Alan O. Ebenstein Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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
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
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
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
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
While it is possible to imagine Mises without Hayek, it is not possible to imagine Hayek without Mises.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek was a philosophical utilitarian in his ultimate moral outlook.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek possessed a towering intellect. At the same time, his intelligence was as much brittle as it was powerful.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek agreed that Keynes saw himself as a preserver of capitalism rather than a destroyer.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek's ultimate social goal—his utopia—was the unification of all humankind in one society.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Although Hayek would have protested being characterized as a democratic welfare statist in The Constitution of Liberty, this is what he was. While he favored less government rather than more, government at the local level rather than national level, the provision of social welfare through private charitable organizations rather than government at any level, and the private competitive provision of government services, there was much in his work that any modern, twentieth-century liberal could support.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek expressed more fully and deeply than Mises the epistemological argument for free market order. The crucial issue for Hayek became not that without prices individuals cannot calculate (though he thought this to be the case), but that the division of knowledge renders centralized control of an economy or society impossible.

Alan O. Ebenstein
He did not think that all knowledge is precise. There is such a thing, particularly in the social sciences, as complex knowledge that is dependent on indeterminate variables and which thus is not susceptible to exact prediction. He sometimes referred to the lesser prediction to which knowledge such as the effects of societal rules is susceptible as pattern prediction. Where prediction is limited, control is limited. Correct prediction precedes control. The greater the accuracy of prediction, the greater the control that is capable of being exercised.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Keynes's essential view was that the laissez-faire conditions that characterized the nineteenth century were dead.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek opposed not merely Keynes's policy recommendations, but his technical method.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek's work in philosophy can be considered from another perspective than its methodology. When Hayek wrote that his philosophical studies should precede his political studies, he meant that in order to explain the sort of political system he favored, it was necessary to have greater understanding of the transmission and communication of information and knowledge. This is why he wished to travel to Italy and Greece. He thought that he might understand nonverbal knowledge better in doing so and might better understand the role of institutions in transmitting knowledge and information.

Alan O. Ebenstein
The German-speaking countries have, of course, a different history from the English-speaking world, and this background greatly influenced Hayek's thought.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek expressed the greatest praise for Popper. Whether this was Hayek's ultimate view or a reflection of a deep, though subordinate, strain of personal modesty and humility that ran through him is an open question. Hayek's support was vital in Popper's career. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hayek was involved with an unsuccessful effort to obtain the Nobel Prize in Literature for Popper.

Alan O. Ebenstein
The German idealist philosophical tradition from which Hayek emerged is usually held to begin with Gottfried Leibniz.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Hayek's view was that all the knowledge that is possible of a circumstance is a theory of the circumstance—that is, there is no such thing as pure sensation. There is, rather, a theory of sensation.

Alan O. Ebenstein