-Caveat Lector- From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39653-2001May3.html }}>Begin Free Market Guru 'Friedrich Hayek: A Biography' by Alan Ebenstein Reviewed by by Brian Doherty Sunday, May 6, 2001; Page BW04 FRIEDRICH HAYEK A Biography By Alan Ebenstein Palgrave. 403 pp. $29.95 Friedrich A. Hayek is difficult to pigeonhole. The Austrian-born intellectual is a hero of the right, thanks to the influence of his free-market vision on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But he publicly disavowed the label "conservative" for his vision of societies continually evolving and learning through spontaneous, unplanned orders. He is the most respected of modern libertarians, but he believed in the propriety of many state ac tions -- such as guaranteed minimal incomes and the draft -- that many libertarians oppose. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, but the majority of his scholarly work was done in other fields, ranging over pol itical philosophy, cognitive psychology and intellectual history. Hayek scholarship has exploded in the past decade. Interest in him goes beyond academe; the New Yorker recently profiled him, and Hayek's theorizing on the importance of free markets has made him a favorite thinker of mod ern business gurus from Tom Peters to Peter Drucker. Some of the most cutting-edge work in computer science and neural networks research is grounded in some of Hayek's theories of how orderly behavior can result from seem ingly uncoordinated actions. In his eventful life, Hayek fought for Austria in World War I, battled with Keynesianism in the 1930s and became a controversial and celebrated public intellectual in postwar America. Alan Ebenstein took on a huge task in relating that saga in this, the first English- language biography of Hayek. Ebenstein weaves explanation and assessment of Hayek's intellectual project with his life story. In the end, Hayek's life and work are too big to be thoroughly summed up in one relatively compact book. But Ebenstein has m ade a credible first swipe at a figure to whom both academia and journalism are sure to return. Hayek's early socialist leanings began to atrophy during the 1920s, when he worked in an Austrian government office under libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises. Mises was then arguing that strict economic calculation was not possible in a socialist economy with no private property and no market prices. Hayek joined Mises in this battle, one that now seems settled in their favor in view of the dismal track record of planned economies. Hay ek left Austria to teach at the London School of Economics in 1931. There he fought with Keynes over the causes of and appropriate cures for business cycles. Hayek posited that cycles were caused by poor investments resul ting from excess bank credit and couldn't be profitably cured through government demand-management. During World War II, Hayek became alarmed at the embrace of central-planning ideas by Western governments and wrote the book that first brought him to public prominence, The Road to Serfdom (1944). The book became a surpr ise popular sensation in America; it was even condensed in the pages of Reader's Digest. Hayek argued that centralized government economic planning, even if managed by men of good will, would inevitably lead to severe reg imentation, loss of liberty and stagnant economies. For much of his career after The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote more as a political philosopher than as an economist. When he moved to the University of Chicago in 1950, h e taught not in the economics department but in the Committee on Social Thought. As Hayek was a serious thinker, he was also a serious man. There is little here to interest the intellectual gossip hound. Except for divorcing his first wife to marry a childhood sweetheart and suffering from intermitten t crippling depression in his later years (both episodes treated circumspectly by Ebenstein), he lived the sort of life you might expect of a man who wrote more than a dozen books of serious scholarship and founded and le d the Mount Pelerin Society, the preeminent intellectual organization for free-market thinkers. Hayek's libertarianism was not based on the notion of natural rights, or the idea (frequently associated with Ayn Rand) that humankind is too grand to live in chains. Rather, Hayek asserted that freedom had to proceed fro m a recognition of humanity's inherent limitations -- particularly the limits of reason and knowledge. No planner could possibly have command of the numberless bits of localized and individual information needed to plan e ffectively. Only the unorganized price system in a free market enabled order to arise from millions of individuals' personal plans. To Hayek, civilization's greatest achievements -- language, law, the market economy -- we re the result of spontaneous orders, not top-down planning. What makes Hayek so important that even Keynes's biographer Robert Skidelsky calls him "the dominant intellectual influence of the last quarter of the 20th century"? The past century was marked by devastation caused by me n who thought they had a central vision, either economic or moral, that must be imposed on everyone. Hayek's intellectual blows to that sort of hubris are evermore relevant to a nascent world order seeking to establish so cial peace via relatively free global markets. Ebenstein has provided an educational look at the life and thought of a philosopher who bids fair to have as much intellectual relevance to this century as Marx had to the 20th. • Brian Doherty is an associate editor at Reason magazine. © 2001 The Washington Post Company End<{{ T' A<>E<>R Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the "democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects. [[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard, Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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