Hayek on Mill is a collection of decades worth of correspondence between John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill, gathered by F. A. Hayek. It showcases the intersections between Hayek and Mill and also brings together Hayek's related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

"The studies of which this book is the result have from the beginning been guided by and in the end confirmed the somewhat old-fashioned conviction of the author that it is human ideas which govern the development of human affairs," Hayek ...

This is a three-part study of the relations between law and liberty.

Every student of the twentieth century has heard both of the great Viennese economist Friedrich von Hayek and of the equally great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But what isn't well known is that the two were distant cousins and that, shortly after Wittgenstein's death in 1951, Hayek set out to write a biography of his cousin. The project was derailed by Wittgenstein family members, who felt it was to soon to publish such a work - especially one like (...) Hayek's, so candid about his cousin's difficulties and depressions. But Hayek's draft acquired an underground readership, and Wittgensteins biographers have used it extensively. Here finally, is the text of that work itself - a true goldmine in being one great thinker's view of another, whom he knew personally, even if not well. Hayek's account has the great merit of being close to its subject; the draft, moreover sheds light, not only on Wittgenstein but on Hayek as well. (shrink)

Otto Neurath experienced an adventurous as well as dangerous life. Already in his childhood, he was fascinated by his father’s huge library. He was especially impressed by images and illustrations since Ancient times and the French Encyclopédie, which inspired his lifelong dealing with picture language. This became manifest with the founding of his “Social and Economic Museum of Vienna” and the invention of his “Vienna Method of Pictorial Language,” later on renamed ISOTYPE. In the flourishing period of “Red Vienna” he (...) acquired a lot of books in several languages covering his research fields and practical activities as a social reformer, teacher and museologist, philosopher, sociologist and historian of science. With his forced migrations from Vienna and The Hague, this most valuable collection of books and brochures was partly destroyed, dispersed, and aryanized, when Austro-Fascism came into power in Austria and Hitler’s troops invaded into the Netherlands. Luckily, Otto Neurath and some members of his family and collaborators could survive and save parts of this unique collection of books which mirrors the education and intellectual background of the polymath Neurath in Dutch and British exile. Here, he again bought and published books continuing his activities for the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism as well as the Unity of Science and the Isotype movements covering some 3000 books in 1945. Three typical case studies from the Neurath library are provided covering economics, philosophy, and literature: Neurath’s annotations in books of Friedrich A. von Hayek, Karl Popper, and the writer Stefan Zweig. (shrink)

SummaryFriedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi corresponded with each other for the best part of thirty years. They had shared interests that included science, social science, economics, epistemology, history of ideas and political philosophy. Studying their correspondence and related writings, this article shows that Hayek and Polanyi were committed Liberals but with different understandings of liberty, the forces that endanger liberty, and the policies required to rescue it.

Friedrich Hayek’s account of “spontaneous order” has generated increasing interest in recent decades. His argument for the superiority of the market in distributing knowledge without the need for central oversight has appealed to progressive democratic theorists, who are wary of the hubris of state planning and attracted to possibilities for self-organization, and to Foucaultians, who have long counseled political theory to cut off the King’s head. A spontaneous social order, organized by an invisible hand, would appear to dispense (...) with arbitrary power and foster creativity and individual liberty. This article challenges this view by highlighting the centrality of submission to Hayek’s account of spontaneous order. It shows that Hayek struggles to obscure the providentialism underpinning the account of social order he derives from Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, his own account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible market forces. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek's defense and analysis of the liberal state built on rule of law is both a moral and a scientific enterprise. The author shows that Hayek favors rule of law because it seeks to protect moral agency. It is procedurally rather than morally restrictive because men cannot easily know moral truth. Markets are included in Hayek's analysis not because they produce wealth but because they promote moral agency.

Une analyse minutieuse du dernier ouvrage de Hayek publié quatre ans avant sa mort, soit en 1988 , permet de mettre au Jour les tenants et aboutissants de la perspective évolutionnaire épousée par Hayek en matière d'économie politique. Examinant d'abord le concept d'ordre spontané, exposant ensuite le fonctionnement de Véconomie marchande comme système en expansion continue, je montre alors comment s'articulent pour Hayek compétence économique et compétence épistémique d'un côté, puis coordination économique et compétence morale de l'autre. (...) L'analyse fait apercevoir que, fondamentalement, l'optique de Hayek est évolutionnaire parce qu 'elle est résolument populationnelle, ce que les commentateurs de Hayek ont plutôt ignoré jusqu'ici, ce qui fournit l'occasion de passer en revue les critiques adressées par Hayek au principe de population de Malthus .Four years before his death, Hayek published a book in which he particulates the main reasons for adopting an evolutionary point of view in economics. This paper tries precisely to systematize these reasons as clearly as possible. I begin by a systematic discussion of the concept of spontaneous order. I then look at what mainly defines the catallaxy as a still extending market order. Following this line of theoretical argument, I then try to show how for Hayek economic competence and epistemic competence are to be seen as developing together in a free market economy. Furthermore, 1 try to show how for Hayek economic coordination and moral competence are to be seen as the unintended results ofrule-governed individual dimensions of behaviour mutually. (shrink)

Cet article revient en détail sur la critique du libéralisme de Friedrich Hayek délivrée par Raymond Aron, sur une période qui court des années 1940 au début des années 1980. A partir d’une relecture croisée des principaux textes de ces deux philosophes du second xx e siècle, il cherche à montrer que leurs oppositions – sur la place laissée aux libertés économiques, sur la définition même du concept de liberté et sur la manière d’envisager la démocratie – révèlent (...) l’existence de deux voies profondément divergentes au sein du néolibéralisme contemporain : l’une qui se fonde sur un attachement primordial au marché et qui s’accompagne d’une méfiance prononcée à l’égard du régime démocratique ; l’autre qui se construit à l’inverse sur la base d’une confiance en la démocratie, conçue comme point d’aboutissement du libéralisme, et qui conduit à ne pas absolutiser le marché. Un réexamen de cette opposition peut ainsi permettre de sortir d’une vision étriquée et caricaturale du néolibéralisme, qui le réduit abusivement à une fermeture de l’espace des possibles politiques. (shrink)

Recent studies of Friedrich Hayek have focused on his theorization of spontaneous order and its relationship to his views on freedom and market individualism. For many scholars, the impersonal nature of Hayek’s spontaneous order, which optimally coordinates human action without human coordination, and/or Hayek’s contention that freedom consists of the exercise of individual choice in a market, reveals Hayek’s neoliberal project to replace or erase the social domain of human life and activity. This article makes (...) the claim that two different, but related, versions of the social exist in Hayek’s writings. The logic of his first and prominent view of social order as spontaneous order depends, I argue, upon a second account of the social, found in Hayek’s writings on money, which consists of forms of conscious and collective social integration and subject formation that the first view requires but cannot account for. In this way, Hayek’s social order is sustained not spontaneously but by money-based collective activities and social subjectivities that make it possible, and his neoliberal project thus depends on fundamental, if disavowed, connections between the social and the political. (shrink)

This paper compares Hayek and Polanyi on spontaneous social order. Although Hayek is widely believed to have first both coined the name and explicated the idea of ?spontaneous order?, it is in fact Michael Polanyi who did so. Numerous differences emerge between the two thinkers. The characterisation of spontaneous order in Hayek, for example, involves different types of freedom to those advanced by Polanyi. Whereas Hayek (usually) portrays spontaneous order as a single entity, which is equivalent (...) to free society as a whole ? the free?catallactic society ? Polanyi by contrast is disposed to conceive of spontaneous orders as sub?units or components within free society as a whole. These and other aspects of their thought ? including the distinction between spontaneous and planned social orders ? are reviewed and criticised. (shrink)

Aarons recognizes the usefulnes of markets, but argues that without some conscious human control they are unsustainable and would ultimately destroy the conditions for human life on the planet.

Aarons recognizes the usefulnes of markets, but argues that without some conscious human control they are unsustainable and would ultimately destroy the conditions for human life on the planet.

Con el objetivo de cuestionar aquellas interpretaciones que identifican la comprensión liberal del Estado con una estructura organizativa reducida a su mínima expresión cuyo desempeño debe quedar supeditado a las dinámicas económico-productivas, el presente artículo se propone revisar críticamente las propuestas de dos figuras destacadas dentro de la tradición del liberalismo: Adam Smith y Friedrich Hayek. Para ello se compara el modo en el que estos autores articulan el concepto de Estado sobre un plano operativo, en particular, en (...) lo referido al principio de “gobierno limitado”. Se identifican las funciones adjudicadas a las instituciones públicas y se caracteriza el modo en el que se presentan las relaciones entre la órbita estatal y la órbita social. Por último, se destacan continuidades y diferencias entre ambas posturas. Sobre esa base, se proponen algunas reflexiones en torno a la eventual distinción entre un liberalismo ético-político y un liberalismo económico. (shrink)