Friedrich Hayek

The conservatives have already accepted a large part of the collectivist creed — a creed that has governed policy for so long that many of its institutions have come to be accepted as a matter of course and have become a source of pride to "conservative" parties who created them. Here the believer in freedom cannot but conflict with the conservative and take an essentially radical position, directed against popular prejudices, entrenched positions, and firmly established privileges. Follies and abuses are no better for having long been established principles of folly.

Our inspiration was less Rab Butler's Industrial Charter than books like Colm Brogan's anti-socialist satire, Our New Masters … and Hayek's powerful Road to Serfdom, dedicated to 'the socialists of all parties'. Such books not only provided crisp, clear analytical arguments against socialism, demonstrating how its economic theories were connected to the then depressing shortages of our daily lives; but by their wonderful mockery of socialist follies, they also gave us the feeling that the other side simply could not win in the end. That is a vital feeling in politics; it eradicates past defeats and builds future victories. It left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty.

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

The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig — with the stress on the "old."

George Nash rightly sees the publication of Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 as the first shot in the intellectual battle that was to turn the tide in favor of conservatism. Geoffrey Perret saw the book as "the intellectual success story of the war."

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

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.

Another colleague had also prepared a paper arguing that the middle way was the pragmatic path for the Conservative party to take … Before he had finished speaking to his paper, the new Party Leader [Margaret Thatcher] reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty". Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. "This", she said sternly, "is what we believe", and banged Hayek down on the table.

There were four years, 1931-1935, when I was myself a member of [Hayek's] seminar in London; it has left a deep mark on my thinking. … At the end of the discussions in that seminar … we were, I believe, on the point of taking what now seems to me to be a decisive step. I was, at least, on the point of taking it myself. There is evidence for that in my "Value and Capital", much of the groundwork for which was done before I left London.

[Hayek's] equilibrium theory offered a wealth of suggestions that were to be taken up in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s. The idea of intertemporal equilibrium, which was to be precisely defined in axiomatic terms by Arrow and Debreu, took shape in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s.

What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.

Hayek's criticisms of market socialism … are for the most part on the mark.

The day may not be far off when authority, by adding appropriate drugs to our water supply or by some other similar device, will be able to elate or depress, stimulate or paralyze, the minds of whole populations for its own purposes.

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible…Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. 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. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

I am in full agreement, also, with Dr. Hayek's rebuttal of John Stuart Mill's well-known dictum that "there cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money," which he expresses admirably in the following passage from his last lecture: "it means also that the task of monetary theory is a much wider one than is commonly assumed; that its task is nothing less than to cover a second time the whole field which is treated by pure theory under the assumption of barter, and to investigate what changes in the conclusions of pure theory are made necessary by the introduction of indirect exchange. The first step towards a solution of this problem is to release monetary theory from the bonds which a too narrow conception of its task has created."

Before we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them.

Adam Smith, the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics till Hayek and Friedman.

Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.

At the time of his death, F. A. Hayek was unquestionably the world's preeminent spokesman for classical liberalism and its most important thinker.