Hayek, Hutt and the Trade Unions

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.