Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.
Source: The Intellectuals and Socialism (1949)
[link] #26The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.
Source: The Road to Serfdom (1944) #65
It is no accident that many abstract rules, such as those treating individual responsibility and several property, are associated with economics. Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interactions comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our vision or our capacity to design. Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon a method of ordering human economic cooperation that exceeds the limits of our knowledge and perception. His 'invisible hand' had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led - for example by the pricing system in market exchange - to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend. In our economic activities we do not know the needs, which we satisfy, nor the sources of the things, which we get. Almost all of us serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions - economic, legal, and moral - into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood in the sense in which we understand how the things that we manufacture function. - Modern economics explains how such an extended order can come into being, and how it itself constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone an individual, could know as a whole, possess or control. Man's knowledge, as Smith knew, is dispersed.
Source: The Fatal Conceit (1988) #129
Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (1960) #254
We shall not prevent the gradual advance of totalitarian control if we do not succeed in defeating the philosophy which produces it.
Source: The Prospects of Freedom (1946)
[link] #534If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
Source: The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
[link] #584About F. A. Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek CH FBA (8 May 1899 — 23 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian economist, legal theorist and philosopher who is best known for his defence of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for their work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his prize.
Hayek served in World War I during his teenage years and said that this experience in the war and his desire to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war drew him into economics. At the University of Vienna, he studied economics, eventually receiving his doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and in political science in 1923. He subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany; he became a British subject in 1938. Hayek's academic life was mostly spent at the London School of Economics, and later at the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. He is widely considered a leader of the Austrian School of Economics, although he also had close connections with the Chicago School of Economics. Hayek was also a major social theorist and political philosopher of the 20th century and as the co-founder of Mont Pelerin Society he contributed to the revival of classical liberalism in the post-war era. His most popular work, The Road to Serfdom, has sold over 2.25 million copies (as of 2020).
Hayek was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1984 for his academic contributions to economics. He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush. In 2011, his article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" was selected as one of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years.
Additional Resources
Friedrich August Hayek - Econlib
