Friedrich Hayek Austrian Economist.pdf

Friedrich Hayek: Austrian Economist A review of Alan Ebenstein’s Hayek’s Journey and Bruce Caldwell’s Hayek’s Challenge Steven Horwitz Department of Economics St. Lawrence University Canton, NY 13617 TEL (315) 229 5731 FAX (315) 229 5709 email sghorwitz@ Prepared for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Spring 2004 Friedrich Hayek: Austrian Economist 1 Friedrich A. Hayek was an Austrian economist. Although this is perhaps not the most controversial claim put forward in the history of economics, it is one that needs to be repeated and revisited from time to time. Over the last twenty to thirty years, there has been an avalanche of scholarly and popular work on Hayek. The scholarly work was likely prompted by his having received the Nobel Prize in 1974 and the subsequent revival of Austrian economics (and the continuing criticisms of, and searches for alternatives to, the mainstream of modern economics). The popular work reflects the revival of classical liberalism more broadly, both in the world of ideas and in the events of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global marketplace. Hayek’s name is invoked as the source of a great number of economic and political ideas these days, both for the better and the worse. Often times, these treatments, especially but not only the popular ones, misunderstand key Hayekian themes. The main reason they do so is that they forget that the entire edifice of Hayek’s social and political thought is built upon the foundations of the ideas he first engaged as a young man, those of the Austrian school of economics. This argument is