Hayek’s intellectual contributions

Throughout his life Hayek criticized socialism, often contrasting it with a system of free markets. Although his earlier critiques were based on economic grounds, he later drew upon political, ethical, and other arguments in making his case.

His economic arguments themselves had many dimensions. Hayek noted, for example, that market prices, which reflect the appraisal of millions of market participants, are essential for entrepreneurial calculation; they allow firm owners to choose the most affordable combinations of technologically feasible inputs. Hayek asserted that in a world of constant change—in which every change of price causes market participants to change their demand and supply, which lead to other adjustments, ad infinitum—no constructed system can match the ability of the market process to adjust continually to the changes. He argued that the market system itself constitutes a “discovery procedure,” in that it provides incentives for the discovery of new products and processes while also disseminating information to market participants (e.g., consumers). This occurs because entrepreneurs have incentives to be alert to and to exploit newly discovered or created knowledge. Hayek maintained that a market system aids in the coordination of plans and the correction of errors in a world in which knowledge is dispersed, tacit, and specific to time and place and in which individual beliefs may be wrong. Obversely, price-fixing hinders coordination; attempts to gather knowledge centrally do not permit the best use of localized and tacit knowledge; and no system provides as much feedback and incentives for the correction of errors in perception as does a market system.

The occasional stridency of Hayek’s arguments must be understood in the context of their time. In the late 1930s many intellectuals believed that capitalism had failed and that only through economic planning could Western democracies avoid totalitarianism, be it of the fascist or communist varieties. “Planning for freedom” became the slogan of the day among the elites of western Europe.

It was this political stance that Hayek countered in The Road to Serfdom and other publications. He began from the premise that in civil society every individual pursues his own set of values. Many forms of planning, however, implicitly assume that a common set of values exists; otherwise it would be impossible to gain consensus on how resources are to be allocated. Hayek argued that without a shared set of values, the planners would inevitably impose some set of values on society. In other words, government planners could not accomplish their tasks without exerting control beyond the economic to the political realm.

Hayek felt, then, that his opponents had it exactly backwards. Planning would inhibit rather than promote freedom. Only when a free market system is allied with democratic political institutions would freedom of choice be allowed to persist.

In The Constitution of Liberty and elsewhere Hayek identified the social institutions that he felt would most effectively achieve the goal of liberty. He argued that a system of free markets—in a democratic polity, with a private sphere of individual activity that is protected by a strong constitution, with well-defined and enforced property rights, all governed by the rule of law, in which laws are prospective, equally enforced, abstractly stated, and stable—will support the set of institutions that both permits individuals to pursue their own values and allows them to make the best use of their own localized knowledge. In Law, Legislation and Liberty he argued that the concept of “social justice” that was often invoked in defending the policies of the modern welfare state was without meaning because it focused on outcomes, rather than actions, and further that special interests are bound to manipulate such moral redistribution schemes to enrich themselves.

In composing a final set of arguments against socialism, Hayek made a distinction between “spontaneous orders” and “constructed orders.” He averred that many social institutions—among them language, money, the common law, the moral code, and trade—are instances of spontaneous orders. These orders arise as a result of human action, and they come about as a result of individuals pursuing goals, but they are not the product of human design, because no one intended that they arise. They survive because they confer benefits on the societies that practice them. Hayek claimed that due to their “scientistic prejudices” those whom he dubbed “rationalist constructivists” neither recognized that institutions could (and in fact do) arise spontaneously nor understood how these institutions could benefit society. By comparison, “constructed orders” often contain flaws because attempts by planners to redesign, create, or plan social institutions often have unintended, unanticipated, or adverse consequences. Hayek linked his discussion of spontaneous orders to his earlier insights about knowledge with the claim that spontaneously formed orders often are able to adapt more readily in environments characterized by rapid change and widespread uncertainty due to the dispersion of knowledge. Constructed orders lack such adaptability.

Hayek’s economic arguments concerning the viability of socialism have proved telling. By the turn of the 21st century, there were few advocates of central planning among economists, and even proponents of market socialism have come to incorporate considerations of knowledge, information, and the structure of incentives identified by Hayek when they attempt to design new systems.

Hayek’s political arguments in The Road to Serfdom have had a more controversial reception. Much turns on whether one reads Hayek as making a prediction (in which case his predictions concerning the Western democracies have not occurred) or as providing a warning of the dangers of the loss of individual liberties and the insistence on a set of common values under socialist systems. (Hayek himself insisted that the latter was his intent.) Finally, his arguments concerning spontaneous orders have struck a chord among those interested in the study of complex adaptive systems.

Even in his early writings, Hayek stressed the limited role of empirical work in economics. This was due in part to his affiliation with the Austrian school, whose work had been shaped by a “battle over methods” (Methodenstreit) with the German historical school of economists at the turn of the 20th century. The Austrian side had insisted that a theoretical (as opposed to a purely empirical) approach to the social sciences was both possible and fruitful and that all observation presupposed an underlying theoretical framework. In later decades the Austrian economists opposed the ascendance of positivist and other radically empiricist doctrines within the philosophy of science.

Hayek made his initial criticisms of these approaches in his essay Scientism and the Study of Society (1952). In later works Hayek began distinguishing between sciences that study simple phenomena versus those that study complex phenomena. In the latter fields, he maintained, precise predictions cannot be made; only “pattern predictions” or “explanations of the principle” by which a mechanism operates are possible. Just as evolutionary biologists are, with the theory of natural selection, able to explain speciation but not predict the specific instances of species change in the future, so economists can explain the principles under which price formation occurs without being able to predict the future course of prices.

As with all of his work, Hayek’s methodological ideas were formed against the backdrop of intense debates over the viability and appropriateness of alternative political and economic systems. His best ideas transcend the circumstances of their formation. If Hayek has a legacy, one part is a constant reminder that human knowledge is limited and that an understanding of this limitation is the first step toward wisdom. Another part of his message is that many social institutions persist precisely because they enable people to survive and prosper in a world in which knowledge is limited and that attempts to create institutions anew, often undertaken with the best of intentions, have been the cause of much human misery.

The starting point for further exploration of Hayek’s work is the multivolume series The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, ed. by W.W. Bartley et al. (1988– ). Hayek’s contributions on economics and knowledge may be found in Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (1948, reissued 1996), and New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (1978, reissued 1985). Hayek’s writings on the social sciences as fields that study complex phenomena can be found in Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967, reprinted 1980); many of his ideals are expressed in the same book. Within the secondary literature, two early surveys of Hayek’s multifarious contributions are Norman P. Barry, Hayek’s Social and Economic Philosophy (1979); and John Gray, Hayek on Liberty, 3rd ed. (1998). G.R. Steele, The Economics of Friedrich Hayek (1993, reissued 1996), surveys Hayek’s economic theory. Chandran Kukathas, Hayek and Modern Liberalism (1989); and Jeremy Shearmur, Hayek and After: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme, (1996) provide overviews of his political philosophy. No authorized biography of Hayek exists, but the following may be profitably consulted: Friedrich A. Hayek, Nobel Prize Winning Economist: Oral History Transcript (1983), an interview conducted in 1978 under the auspices of the Oral History Program, University Library, UCLA; Bruce J. Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (2003); Friedrich A. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed. by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (1994); John Raybould (compiler), Hayek: A Commemorative Album (1998); and Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001, reissued 2003). More on the development of the Austrian school and in particular the revival of interest in Austrian ideas in the United States in the 1970s is presented in Karen I. Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition (1994, reissued 1998).