Hayek: A Collaborative Biography

In the second edition of Capitalism and Freedom, Milton and Rose Friedman (1982, viii) reflected on the

transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 — two men with essentially the same programme and the same message.

In his Nobel Prize Lecture on ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’, Friedrich von Hayek (1974) proclaimed:

We cannot be grateful enough to such modern philosophers of science as Sir Karl Popper for giving us a test by which we can distinguish between what we may accept as scientific and what not — a test which I am sure some doctrines now widely accepted as scientific would not pass.¹

Hayek was at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962 and worked as part of the Committee on Social Thought. Despite his 12-year tenure at Chicago and his eventual influence on the trajectory of post-war economics in the United States, the historical record indicates that Hayek had little influence on the rise of post-war Chicago School during his time there.¹ Most of the seminal figures of the post-war Chicago School — Milton Friedman, Allen Wallis, and Aaron Director — had all been hired in 1946, four years before Hayek arrived at Chicago. When Hayek came, because he joined the Committee on Social Thought, he did not work in the Economics Department, the Law School, or the Business School — the three pillars of the post-war Chicago School. Moreover, Hayek principally focused on political philosophy, not economics, while he served as part of the Committee.

In May 2013, The Nation published Corey Robin’s article, ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek’, a wide-ranging examination of the philosophical, political, and cultural origins of one wing of modern economics.¹ The article provoked an instant controversy, generating more than 20 online responses within less than a month and a round-table discussion in New York City. The criticism was wide-ranging; it came from the Left and the Right. In June 2013, Robin replied to his critics with two lengthy posts at his blog and the social sciences and humanities blog Crooked Timber.² The socialist magazine Jacobin then compiled the two replies and published them as a single post.³ What follows is Robin’s original article and his reply to his critics as it was published at Jacobin. Footnotes have been added to the original article; hyperlinks have been converted to footnotes in Robin’s reply. Awkward or clumsy passages in the reply have been revised, as have language and argumentation that are more appropriate to the blogosphere than a scholarly publication.

Among the many foes that Friedrich Hayek pitted himself against, trade unionism posed a particularly vexing challenge. A movement that had sprung from civil society rather than the state, organized labour appeared to embody virtues that Hayek himself valued: self-reliance, associational autonomy, and a vigorous defence of freedom from coercion. Yet Hayek was unmoved by these affinities and instead became a fierce critic of the labour movement. In elaborating his critique of unions in the 1950s and 1960s, Hayek drew on a burgeoning free market literature that sought to add greater intellectual ballast to the Right’s traditional suspicions about trade unionism. An important contributor to this literature was the British and South African economist, W. H. Hutt.

My passion for free-market, classical-liberal, and libertarian scholarly research and education — in fact, my entire career — began by my coming to know and admire the work of Friedrich A. Hayek. Hayek’s impact on my life occurred well before I first had the great pleasure of meeting and working with him, and it has been a recurring influence now for decades. At times along the way, Hayek has been a role model, a signpost, and a companion in my involvement in the creation of new institutions, landmark books, and countless other educational projects as well as in my own and others’ commitment to spreading liberty throughout the globe. My most intensive connection was in the mid-1980s, when I became involved in a collected works project headed by William W. Bartley III that Hayek saw as the culmination of the latter part of his career. Instead, it was beset by mishandling, confusion, hubris, petty rivalries and even duplicity, to the extent that it raises serious questions about whether the resulting books are accurate reflections of Hayek’s thinking. Before I delve into the actual record of this strange tale, whose details I am presenting for the first time in this paper, some background is necessary to clarify the development of the project and the connections of the people involved.

In 1984 I wrote an essay about Friedrich Hayek’s (1944) The Road to Serfdom on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the book’s publication. I was invited to that year’s meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society at Cambridge University to receive a prize for the essay. I met with Hayek not only at the time of the award, but also at the hotel where he was staying. We discussed some of the ideas that became the basis for Volume I of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), edited — and possibly co-written — by William Warren Bartley III (Ebenstein 2005a; 2005b).