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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
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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.
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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.
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Keynes's essential view was that the laissez-faire conditions that characterized the nineteenth century were dead.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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Hayek opposed not merely Keynes's policy recommendations, but his technical method.
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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.
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The German-speaking countries have, of course, a different history from the English-speaking world, and this background greatly influenced Hayek's thought.
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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.
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The German idealist philosophical tradition from which Hayek emerged is usually held to begin with Gottfried Leibniz.
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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.
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Stemming from the Germanic philosophical heritage, Hayek was likely to place more emphasis on the act of knowing than on objects themselves. Hayek ultimately followed Kant in his ontological conception of reality—he thought that mind impresses order on existence.
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Hayek abhorred Hegel, considering his work virtually without value. At the same time, Hegel's emphasis on mind and idealism indicate the philosophical heritage from which Hayek sprang.
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Keynes ultimately placed his hopes for good government in exceptional men. The focus in Hayek's work was rules.
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Hayek did not believe that the same sort of prediction—and therefore control—that is possible in the natural sciences is attainable in the realm of society. At best, he thought, only a pattern of the future can be predicted in social life. He thought that to attempt to formulate laws of societal development akin to the laws of the physical sciences, as Marx attempted, is doomed to failure.
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Hayek ripped G. W. F. Hegel in The Counter-Revolution of Science's third part for his historicism —the idea, in Hayek's terminology, that history moves in set and predictable stages. He considered this idea fatally flawed and societies that were based on it to be unsuccessful, unproductive, and unfree. Historicism denies free will. The future is what we make of it.
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It is likely that Hayek was influenced to consider the role of prices in economic activity more substantially than he otherwise would have as a result of Mises's emphasis on the necessity of prices to engage in optimal economic activity. Nevertheless, Hayek stressed that his ideas in economic theory were his own.
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Hayek was in many respects a philosophical idealist, in that he believed that ideas rule the world. It was the idea of constructivism, he thought, that has such destructive consequences. If he could combat this idea, then much good would result.
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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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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