Hayek, F.A.

▪ British economist

Introduction

also called  Friedrich A. Hayek , in full  Friedrich August von Hayek 

born May 8, 1899, Vienna, Austria

died March 23, 1992, Freiburg, Germany

      Austrian-born British economist noted for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian (totalitarianism) socialism. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (Myrdal, Gunnar).

Life and major works

      Hayek's father, August, was a physician and a professor of botany at the University of Vienna. His mother, Felicitas, was the daughter of Franz von Juraschek, a professor and later a prominent civil servant. Because his mother's family was relatively wealthy, Hayek and his two younger brothers had a comfortable childhood in Vienna, which was then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

      During World War I Hayek served in a field artillery battery on the Italian front, and after the war he enrolled at the University of Vienna. Hayek was attracted to both law and psychology in his early university years, but he settled on law for his first degree in 1921. Among his classmates were a number of people who would become prominent economists, including Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler (Haberler, Gottfried von), and Oskar Morgenstern (Morgenstern, Oskar). In 1923, his last year at the university, Hayek studied under the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser (Wieser, Friedrich von) and was awarded a second doctorate in political economy. He also began working at a temporary government office, where he met Ludwig von Mises (Mises, Ludwig von), a monetary theorist and author of a book-length critique of socialism. (Von Mises's book was originally published as Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus in 1922 and translated as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis in 1936.)

      Von Mises quickly became Hayek's mentor. After a trip to the United States in 1923–24, Hayek returned to Vienna, married, and with von Mises's assistance became the director of the newly founded Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek also became a regular attendee at von Mises's biweekly seminar, passed his Habilitation (an oral examination that is a necessary step toward becoming a university teacher), and published his first book, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, in 1929.

      In early 1931 Hayek was invited to England by Lionel Robbins (Robbins, Lionel Charles Robbins, Baron) to present four lectures on monetary economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The lectures would ultimately lead to his appointment the following year as the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE, where Hayek remained until 1950, having become a naturalized British subject in 1938. Immediately upon arriving in England, Hayek became embroiled in a debate with University of Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes (Keynes, John Maynard) over their respective theories about the role and effect of money within a developed economy. Hayek wrote a lengthy critical review of Keynes's 1930 book, A Treatise on Money, to which Keynes forcefully replied, in the course of which he attacked Hayek's own recent book, Prices and Production (1931). Both economists were criticized by other economists, and this caused each to rethink his framework. Keynes finished first, publishing in 1936 what would become perhaps the most famous economics book of the century, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Hayek's own book, The Pure Theory of Capital, did not appear until 1941, and both World War II and the book's opaqueness caused it to be much less noticed than Keynes's work.

      In the mid-1930s Hayek also participated in a debate among economists on the merits of socialism. Those discussions would help shape his later ideas on economics and knowledge, eventually presented in his 1936 presidential address to the London Economic Club. During the war years LSE evacuated to Cambridge. There Hayek worked on his Abuse of Reason project, a wide-ranging critique of an assortment of doctrines that he lumped together under the label of “scientism,” which he defined as “the slavish imitation of the method and language of Science” by social scientists who had appropriated the methods of the natural sciences in areas where they did not apply. Although the project as originally envisioned was never completed, it became the basis for a number of essays and also led to the 1944 publication of Hayek's most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an immediate best-seller. In the same year Hayek was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.

      At the end of World War II, Hayek began work on a theoretical psychology book based on an essay he had written during his student days in Vienna. In 1947 he organized a meeting of 39 scholars from 10 countries at Mont Pèlerin, on Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps. This was the beginning of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an organization dedicated to articulating the principles that would lead to the establishment and preservation of free societies. Von Mises, Robbins, and Machlup were among the original attendees, as were Milton Friedman (Friedman, Milton), Frank Knight (Knight, Frank Hyneman), George Stigler (Stigler, George J.), Aaron Director, Michael Polanyi, and the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (Popper, Sir Karl). Hayek had been instrumental in bringing Popper from New Zealand to LSE at war's end, and he had also secured a publisher for Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper and Hayek would remain lifelong friends.

 In 1950 Hayek left LSE for a position on the newly formed Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (Chicago, University of). In 1952 his book on psychology, The Sensory Order, was published, as was a collection of his essays from the Abuse of Reason project under the title The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Hayek would spend 12 years at Chicago. While there he wrote articles on a number of themes, among them political philosophy, the history of ideas, and social science methodology. Aspects of his wide-ranging research were woven into his 1960 book on political philosophy, The Constitution of Liberty.

      In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (Freiburg, Albert Ludwig University of) in West Germany. He remained there until his retirement in 1968, when he accepted an honorary professorship at the University of Salzburg in Austria. In 1974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, which, ironically, he shared with Gunnar Myrdal (Myrdal, Gunnar), whose political and economic views were often opposed to his.

      Hayek returned to Freiburg permanently in 1977 and finished work on what would become the three-part Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–79), a critique of efforts to redistribute incomes in the name of “social justice.” Later in the 1970s Hayek's monograph The Denationalization of Money was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, one of the many classical liberal think tanks that Hayek, directly or indirectly, had a hand in establishing.

      In the early 1980s Hayek began writing what would be his final book, a critique of socialism. Because his health was deteriorating, another scholar, philosopher William W. Bartley III, helped edit the ultimate volume, The Fatal Conceit, which was published in 1988. Hayek died four years later, having lived long enough to see the reunification of Germany.

Hayek's intellectual contributions

      Hayek's writings span seven decades. He was professionally active through most of his adult life, and he contributed to a variety of disciplines, among them economics, political philosophy, psychology, the history of ideas, and the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. Hayek was also controversial. A member of the Austrian school of economics, he was part of a tradition that was marginalized politically and generally dismissed by the economics community for about 50 years, starting in the 1930s. In that decade and the next, for example, Hayek was endorsing free market economics and classical liberal political doctrines when many intellectuals regarded socialist and welfare state policies as providing the “middle way” between totalitarianism (especially in its communist or fascist forms) and the perceived failures of unfettered capitalism (particularly in the aftermath of the Great Depression). As an early opponent of Keynes, Hayek lived through an era (especially in the 1950s and '60s) when Keynesianism dominated the economics profession and the necessity of widespread government intervention in the economy was, by and large, universally accepted in the Western democracies. It was not until the stagflation (high levels of inflation and unemployment coupled with low growth) of the 1970s that Keynesian dominance was brought to an end, and in the late 1980s the collapse of communist states in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe triggered a reassessment of Hayek's contributions. There is now a significant secondary literature on Hayek and the Austrian school—some of which is critical, some adulatory. All these considerations call for caution in approaching Hayek as a historical figure. A survey of his most important contributions must, because of the breadth of Hayek's work, be selective. Four general areas in which he made contributions will be reviewed below.

Trade cycle theory

      Hayek's earliest contribution was his development of a business cycle theory that built on the earlier work by Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (Wicksell, Knut) and von Mises. Hayek's theory posits the natural interest rate as an intertemporal price; that is, a price that coordinates the decisions of savers and investors through time. The cycle occurs when the market rate of interest (that is, the one prevailing in the market) diverges from this natural rate of interest. This causes the structure of the capital stock to become distorted, so that it no longer reflects the desires of savers and investors as expressed in the market. His theory had the unfortunate policy implication that attempts to counteract a recession, or period of high unemployment, with an increase in the money supply would further distort the structure of the capital stock. His remedy was simply to allow the recession to play itself out, thereby permitting the market rate to return to the natural rate.

      While Hayek's trade cycle theory, articulated during the Great Depression, has relatively few defenders today, some aspects of it remain valuable. These include Hayek's conception of the interest rate as an intertemporal price and his idea that changes in the money supply can be an important cause of discoordination, particularly as those changes affect the ability of prices to accurately reflect relative scarcities.

Economics and knowledge

      Among economists Hayek's analysis of the role of assumptions about knowledge in economic theories is highly regarded. Hayek began developing his ideas during the 1930s, when the static equilibrium theories of the day were full information models; in other words, they assumed that all agents have access to the same objectively correct information. Hayek believed that such models fail to illuminate the role of market prices in providing information to market participants.

      In his 1936 presidential address to the London Economic Club, Economics and Knowledge, Hayek posited instead a world in which knowledge is dispersed among many different agents and in which the information that any one agent holds is not necessarily correct. He then asked how social coordination could ever occur in such a world. His answer was that freely formed and freely adjusting market prices contain information about the plans and intentions of millions of market participants. Because of this, changes in prices reflect changing relative scarcities for factors, goods, and services, and they thereby enable market agents to plan and to bring their subjectively formed perceptions and expectations about market conditions into line with actual conditions. In other words, the world is constantly changing and errors are constantly being made; but errors create profit opportunities for alert entrepreneurs, whose actions bring market prices back in line with underlying relative scarcities. Hayek argued that market prices thus allow agents—all of whom operate with limited information—to coordinate their activities. By contrast, the full information equilibrium models obscure the process by which real markets deal with the problem of dispersed information, because they are based on the assumption that such coordination has already occurred.

      Hayek came to these insights as the result of debates with opponents over his monetary theory and over the viability of socialism. As noted above, he demonstrated how changes in the money supply can interfere with the interest rate's ability to coordinate intertemporal decisions and how inflation can disrupt the efficacy of price signals. According to Hayek, socialist schemes that either do away with markets (as, for example, when the means of production is nationalized, thereby eliminating factor markets in capital goods) or do not allow prices to adjust, or allow them to adjust only slowly (as is the case in planned economies in which prices are fixed by a central authority), further interfere with the ability of prices to coordinate dispersed knowledge.

      Hayek later added to his analysis, first by noting that knowledge, in addition to being localized, is often tacit (that is, implied but not clearly stated). By its nature, tacit knowledge cannot be articulated, but it affects people's behaviour and is captured in market prices. Hayek also noted that price systems were far from being a singular influence and that other social institutions assisted in coordinating human action.

      The economics of information is now an important area of economics, and many theorists (among them, Leonid Hurwicz, Sanford Grossman, and Joseph Stiglitz (Stiglitz, Joseph E.)) credit Hayek with being among the first to emphasize the role of market prices in conveying information. Interestingly, certain of Hayek's ideas about knowledge (especially its tacit dimension) do not fit in so easily with mainstream information economics, so his analyses may with equal justice be seen as posing challenges to as well as anticipating later developments.

The critique of socialism and the defense of classical liberal institutions

      Throughout his life Hayek criticized socialism, often contrasting it with a system of free markets (capitalism). Although his earlier critiques were based on economic grounds, he later drew upon political, ethical, and other arguments in making his case.

      His economic arguments themselves had many dimensions. Hayek noted, for example, that market prices, which reflect the appraisal of millions of market participants, are essential for entrepreneurial calculation; they allow firm owners to choose the most affordable combinations of technologically feasible inputs. Hayek asserted that in a world of constant change—in which every change of price causes market participants to change their demand and supply, which lead to other adjustments, ad infinitum—no constructed system can match the ability of the market process to adjust continually to the changes. He argued that the market system itself constitutes a “discovery procedure,” in that it provides incentives for the discovery of new products and processes while also disseminating information to market participants (e.g., consumers). This occurs because entrepreneurs have incentives to be alert to and to exploit newly discovered or created knowledge. Hayek maintained that a market system aids in the coordination of plans and the correction of errors in a world in which knowledge is dispersed, tacit, and specific to time and place and in which individual beliefs may be wrong. Obversely, price-fixing hinders coordination; attempts to gather knowledge centrally do not permit the best use of localized and tacit knowledge; and no system provides as much feedback and incentives for the correction of errors in perception as does a market system.

      The occasional stridency of Hayek's arguments must be understood in the context of their time. In the late 1930s many intellectuals believed that capitalism had failed and that only through economic planning could Western democracies avoid totalitarianism, be it of the fascist or communist varieties. “Planning for freedom” became the slogan of the day among the elites of western Europe.

      It was this political stance that Hayek countered in The Road to Serfdom and other publications. He began from the premise that in civil society every individual pursues his own set of values. Many forms of planning, however, implicitly assume that a common set of values exists; otherwise it would be impossible to gain consensus on how resources are to be allocated. Hayek argued that without a shared set of values, the planners would inevitably impose some set of values on society. In other words, government planners could not accomplish their tasks without exerting control beyond the economic to the political realm.

      Hayek felt, then, that his opponents had it exactly backwards. Planning would inhibit rather than promote freedom. Only when a free market system is allied with democratic political institutions would freedom of choice be allowed to persist.

      In The Constitution of Liberty and elsewhere Hayek identified the social institutions that he felt would most effectively achieve the goal of liberty. He argued that a system of free markets—in a democratic polity, with a private sphere of individual activity that is protected by a strong constitution, with well-defined and enforced property rights, all governed by the rule of law, in which laws are prospective, equally enforced, abstractly stated, and stable—will support the set of institutions that both permits individuals to pursue their own values and allows them to make the best use of their own localized knowledge. In Law, Legislation and Liberty he argued that the concept of “social justice” that was often invoked in defending the policies of the modern welfare state was without meaning because it focused on outcomes, rather than actions, and further that special interests are bound to manipulate such moral redistribution schemes to enrich themselves.

      In composing a final set of arguments against socialism, Hayek made a distinction between “spontaneous orders” and “constructed orders.” He averred that many social institutions—among them language, money, the common law, the moral code, and trade—are instances of spontaneous orders. These orders arise as a result of human action, and they come about as a result of individuals pursuing goals, but they are not the product of human design, because no one intended that they arise. They survive because they confer benefits on the societies that practice them. Hayek claimed that due to their “scientistic prejudices” those whom he dubbed “rationalist constructivists” neither recognized that institutions could (and in fact do) arise spontaneously nor understood how these institutions could benefit society. By comparison, “constructed orders” often contain flaws because attempts by planners to redesign, create, or plan social institutions often have unintended, unanticipated, or adverse consequences. Hayek linked his discussion of spontaneous orders to his earlier insights about knowledge with the claim that spontaneously formed orders often are able to adapt more readily in environments characterized by rapid change and widespread uncertainty due to the dispersion of knowledge. Constructed orders lack such adaptability.

      Hayek's economic arguments concerning the viability of socialism have proved telling. By the turn of the 21st century, there were few advocates of central planning among economists, and even proponents of market socialism have come to incorporate considerations of knowledge, information, and the structure of incentives identified by Hayek when they attempt to design new systems.

      Hayek's political arguments in The Road to Serfdom have had a more controversial reception. Much turns on whether one reads Hayek as making a prediction (in which case his predictions concerning the Western democracies have not occurred) or as providing a warning of the dangers of the loss of individual liberties and the insistence on a set of common values under socialist systems. (Hayek himself insisted that the latter was his intent.) Finally, his arguments concerning spontaneous orders have struck a chord among those interested in the study of complex adaptive systems.

The limits of the social sciences

      Even in his early writings, Hayek stressed the limited role of empirical work in economics. This was due in part to his affiliation with the Austrian school, whose work had been shaped by a “battle over methods” (Methodenstreit) with the German historical school of economists at the turn of the 20th century. The Austrian side had insisted that a theoretical (as opposed to a purely empirical) approach to the social sciences was both possible and fruitful and that all observation presupposed an underlying theoretical framework. In later decades the Austrian economists opposed the ascendance of positivist and other radically empiricist doctrines within the philosophy of science.

      Hayek made his initial criticisms of these approaches in his essay "Scientism and the Study of Society" (1952). In later works Hayek began distinguishing between sciences that study simple phenomena versus those that study complex phenomena. In the latter fields, he maintained, precise predictions cannot be made; only “pattern predictions” or “explanations of the principle” by which a mechanism operates are possible. Just as evolutionary biologists are, with the theory of natural selection, able to explain speciation but not predict the specific instances of species change in the future, so economists can explain the principles under which price formation occurs without being able to predict the future course of prices.

Assessment

      As with all of his work, Hayek's methodological ideas were formed against the backdrop of intense debates over the viability and appropriateness of alternative political and economic systems. His best ideas transcend the circumstances of their formation. If Hayek has a legacy, one part is a constant reminder that human knowledge is limited and that an understanding of this limitation is the first step toward wisdom. Another part of his message is that many social institutions persist precisely because they enable people to survive and prosper in a world in which knowledge is limited and that attempts to create institutions anew, often undertaken with the best of intentions, have been the cause of much human misery.

Bruce J. Caldwell

Additional Reading

The starting point for further exploration of Hayek's work is the multivolume series The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, ed. by W.W. Bartley et al. (1988– ). Hayek's contributions on economics and knowledge may be found in Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1948, reissued 1996), and New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (1978, reissued 1985). Hayek's writings on the social sciences as fields that study complex phenomena can be found in Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967, reprinted 1980); many of his ideals are expressed in the same book. Within the secondary literature, two early surveys of Hayek's multifarious contributions are Norman P. Barry, Hayek's Social and Economic Philosophy (1979); and John Gray, Hayek on Liberty, 3rd ed. (1998). G.R. Steele, The Economics of Friedrich Hayek (1993, reissued 1996), surveys Hayek's economic theory. Chandran Kukathas, Hayek and Modern Liberalism (1989); and Jeremy Shearmur, Hayek and After: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme, (1996) provide overviews of his political philosophy. No authorized biography of Hayek exists, but the following may be profitably consulted: Friedrich A. Hayek, Nobel Prize Winning Economist: Oral History Transcript (1983), an interview conducted in 1978 under the auspices of the Oral History Program, University Library, UCLA; Bruce J. Caldwell, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (2003); Friedrich A. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed. by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (1994); John Raybould (compiler), Hayek: A Commemorative Album (1998); and Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001, reissued 2003). More on the development of the Austrian school and in particular the revival of interest in Austrian ideas in the United States in the 1970s is presented in Karen I. Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition (1994, reissued 1998).Bruce J. Caldwell

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