Friedrich Hayek

“I very well remember Hayek's visit to Cambridge on his way to the London School. He expounded his theory and covered a black-board with his triangles. The whole argument, as we could see later, consisted in confusing the current rate of investment with the total stock of capital goods, but we could not make it out at the time.”

“I think it's a scandal that he's not one of the absolute required names on political theory reading lists for modern political thought or 20th century political thought. I know this gets into some sensitive terrain, but he absolutely should be there alongside Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt. And certainly should be there over Berlin, Oakeshott, Strauss, and Schmitt. Obviously, more is better, and I want students to read everything, but we have to make choices, and I'd put H. ahead of Berlin et al.”

“As someone who came to Fredrick von Hayek comparatively late in life, I’m still catching up with him…Indeed, many of the insights I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings on the frontier of evolutionary biology and economics it turns out Hayek had long before me…The field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek quite badly.”

“Well … I've always been a voracious reader — I have read the economic views of von Mises and Hayek, and … Bastiat … I know about Cobden and Bright in England — and the elimination of the corn laws and so forth, the great burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed.”

“I have created myself a kind of generational gulf between you and myself. Although you were only 3 years old when I was born, you became, as I now realize, a kind of father figure....[E]ven now, when I am 82, and we have been friends for so many years, you still are! And, strangely enough, you yourself...described your feelings towards me as those towards a young man who has made good.”

“I think that I have learned more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski … but not even excepting Russell.”

“I can testify from personal experience to the immense stimulus and direction which Hayek's migration to this country [Great Britain] gave to economic research in the 1930s, not only in London and economics faculties throughout the United Kingdom, but also in the international world of scholarship.”

“Arguably the most influential economist of this century.”

“Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market. (footnote 4: The original contributions were those of Hayek (1937 and 1945)).”

“Friedrich A. von Hayek, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, says that on the whole he approves of the economic policy of the Reagan Administration.Yet, when he discusses particulars, Professor von Hayek - a conservative who is best known as an unrelenting opponent of Socialism and lesser forms of economic interventionism -sounds less than approving. He applauds the determination in Washington and London to stop inflation but laments that both Governments seek gradual progress. "You have to do it rapidly and drastically," he says.”

“If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.”

“He relapsed into a crude identification of socialism with Soviet-style central planning, even though, in the West at any rate, there were very few actual socialists who continued to accept that equation.”

“Although the democratic left is unlikely to find his views very palatable, at least one lesson can be learned by contemplating Hayek’s life. He shows us what can sometimes be achieved by sticking doggedly to your guns, ignoring intellectual fashion, and waiting until your moment comes. Hayek had only one tune to play, the virtues of the free-market economy as opposed to central planning, but he played it with panache, could improvise longer or shorter versions as the occasion demanded, and above all never gave up practicing.”

“All of this, of course, establishes Hayek's primacy over Hicks in the origin of the notion of intertemporal equilibrium.”

“It is likely that many modern economists would have no difficulty accepting Hayek's statement of the problem (of macroeconomics) as roughly equivalent to their own. Whether or not this is so, I wish … to argue that it should be so, or that the most rapid progress toward a coherent and useful aggregate economic theory will result from the acceptance of the problem statement as advanced by [Hayek].”

“Although he is very probably unaware of this book and of my work in general, I want to express a very belated thanks to Friedrich A. Hayek. His work had much more of an influence on me than I realized during the writing of the First Edition [of The End of Liberalism] I neither began nor ended as a Hayekist but instead found myself confirming, by process of elimination and discovery, many of his fears about the modern liberal state.”

“Friedrich Hayek is the twentieth-century social theorist who, probably more than any other, found himself vindicated by events — if not wholly, then at least in his central contention. He is also the one who, more than any other, himself exercised a significant political influence.”

“In the 20th century, three world wars facilitated a Communist revolution, a Fascist backlash and the subsequent collapse of both. The weakness of bureaucratic information flows (relative to market-based competitors) undermined Communist economies – a point emphasized by Frederick Hayek, the co-leader (with Murray Rothbard) of the fourth generation Austrian School of Economics. Flows of information and disinformation played pivotal roles in the First, Second and Third (that is, Cold) World Wars.”

“Hayek’s views should be considered because, in addressing institutional questions, he has not made the mistake of confining the problems of liberalism within national boundaries.”

“The central dilemma of Hayek's political philosophy is, given his view of the limited role reason can play in social life, how is it possible to mount a systematic defence of liberalism without falling victim to the very kinds of rationalism he criticises? This difficulty stays unresolved in Hayek’s political thought because it is informed by two incompatible assumptions about what reason can achieve.”