From the New York Review of Books, December 7:
The Naturalist
In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.
Friedrich Hayek, the Austria-born economist, has always aroused strong feelings in both his admirers and his detractors. The Road to Serfdom (1944), his most famous book, was dismissed on publication by most of the British and American intelligentsia, a predictable response in view of Hayek’s taunt that intellectuals had played a leading part in the “totalitarian transformation of society.” Isaiah Berlin struggled with the book, referring to “the awful Dr. Hayek” in a letter to a friend. Socialists branded him a reactionary for his espousal of nineteenth-century liberalism; opponents of FDR’s New Deal embraced him as their savior. Although Hayek’s standing among professional economists had waned long before the outbreak of World War II, The Road to Serfdom found a receptive audience in the general public: he lived long enough to receive a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and to count Margaret Thatcher among his most ardent acolytes.
While his great rival, John Maynard Keynes, has attracted several biographical studies, notably the brilliant three-volume treatment by Robert Skidelsky, Hayek’s life has remained comparatively obscure. The American philosopher W. W. Bartley embarked upon an edition of Hayek’s collected works, to be accompanied by a biography, but died before he could finish them. Bruce Caldwell, an economic historian, took over Bartley’s editorship, published the intellectual biography Hayek’s Challenge (2004), and has now cowritten with Hansjoerg Klausinger the first volume of what’s intended to be the “definitive” biography.
So far, the authors have achieved that ambition: they devote more than eight hundred pages to Hayek’s first fifty years, replete with trivial details such as the subject’s weight on his first birthday (twenty-two pounds) and a lengthy description of his “messy” family life. This is an unsparing portrait. Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose family supported the Nazis and whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative, a loner with a broad circle of contacts, a world-famous economist who scorned the social sciences, a polemicist who on occasion retired from the fight, an antimonopolist whose ideas were used as propaganda for big business, and an ethicist whose own behavior in marriage was disappointing....
....MUCH MORE
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