Friedrich August Von Hayek Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) is best known as a leader of the Austrian school of economics, but he also made important contributions to political theory. He was a staunch advocate of the free market, and from that position he developed his larger notion of spontaneous order—the idea that social orders work best when they evolve out of the apparently chaotic interaction of individuals, with no central control by the government and no central planning by scientific experts. Hayek maintained that, compared to governments, markets better discover and coordinate the vast amount of fragmented and dispersed knowledge in a society—a process vital to society’s progress.

Hayek was born on May 8, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. At the University of Vienna, he met Ludwig von Mises, the chief representative of the Austrian school, who turned him from a prosocialist to a procapitalist position and became the most significant influence on his intellectual development. Hayek’s technical work in economics centered on issues of monetary theory, the capital structure of production, and the business cycle. In 1931, he joined the London School of Economics and later taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Freiburg.

In 1944, Hayek published what became his most famous and widely read book, The Road to Serfdom. At a time when Europe seemed polarized between fascism and communism, he reminded people that both are species of socialism. The book created enormous controversy by suggesting that all forms of socialism inevitably become totalitarian and thus are incompatible with political freedom and democracy. Hayek remained controversial throughout his life, but his growing reputation as a major social thinker solidified when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. His most important books from a political standpoint are The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979). In the former, Hayek advances the classical liberal ideal of the social order, especially its principles of limited government, rule of law, private property, and economic freedom. In contrast to Mises, however, Hayek makes several concessions to the principles of the welfare state. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, he offers his fullest articulation of the idea of spontaneous order. He defends the British common-law tradition against legislative utilitarianism. Hayek endorses principles of justice that have evolved over time in judges’ responses to concrete legal situations, and rejects the idea that the law should be handed down by a legislature based on abstract reasoning about the just social order. In his preference for the concrete over the abstract and for what has stood the test of time, Hayek harks back to the political thinking of philosopher David Hume and political theorist Edmund Burke.

By the time of his death on March 23, 1992, in Freiburg, Germany, Hayek was generally credited with being—along with American economist Milton Friedman—the intellectual driving force behind the free market revolution in government policy led by President Ronald Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain in the 1980s. Having predicted the collapse of communism, Hayek became a hero to many in East Central and Eastern Europe striving to create a postcommunist world after 1989. Rejecting the utopian notion that government can solve all human problems, Hayek was one of the foremost critics of collectivism and champions of economic and political liberty in the twentieth century.

Bibliography:

Caldwell, Bruce. Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Cubeddo, Raimondo. The Philosophy of the Austrian School. London: Routledge, 1993.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Counter-Revolution in Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980.
Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.
Kukathas, Chandran. Hayek and Modern Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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