Happy Birthday, F.A. Hayek!
Your wide-ranging erudition, the application of your thought to
matters from economics to politics to intellectual history to
neurology to computer science, that Nobel Prize, your founding of
the Mont Pelerin Society, Margaret Thatcher saying she believing
what you believed, your cogent advocacy of Austrian business cycle
theory that helps explain how government credit manipulations could
harm the economy, all helped make you one of libertarianism’s
most prominent and respectable advocates. Milton Friedman told me
that your Road to Serfdom was the most influential
libertarian document of the 20th century.
You didn’t hate the state, per se, but believed a mostly free
market provided the best chanceÂ
for the use and creation of valuable
knowledge that would increase human options and choices on earth,
leading to the best chance for the widest happiness. You believed
in a limited welfare state to keep a minimal income floor
under the destitute, but thought
“social justice” was nonsense.
A few bits I wrote about Hayek in my book
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern
American Libertarian Movement:
Hayek’s vision of individualism and liberty is not based on a
belief in human grandeur, ability, or strength. It’s based on our
limits and weakness, particularly the limits and weakness of our
reason. Hayek didn’t believe in strict and severe limitations on
the power of the state on a judgment of the state’s evil….Hayek
stressed the state’s inefficacy: the essential and in Hayek’s mind
insurmountable limits of what a state can hope to do, owing to the
insurmountable limits of what man’s reason and knowledge can
do….Hayek’s personal influence on such think tankers as Antony
Fisher of Britain’s Institute for Economic Affairs, and through
them on politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and dozens of other
classical liberal intellectual institutes the world over, has had
and is having a decisive influence on what Hayek called the
secondhand dealers in ideas, the intellectuals, that makes him
(despite his occasional doctrinal looseness when it comes to purist
antistatism) a prime engine of modern libertarianism.
A nifty summational quote on Hayek’s political thought (hat tip
to the Reason Foundation’s director of polling Emily Ekins):
“Our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments
which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular
ends, are not compatible with preservation of a free society”- F.A.
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Herewith, a sampling of some of Reason‘s coverage of
Hayek’s life, work, and controversies:
*A
long interview with Hayek from 1977.
*I explain at length the controversies and divisions between
Hayekian libertarianism and (Murray) Rothbardian
libertarianism.
*A January 2005 interview with
Hayek biographer Bruce Caldwell.
*Sheldon Richman on
why his modern critics fear Hayek, from 2011.
*Hayek speaks
on stagflation–actual audio from 1975 on Meet The
Press.
*A
review of Theodore Burczak’s
Socialism After Hayek, by Steven Horwitz, from 2007.
*My March 2012 review of the
disappointing book
Keynes Hayek by Nicholas Wapshott.
*Katherine Mangu-Ward noted the 20th
anniversary of Hayek’s death in March.
*Barney Frank
embraces Hayek (sort of) from last month.
*Hayek
would have been for gay marriage, Jonathan Rauch argued in
2004.
*Hayek
and Orwell intersect, Sheldon Richman explains in December
2011.
*Hayek vs. the
ants.