interpretation of the business cycle, which defended what later became known as the "Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle". In his Prices and Production (1931) and The Pure Theory of Capital (1941), he explained the origin of the business cycle in terms of central bank credit expansion and its transmission over time in terms of capital misallocation caused by artificially low interest rates. Hayek claimed that: The past instability of the market economy is the consequence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process. In accordance with arguments outlined in his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, he argued that a monopolistic governmental agency like a central bank can neither possess the relevant information which should govern supply of money, nor have the ability to use it correctly. [33]

Social and political philosophy

In the latter half of his career Hayek made a number of contributions to social and political philosophy, which he based on his views on the limits of human knowledge[34], and the idea of spontaneous order in social institutions. He argues in favor of a society organized around a market order, in which the apparatus of state is employed almost (though not entirely) exclusively to enforce the legal order (consisting of abstract rules, and not particular commands) necessary for a market of free individuals to function. These ideas were informed by a moral philosophy derived from epistemological concerns regarding the inherent limits of human knowledge.

In his philosophy of science, which has much in common with that of his good friend Karl Popper, Hayek was highly critical of what he termed scientism: a false understanding of the methods of science that has been mistakenly forced upon the social sciences, but that is contrary to the practices of genuine science. Usually scientism involves combining the philosophers' ancient demand for demonstrative justification with the associationists' false view that all scientific explanations are simple two-variable linear relationships. Hayek points out that much of science involves the explanation of complex multi-variable and non-linear phenomena, and that the social science of economics and undesigned order compares favourably with such complex sciences as Darwinian biology. These ideas were developed in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason, 1952 and in some of Hayek's later essays in the philosophy of science such as "Degrees of Explanation" and "The Theory of Complex Phenomena".

In The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952), Hayek independently developed a "Hebbian learning" model of learning and memory – an idea which he first conceived in 1920, prior to his study of economics. Hayek's expansion of the "Hebbian synapse" construction into a global brain theory has received continued attention[citation needed] in neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, behavioral science, and evolutionary psychology.

Hayek and conservatism

Hayek attracted new attention in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of conservative governments in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. After winning the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect parliament's economic strategies. Likewise, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's most influential financial official in 1981 was an acknowledged follower of Hayek.[35]

Hayek wrote an essay titled Why I Am Not a Conservative[36] (included as an appendix to The Constitution of Liberty), in which he disparaged conservatism for its inability to adapt to changing human realities or to offer a positive political program. Although he noted that modern day conservatism shares many opinions on economics with classic liberals, particularly a belief in the free market, he believed it's because conservatism wants to "stand still", whereas liberalism embraces the free market because it "wants to go somewhere". Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition, and the term "libertarian" has been used instead. However, for his part Hayek found this term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term "Old Whig" (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke) instead. In his later life he said: "I am becoming a Burkean Whig". [37]

Influence and recognition

Hayek's profound influence on the development of economics is universally acknowledged. Hayek is the second most frequently cited economist (after Kenneth Arrow) in the Nobel lectures of the prize winners in economics – particularly that his lecture was critical of the field of orthodox economics and neo-classical modelization. A number of Nobel winners – such as Vernon Smith and Herbert Simon – recognize Hayek as the greatest economist of the modern period. Hayek is widely recognized for having introduced the time dimension to the equilibrium construction, and for his key role in helping to having inspired the fields of growth theory, information economics, and the theory of spontaneous order. The "informal" economics presented in Milton Friedman's massively influential popular work "Free to Choose" (1980), is explicitly Hayekian in its account of the price system as a system for transmitting and coordinating knowledge. This can be explained by the fact that Friedman taught Hayek's famous paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) in his graduate seminars.

Harvard economist and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers explains Hayek's place in modern economics this way: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy."[38]

By 1947, Hayek was an organizer of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical liberals who sought to oppose what they saw as socialism in various areas. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the free-market think tank that inspired Thatcherism.

Hayek had a long-standing and close friendship with philosopher of science Karl Popper, also from Vienna. In a letter to Hayek in 1944, Popper stated, "I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski." (See Hacohen, 2000). Popper dedicated his Conjectures and Refutations to Hayek. For his part, Hayek dedicated a collection of papers, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, to Popper, and in 1982 said, "... ever since his Logik der Forschung first came out in 1934, I have been a complete adherent to his general theory of methodology."[39] Popper also participated in the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Their friendship and mutual admiration, however, do not change the fact that there are important differences between their ideas.[40]

Hayek's greatest intellectual debt was to Carl Menger, who pioneered an approach to social explanation similar to that developed in Britain by Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish moral philosophers (cf. Scottish Enlightenment). He had a wide-reaching influence on contemporary economics, politics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology. For example, Hayek's discussion in The Road to Serfdom (1944) about truth, falsehood and the use of language influenced some later opponents of postmodernism.[41]

Legacy and honors

Even after his death, Hayek's intellectual presence was noticeable, especially in the universities where he had taught: the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. A number of tributes resulted, many posthumous.

  • A student-run group at the LSE Hayek Society, was established in his honor.
  • At Oxford University, the Oxford Libertarian Society was previously known as the Hayek Society.
  • The Cato Institute named its lower level auditorium after Hayek, who had been a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato during his later years.
  • Also, the auditorium of the school of economics in Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala is named after him.

Hayek's work on price theory has been central to the thinking of Jimmy Wales about how to manage the Wikipedia project.[42]

Selected bibliography

See also: List of books by Friedrich Hayek

1) Rules and Order, 1973
2) The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976
3) The Political Order of a Free People, 1979

Notes

  1. ^ Skarbek, David, F. A. Hayek's Influence on Nobel Prize Winners, Review of Austrian Economics 22(1) March 2009 http://www.davidskarbek.com/papers/HayekNobel.pdf
  2. ^ Bank of Sweden (1974). "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974". http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/index.html. 
  3. ^ George H. W. Bush (1991-11-18). "Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom Awards". http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=3642&year=&month=. 
  4. ^ UCLA Oral History 1978 Interviews with Friedrich Hayek, pp. 32-38
  5. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/tr_show01.html
  6. ^ "The Viennese Connection: Alfred Schutz and the Austrian School" by Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard.
  7. ^ Interview with David Rockefeller
  8. ^ J. K. Galbraith, "Nicholas Kaldor Remembered", in Nicholas Kaldor and Mainstream Economics: Confrontation or Convergence?, New York: St. Martin's Press.
  9. ^ Sir Arthur Lewis Autobiography
  10. ^ Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, p. 62, 248, 284.
  11. ^ Samuel Brittan, 'Hayek, Friedrich August (1899–1992)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 28 April 2009.
  12. ^ Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek. A Biography (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 107.
  13. ^ Ebenstein, p. 116.
  14. ^ Ebenstein, p. 128.
  15. ^ Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, University Chicago Press (1960) pp. 502-3
  16. ^ Block W. (1996). "Hayek's Road to Serfdom". Journal of Libertarian Studies.
  17. ^ F. A. Hayek, Hayek On Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (Liberty Fund, 2008) p. 128.
  18. ^ Ebenstein, p. 195.
  19. ^ F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 11.
  20. ^ Ebenstein, p. 203.
  21. ^ Ebenstein, p. 218.
  22. ^ Ebenstein, p. 254.
  23. ^ a b Ebenstein, p. 263.
  24. ^ Ebenstein, p. 261.
  25. ^ Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable. Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (Fontana, 1995), pp. 174-6.
  26. ^ John Ranelagh, Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities (Fontana, 1992), p. ix.
  27. ^ "Letters to the Editor: Liberal pact with Labour", The Times (31 March, 1977), p. 15.
  28. ^ "Letters to the Editor: Liberal pact with Labour", The Times (2 April, 1977), p. 15.
  29. ^ "Letters to the Editor: German socialist aims", The Times (13 April, 1977), p. 13.
  30. ^ "Letters to the Editor: The dangers to personal liberty", The Times (11 July, 1978), p. 15.
  31. ^ Ebenstein, p. 305.
  32. ^ The Pure Theory of Capital (pdf), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941/2007 (Vol. 12 of the Collected Works): p. 90.
  33. ^ Hayek, Friedrich (1989). The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. University of Chicago Press. p. 202. ISBN 978-0-226-32097-7. 
  34. ^ The Use of Knowledge in Society
  35. ^ Kenneth R. Hoover, Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics (2003) p. 213
  36. ^ Why I Am Not a Conservative
  37. ^ E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism. Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 259.
  38. ^ Lawrence Summers, quoted in The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace that Is Remaking the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1998, pp. 150-151.
  39. ^ See Weimer and Palermo, 1982
  40. ^ See Birner, 2001, and for the mutual influence they had on each other's ideas on evolution, Birner 2009
  41. ^ e.g., Wolin 2004
  42. ^ Katherine Mangu-Ward: Wikipedia and Beyond. Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision, June 2007
  43. ^ Liberty - The Fatal Deceit

Bibliography

  • Birner, Jack, 2001, "The mind-body problem and social evolution," CEEL Working Paper 1-02.
  • Birner, Jack, and Rudy van Zijp, eds., Hayek: Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas (1994)
  • Birner, Jack, 2009, "From group selection to ecological niches. Popper's rethinking of evolutionary theory in the light of Hayek's theory of culture", in S. Parusnikova & R.S. Cohen (eds.), Rethinking Popper, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Vol. 272, Springer 2009
  • Brittan, Samuel "Hayek, Friedrich August (1899–1992)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2006) online
  • Caldwell, Bruce, 2005. Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek.
  • Cohen, Avi J. "The Hayek/Knight Capital Controversy: the Irrelevance of Roundaboutness, or Purging Processes in Time?" History of Political Economy 2003 35(3): 469-490. Issn: 0018-2702 Fulltext: online in Project Muse, Swetswise and Ebsco
  • Doherty, Brian. 2007. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
  • Ebenstein, Alan O., 2001. Friedrich Hayek: A Biography.
  • Frowen, S. ed., (1997) Hayek: economist and social philosopher
  • Gamble, Andrew. (1996) The Iron Cage of Liberty, an analysis of Hayek's ideas
  • Gray, John, 1998. Hayek on Liberty.
  • Hacohen, Malachi, 2000. Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902 – 1945.
  • Horwitz, Steven. "Friedrich Hayek, Austrian Economist." Journal of the History of Economic Thought 2005 27(1): 71-85. Issn: 1042-7716 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta and Ebsco
  • Issing, O. (1999) Hayek, currency competition and European monetary union
  • Kasper, Sherryl, 2002, The Revival of Laissez-Faire in American Macroeconomic Theory: A Case Study of Its Pioneers. Chpt. 4.
  • Kley, Roland, 1994. Hayek's Social and Political Thought. Oxford Univ. Press.
  • Muller, Jerry Z., 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books.
  • Pavlík, Ján. 2004 [1]. University of Economics, Prague F. A. von Hayek and The Theory of Spontaneous Order. Professional Publishing 2004, Prague [2].
  • Rosenof, Theodore, 1974, "Freedom, Planning, and Totalitarianism: The Reception of F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom," Canadian Review of American Studies.
  • Samuelson, Richard A. "Reaction to the Road to Serfdom." Modern Age 1999 41(4): 309-317. Issn: 0026-7457 Fulltext: in Ebsco
  • Shearmur; Jeremy, 1996. Hayek and after: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme. Routledge.
  • Touchie, John, 2005. Hayek and Human Rights: Foundations for a Minimalist Approach to Law. Edward Elgar.
  • Vanberg, V. (2001). "Hayek, Friedrich A von (1899–1992)," International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 6482–6486. Abstract.
  • Vernon, Richard. "The 'Great Society' and the 'Open Society': Liberalism in Hayek and Popper." Canadian Journal of Political Science 1976 9(2): 261-276. Issn: 0008-4239 Fulltext: in Jstor
  • Weimer, W., and Palermo, D., eds., 1982. Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Contains Hayek's essay, "The Sensory Order after 25 Years" with "Discussion."
  • Wolin, R. 2004. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Primary sources

  • Hayek, Friedrich. Hayek on Hayek: an autobiographical dialogue, ed. S. Kresge and L. Wenar (1994)
  • Hayek, Friedrich. The collected works of F. A. Hayek, ed. W. W. Bartley and others (1988–)

See also




External links


 
 

 

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