Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.
In the 1980s, when F A Hayek was one of the intellectual icons of the New Right, some of the more doctrinaire members of that complicated and fractious movement used to say that for him a minimal government was one that provided three things: national defence, law and order, and a state opera. It was an observation made only partly in jest. The Austrian-born economist and philosopher may have been the thinker who, more than anyone else, articulated the free-market ideology that came to power along with Margaret Thatcher; but his view of politics was formed not in Britain, his adopted country, but in the Habsburg empire, where the Vienna Court Opera was a department of government whose existence no one would dream of questioning.HT: The Big Picture
Born in that city in 1899, Hayek came from an upper-middle-class background – his father was a medical doctor with a passion for botany who always wanted to be a professor, while his mother came from a wealthy land-owning family. The Hayeks enjoyed the prosperity of the closing decades of what the Austrian author Stefan Zweig described as “ the age of security”: the long period of stability provided by the 68-year reign of its last-but-one emperor, Franz Joseph. Hayek witnessed the collapse of an imperial regime that for generations had been more civilised and more liberal than most of the nation states that replaced it in interwar Europe. It was this Habsburg realm, as he experienced it in its final years, which shaped Hayek’s thinking about freedom and government.
My interest in Hayek, which began in the early 1970s, was as much to do with intellectual life in the Vienna of his youth as with the condition of British politics at the time. One of the first questions I asked after we had met through one of the right-wing think tanks that were proliferating around the end of that decade was whether he had known Karl Kraus, the incomparable Viennese satirist, who in 1909 had written, with some prescience: “Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin.” Hayek replied that he had not talked with Kraus, though he remembered seeing him crossing the road to enter a coffee house some time during the First World War. Hayek had little in common with Kraus. Cool and reserved, he had nothing of Kraus’s wit. Although he was academic in his manner, Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one that is uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.
I was also keen to learn something of Hayek’s connection with Wittgenstein, a relative of his about whom he had written a biographical fragment, “Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein”, published in Encounter in 1977. Hayek met Wittgenstein by chance, on a railway station in August 1918, when they were both in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army. Travelling on together, they talked throughout the journey – a conversation Hayek told me had influenced him deeply, though not because of any philosophical exchange that he could remember. The two would never become close and their paths crossed only occasionally; but there seems to have been a meeting of minds between the two artillery ensigns on their way back to war. At the time both were ardent socialists who attributed the disaster that had befallen Europe to the malign impact of capitalism.
At the start of the 20th century, Vienna was one of the world’s great cosmopolitan cities. Though not without grievous bigotry – in 1897, after repeated attempts by the emperor to block the appointment, the city elected a virulently anti-Semitic mayor – the population was not divided, as much of central Europe soon would be, into violently hostile groups. The antique structures of the Habsburg state supported a society that was remarkably modern, not only in its embrace of technology (railways and trams, electric lighting and public sanitation) but also in enabling people with widely differing cultures to coexist and work productively with one another. The destruction of this order after the Great War by the forces of nationalism – which the US president Woodrow Wilson inflamed by insisting that Europe could be rebuilt only on the basis of popular self-determination – framed a dilemma with which Hayek struggled for the rest of his long life (he died in 1992).
How could liberal values be renewed in a time of political tribalism? It was a question Hayek could not answer. Instead, he came up with a mix of evolutionist pseudo-science and rationalistic designs for an ideal liberal regime. Having abandoned his youthful socialism under the influence of the doctrinaire market economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Hayek came to believe that a process of social evolution would impel humankind in the direction of the values he favoured. His legacy to liberal thinking has been a type of scientism – the mistaken attempt to apply the methods of the natural sciences when examining the human world. It’s an ironical outcome, given that he was a forceful critic of scientism in economics. In his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hayek described the efforts of economists to mimic the methods of the natural sciences as having produced a “pretence of knowledge”.
***One of the oddities of Hayek’s career is that while his professional standing was secured through his work as an economist, he had by the mid-1940s given up economics as his central intellectual activity. A major reason for Hayek’s shift into social philosophy was that he believed – correctly – that he had lost the debate with John Maynard Keynes about the causes of the Great Depression. There can be no doubt that his encounter with Keynes was the most important event in his intellectual life. Yet he had little insight into Keynes either as a thinker or a human being. He told me that during their acquaintance he never realised that Keynes had been homosexual – a surprising admission, as it was hardly something Keynes concealed within his circle of friends. The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.
Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed. With characteristic generosity, Keynes – while firmly rejecting its claim that government management of the economy is bound to lead to totalitarianism – heaped praise on Hayek’s anti-socialist tract The Road to Serfdom when it appeared in 1944....MUCH MORE
