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Hayek was a great historian of economic thought. His reading and writing in the field of economic history were among the influences that shifted his academic research focus from technical economic theory to broader societal thought.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Placement of both Hayek and Mill in the liberal tradition is suspect to many historians of political thought for various reasons. First, Mill also expressed socialist sentiments, so to classify him as a liberal has seemed inaccurate to some more right-inclined liberals. Second, Hayek is sometimes considered more a conservative by left-inclined liberals, and not in the liberal tradition as it has evolved. Nonetheless, Mill and Hayek were the two greatest liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Time is basic in Hayek's concept of economic activity and the role of capital. Production occurs over time. The price system is in part an intertemporal valuing system.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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His emphasis on prediction of the principle or pattern leaves out a great deal. It is not merely that only general predictions can be made—it is that predictions often can be made only of best-guess probabilities, not even of patterns or principles. As Hayek mentioned, patterns can sometimes be expressed numerically as ranges.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Hayek's approach was largely Burkean. He saw much good in inherited institutions, and yet, at the same time, he also saw the desirability and necessity of change.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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The idea of unarticulated, nonverbal, or tacit knowledge led, in Hayek's mind, to the further idea that legal and moral institutions store, embed, and convey tacit knowledge. Hayek considered the most important of these institutional practices to be the rule of law. The rule of law allows individuals to lead rational lives.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Indeed, Hayek's later monetary work constitutes some of his most creative practical policy suggestions, though his thought in the area was, by his own admission, undeveloped.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Hayek's essential gist in capital theory was that capital is heterogeneous, that it cannot be put to many uses simultaneously or at different times. If these empirical assumptions as to capital's heterogeneity are false, then his theoretical system of economic activity falls. Hayek never established that changes in interest rates primarily and predominantly influence capital production of goods of higher order and their prices.
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Expressed egotism is, of course, no reason necessarily to disregard someone's work, but it is a warning signal. If someone can evaluate his work so poorly, is the work itself likely to be better? In many of his areas of intellectual interest, Popper's work is wanting.
Hayek did more to advance Popper professionally early in his career than anyone else, and Popper remembered his personal debt to Hayek. Over the years, he wrote him a number of appreciative letters.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Notwithstanding the predominant role in academic economic theory that Keynes and Keynesian economics achieved during the twentieth century, his basic outlook and policy recommendations were shaped by the particular experiences of the British Empire's waning years.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Among Mises's greatest personal attributes was courage. He had the force of will and character to maintain a position that he thought true even if almost no one else did.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Freedom or liberty referred originally to the state of not being a slave. Free men were not slaves. This idea of freedom had nothing to do with receiving government services or benefits, or the right to vote.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Hayek's emphasis on the signaling function of interest rates to guide economic production to longer or shorter periods of production informed and was the starting point for many of his contributions in spontaneous order and of the crucial role of prices to guide optimal economic activity.
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Government creates the market and law. Law is not the negation of liberty; it is its fulfillment. Right law is not a restriction on people's liberty; it makes their freedom possible. Right law is liberty; liberty is right law.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Before the middle 1930s, Hayek followed Mises in adopting an a priori conception of the theory of economic activity, although Hayek said he was never an a priorist philosophically. Following Mises, however, he thought at this time that economic theory is strictly deductive from premises. Economic theory consists of laws derived from the pure logic of choice of economic actors. Economics is not an empirical science, Hayek then thought.
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While it is possible to imagine Mises without Hayek, it is not possible to imagine Hayek without Mises.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Hayek was a philosophical utilitarian in his ultimate moral outlook.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Freud's emphasis on the unconscious is not entirely unrelated to Hayek's conception of spontaneous order and the idea of tacit, nonverbal knowledge distinct from verbal, explicit knowledge (or verbal statement). For the concepts of both the unconscious and spontaneous order, ideas of unarticulated knowledge and interpersonal knowledge and its communication are critical. There was more philosophical similarity between some of Hayek's and Freud's ideas than Hayek realized.
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Hayek possessed a towering intellect. At the same time, his intelligence was as much brittle as it was powerful.
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The history of the Austrian school remains unfinished, and what happens in the future may influence interpretations of the past as much as what has already occurred. An increasing number of economists, however, believe that a reconceptualization of the role the Austrian school has played in academic economics from the 1870s to the present would be more accurate than the prevailing view.
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Hayek agreed that Keynes saw himself as a preserver of capitalism rather than a destroyer.
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Hayek, highly influenced by Mach as a young man, began reading him immediately following his return from service in World War I. He remarked about four decades later that he was stimulated by Mach's work to study psychology and the physiology of the senses, though his interest in these areas derived as much from disagreement as agreement with Mach's work.
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Both Hayek and Locke thought that this is best achieved by limiting government's potential actions and restricting these potential actions to known general rules applicable to all. Both sought a government of rules rather than commands, the latter of which, by their nature, are not known in advance and may be arbitrary—not applicable to all. Hayek's goal was the society of law.
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The core ideas in Hayek's metaphysical and methodological thought were, in the former, that reality is complex; and in the latter, that there should be some empirical corroboration for statements about events in the realm of nature.
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Hayek's ultimate social goal—his utopia—was the unification of all humankind in one society.
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Alan O. Ebenstein
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Alan Oliver Ebenstein is an American political scientist, educator and author, known from his biographical works on Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
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