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Alan O. Ebenstein -
Hayek
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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.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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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.
Alan O. Ebenstein
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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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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.
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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
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Quote of the day
Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Alan O. Ebenstein
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