Alan O. Ebenstein - Hayek Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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 was a philosophical utilitarian in his ultimate moral outlook.

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

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

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

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
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
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
Keynes ultimately placed his hopes for good government in exceptional men. The focus in Hayek's work was rules.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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.

Alan O. Ebenstein
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
Hayek had high regard for Marx in technical economic theory and considered him a predecessor in his business cycle theory. [...] It was not in technical economic theory that the classical Austrians disagreed with Marx. So towering a figure in history is Marx that discussion of his thought in summary form is always difficult, for there is so much that he said and that others have said about him. At the same time, so tendentious, ill-spirited, and just plain wrong a thinker was Marx that it is surprising that he may have had some of the influence attributed to him. Hayek's opposition to Marx was in the realm of practical political emanations from Marx's thought. Here he considered Marx's influence to have been wholly pernicious.

Alan O. Ebenstein