Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger: Hayek: A Life 1899–1950

The first volume of Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger’s Hayek: A Life, covering 1899–1950 in 730 pages, is to be warmly welcomed. It is a magnificent volume. The work that has gone into it may well not be obvious. Hayek published extensively, and on a wide range of subjects. There is a large archive of Hayek’s papers at the Hoover Institution archive at Stanford. But Hayek regularly discarded his correspondence when he moved. One consequence is that, for example, the Hoover collection only has copies of Hayek’s correspondence with Wesley Clair Mitchell (the importance of Hayek’s contacts with whom I will discuss, below) because it was supplied to Hayek subsequently, by Columbia University. While an initial letter which Keynes sent to Hayek giving his reactions to The Road to Serfdom (1944) is only in the London School of Economics archive. It had been found, discarded, in an office that Hayek once occupied at the L.S.E. Furthermore, Hayek regularly discarded manuscripts and proofs of his publications once they were published, and frequently did not retain the manuscripts of talks or public lectures. In addition, Hayek’s publications and correspondence (which often have to be retrieved from other archives and collections) are conducted in both German and English. The authors have done a remarkable job of drawing on a vast amount of additional and disparate material. …