Abstract
F. A. Hayek famously distinguished between “true” and “false” individualism.1 In that dichotomy, “true” individualists were comfortable with evolved institutions and rule following without fully understanding the origin or consequences of those rules. “False” individualists, by contrast, believed themselves capable of constructing the rules themselves and, as such, they imposed rules or institutions on others. For Hayek, as is well known, “false” individualists included those in the nineteenth century such as Auguste Comte and Saint Simon who advocated for the reorganization of society.2
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Notes
Friedrich A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1948), 1–32;
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1948), 77–91.
For a more extensive discussion, see Sandra J. Peart, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Sandra J. Peart, vol. 16, Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
See Bruce Caldwell’s assessment in “Editor’s Introduction,” in Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. 13, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Texts and Documents (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–45: “The distinction between the hubris of the scientistic approach and the humility of individualism would be a major theme of Hayek’s ‘Individualism: True and False,’ and would reappear in later writings as the contrast between constructivist rationalism and the evolutionary way of thinking” (p. 13).
Ibid., 4. There was in Hayek’s view yet another problem with such rationalism, its narrow conception of economic man. See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Ronald Hamowy, vol. 17, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1960] 2011), 121: “in the view of those British philosophers, man was by nature lazy and indolent, improvident and wasteful, and that it was only by force of circumstances that he could be made to behave economically or would learn carefully to adjust his means to an end. The homo oeconomicus was explicitly introduced, with much else that belongs to the rationalist rather than the evolutionary tradition, only by the younger Mill.”
Leonidas Montes, “Is Friedrich Hayek Rowing Adam Smith’s Boat?” in Hayek, Mill, and the Liberal Tradition, ed. Andrew Farrant (London: Routledge, 2011), 19, argues that Hayek suggests that Mill here departed from Adam Smith. In this respect, it now seems fair to say that Hayek was mistaken; Mill’s conception of economic man is much more Smithian than that of economists late in the nineteenth century such as William Stanley Jevons.
See also Sandra J. Peart, introduction to W. S. Jevons: Critical Responses, ed. Sandra J. Peart (London: Routledge, 2004) vol. I: 1–26.
Lorie Tarshis, The Elements of Economics (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1947).
George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer1874–1914 (New York: Norton, 1983), 505.
Isaac Don Levine, “The Strange Case of Merwin K. Hart,” Plain Talk 4 (February 1950): 1–9.
This is reported on the authority of manuscripts in the Merwin K. Hart papers in the Special Collections of the University of Oregon by John Moser, Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 169.
John Chamberlain gives us the name of the privately financed staff member but not the funding source: “Percy Greaves was hired privately to help the minority Republicans who had no funds for a research staff.” John Chamberlain, “Foreword,” in Percy L. Greaves, Jr., Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy, ed. Bettina B. Greaves (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991), xviii.
Karen Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 45, 122;
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 178, 314, 651, 675.
The 1952 study by the Anti-Defamation League emphasizes Hart’s centrality. See Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The Trouble-Makers: An Anti-Defamation League Report (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 199: “Hart is probably the most ubiquitous of the network figures. He is a registered lobbyist whose activities were closely examined by the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities of the 81st Congress.” The same judgment is found in their later Danger on the Right: “[he] was a focal point for much of the Extreme Rightist activity of the 1940s and 1950s.”.
Quoted from Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964), 107.
David C. Colander and Harry Landreth, eds., The Coming of Keynesianism to America: Conversations with the Founders of Keynesian Economics (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1996);
Paul A. Samuelson, “Credo of a Lucky Textbook Author,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11, no. 2 (1997): 153–69;
David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Soviet Growth and American Textbooks: An Endogenous Past,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 78, nos. 1–2 (April 2011): 110–25.
See also David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart, and Margaret Albert, “Economic Liberals as Quasi-Public Intellectuals: The Democratic Dimension,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 30, no. 2 (2012): 1–116.
William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” (Chicago, IL: Regnery [1951] 2002), 64. “I am also grateful to the National Economic Council for its telling analysis of the Tarshis book (Review of Books, August 1947).” Ibid., 221.
Contemporary discussions linked Hart’s Review of Books to Buckley, for example, [F. Porter Sargent], Educational Directions: A Report—1951 (Boston: F. Porter Sargent, 1952), 93: “Some of Buckley’s objections coincide with those of Rose Wilder Lane, whose review for Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council he quotes. Miss Lane was formerly a writer of fiction.” The public reaction of those who were attacked was very late in coming. See Colander and Landreth, Coming of Keynesianism; Samuelson, “Credo.” The reviews and some items in the Hart campaign to rid the campus of the Tarshis text are reprinted in Levy, Peart, and Albert, “Economic Liberals.”
William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies (Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1954).
William F. Buckley, Jr., Up from Liberalism (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1959).
William F. Buckley, Jr., “Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition,” in God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom,’ ed. William F. Buckley, Jr. (Chicago, IL: Regnery, [1977] 2002), xiv–lviii. A less obvious moment to confront the past came when in the blast from the John Birch Society protesting National Review’s attack, Buckley’s discussion of the textbooks was singled out for praise. See John F. McManus, William F. Buckley,
fr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment (Appleton, WI: John Birch Society, 2002), 54: “a lengthy chapter crammed with passages from economics textbooks that were required reading. Buckley presented convincing evidence that the books promoted socialism, Keynesianism, and other collectivist nostrums while disparaging individualism, free enterprise, and limited government.” Oddly enough the Hart linkage is not noticed by Nash. See George H. Nash, “God and Man at Yale Revisited,” Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservativism (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 133–47.
William F. Buckley, Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (New York: Continuum, 1992), 4–6.
Spencer’s name does not appear in The Road to Serfdom. In Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” 11, Spencer is linked to Mill’s “false” individualism on the basis of their shared rationalism. In the exchange published in Mill’s Utilitarianism, Spencer distinguished his utilitarianism from Mill’s on the basis of his rationalism and Mill’s empiricism. See Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, The “Vanity of the Philosopher”: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2005), 214–15.
Albert J. Nock, review of The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, Economic Council Review of Books 2 (October 1944): 1–2.
Charles Lam Markmann, The Buckleys: A Family Examined (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 90: “Buckley, who went to Chicago from Mexico for the radio appearance, was taken to lunch with Hayek, whom everyone expected to be basically in accord with Buckley and who deeply differed with him on academic freedom, which for Hayek, regardless of his personal conservatism, was or ought to be inviolate.” Nash, God and Man, 143: “Friedrich Hayek, from whom Buckley badly wanted a blurb for the book, declined to give him one, the great economist objected strenuously to Buckley’s chapter on academic freedom.”
This ought not to be a surprise from the greatest of the J. S. Mill scholars of his generation. See Peart, Editor’s Introduction to Hayek on Mill. Hayek’s disagreement with Mill is very localized, Sandra J. Peart, “We’re All ‘Persons’ Now: Classical Economists and Their Opponents on Marriage, the Franchise and Socialism,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 31, no. 1 (2009): 3–20.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 2, The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents: The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1944] 2007), 240. Recent scholarship has emphasized how important Henry Simons was in Hayek’s plans for the future.
See Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Friedrich A. Hayek, “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1947] 1948), 117.
On the front flap of the dust jacket of Henry Simons, Economic Policy for a Free Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948). The practice of university libraries to discard dust jackets might perhaps be compared with the treatment by rare book dealers. We acknowledge helpful correspondence with Angus Burgin on this issue.
Hayek with evident amusement remembers acting as Eucken’s translator at the 1947 MPS. “And I believe that Eucken’s success in 1947—as the only German attending a scholarly international conference—contributed a little, if I may use this term, to the rehabilitation of German scholars on the international scene. Up to that time, my American friends in particular had been asking, ‘Do you really dare to invite Germans too?’” F. A. Hayek, “The Rediscovery of Freedom,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Peter G. Klein, vol. 4, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 192. Richard Ware remembered, after a lapse of 60 years, Walter Eucken’s impact (Richard Ware interview by Peart and Levy, 2008).
Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane, The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane, ed. Roger Lea MacBride (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1973), 106.
“It will be on Germans who have carried on in this manner … that our hopes must rest, and to them that we must give any assistance we can. The task of finding them and assisting them without at the same time discrediting them with their own people will be a most difficult and delicate one.” Quoted from Friedrich A. Hayek, “Historians and the Future of Europe,” in Fortunes of Liberalism [1944], 202. Recovery of a liberal tradition inside Germany “would be hopeless if there were in Germany no men or women at all who will adhere to the beliefs that we wish to see again victorious. But unless during the last two years they have all been killed, there is good reason to believe that we shall find in Germany such men and women, a small number it is true, but not so few in comparison with the number of people who think independently in any nation.” Ibid., 224.
“Hayek notes that John Maynard Keynes had become a hero on the European continent by writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes argued that the defeated Germany (and the Germans had come to regard themselves as not so much defeated as betrayed into a punitive armistice) could not pay the reparations which France demanded without exports at a level which the other powers would not tolerate.” Quoted from Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar, “Introduction,” in Hayek on Hayek, ed. Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (London: Routledge, 1994), 9.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, [1919] 1920), 274. He concludes: “The ungrateful Governments of Europe owe much more to the statesmanship and insight of Mr. Hoover and his band of American workers than they have yet appreciated or will ever acknowledge. The American Relief Commission, and they only, saw the European position during those months in its true perspective and felt towards it as men should. It was their efforts, their energy, and the American resources placed by the President at their disposal, often acting in the teeth of European obstruction, which not only saved an immense amount of human suffering, but averted a widespread breakdown of the European system.” Ibid.
George H. Nash, introduction to American Individualism and The Challenge to Liberty, by Herbert Hoover (West Branch, IA: Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, 1989), 1–28;
George H. Nash, “Foreword,” in Two Faces of Liberalism: How the Hoover-Roosevelt Debate Shapes the 21st Century, ed. Gordon Lloyd (Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener, 2007), vi–x.
Herbert C. Hoover, The Principles of Mining: Valuation, Organization and Administration Copper, Gold, Lead, Silver, Tin and Zinc (New York: McGraw Hill, 1909), 163.
Roger C. Bannister notes Carver’s role as satisfying the stereotype of the laissez-faire eugenicist. See Roger C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 241.
Bastiat’s The Law was printed as the first of the Los Angeles The Freeman series. See Frederic Bastiat, The Law, The Freeman 1 (Los Angeles: Pamphleteers [1850], 1944) and then again, with a new translation by the Foundation for Economic Education, Frederic Bastiat, The Law, trans. Dean Russell Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, [1850] 1950). The importance of getting Bastiat right can be judged by the fact that Bertrand de Jouvenel was engaged to check the new translation.
Thomas Nixon Carver, Recollections of an Unplanned Life (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1949), 241.
Leonard E. Read, Pattern for Revolt (Santa Ana, CA: Register Publishing, 1945), 21.
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, [1944] 1992).
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Watts is described in Road from Mont Pèlerin, 21, 198, as a FEE executive. His tenure was quite short; by 1950 when he was writing for Hart’s Economic Council Reviews, he was no longer at FEE. See Levy, Peart, and Albert, “Economic Liberals.” Samuelson gives a Knightian reading of Watts and Carver: Paul A. Samuelson, review of Do We Want Free Enterprise?, by Orval Watts, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 236 (November 1944): 198–99. Watts’s role in the textbook controversy of the early 1950s seems to have been generally overlooked. In the correspondence between Lane and Crane, Watts’s name comes up as often as Hayek’s and von Mises’s. See Lane and Crane, Lady and the Tycoon. The correspondence is important for insight into “business conservatives” and the MPS. See Kim Phillips-Fein, “Business Conservatives and the Mont Pèlerin Society,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 280–301.
E. Böhm-Bawerk, “Capital and Interest Once More: I, Capital vs. Capital Goods,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 21 (November 1906): 1–21.
Thomas Nixon Carver, [Remarks], Ninety-Second Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1922).
Thomas Nixon Carver, “The Demand for Money,” Economic Journal 44, no. 174 (June 1934): 188–206.
Ward Ritchie, Fine Printing: The Los Angeles Tradition (Washington: The Library of Congress, 1987).
Armen Alchian and Friedrich A. Hayek, interview included in Nobel Prize Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek (Los Angeles: University of California, Oral History Program, 1983). http://www.archive.org/stream/nobelprizewin nin00haye/nobelprizewinnin00haye_djvu.txt (accessed May 6, 2013).
Thomas Nixon Carver, Essential Factors in Social Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 344.
Thomas Nixon Carver, Essays on Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915), 99.
Thomas Nixon Carver, The Religion Worth Having (Boston, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 79–80.
Thomas Nixon Carver, Principles of National Economy (Boston: Ginn, 1921), 601–02.
Thomas Nixon Carver, What Must We Do to Save our Economic System? (Los Angeles: [self-published?] 1935).
Leonard E. Read, The Romance of Reality (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937), 111–12.
More recent studies of the linkage between social Darwinism and Nazi ideology are found in Hans-Gunter Zmarzlik, “Social Darwinism in Germany, Seen as a Historical Problem,” trans. Ralph Mannheim, in Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Pantheon, [1963] 1972), 435–74;
Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origin of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: MacDonald, 1971);
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1997);
Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe: 1870–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Charles Kingsley’s role in combining Thomas Carlyle with Charles Darwin and putting forward a theology of extermination should not be overlooked.
See David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Charles Kingsley and the Theological Interpretation of Natural Selection,” Journal of Bio economics 8, no. 3 (November 2006): 197–218.
Jacob Viner, “Hayek on Freedom and Coercion,” Southern Economic Journal 27 (1961): 230–36.
Buchanan, Workshop Discussion, points to the importance of Richard Ware’s insistence that Hayek’s evolutionary move would undermine Hayek’s earlier contributions. Ware was close to Warren Nutter on whose thinking Knight had an enormous impact (Richard Ware interview by Peart and Levy, 2008). Knight’s opposition to Carver is found in Frank H. Knight, review of The Economy of Human Energy, by Thomas Nixon Carver, Journal of Social Forces 3, no. 4 (May 1925): 777–78, and the larger link between efficiency and ethics is of great importance here.
John Rawls’s annotation of Knight’s Ethics of Competition brings out the connection between the Knightian era at Chicago and later Rawlsian thinking as seen in Frank H. Knight, Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (New York: Augustus Kelley, [1935] 1951) with annotations by John Rawls. (Now in the possession of Levy and Peart.)
See also James M. Buchanan and John Rawls, “The Buchanan-Rawls Correspondence,” in The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations in Analytical Egalitarianism, ed. Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2008), 397–418.
Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945);
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1949] 2007): 171–74.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Alan Ebenstein, Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of F. A. Hayek (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 220–32;
Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 314–19.
Viktor J. Vanberg, The Constitution of Markets (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Gerald F. Gaus, “Social Complexity and Evolved Moral Principles,” in Liberalism, Conservativsm, and Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order, ed. Louis Hunt and Peter McNamara (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 149–76.
John Gray, Hayek on Liberty, third edition (London: Routledge, [1984] 1998), 103–10.
Erik Angner, Hayek and Natural Law (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, “Hayek’s Sympathetic Agents,” in Hayek and Liberalism, ed. Andrew Farrant (London: Routledge, 2011), 39–56.
Friedrich A. Hayek, “Economics and Knowledge,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1937] 1948), 33–56; “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, [1945] 1948), 77–91.
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Meaning of Competition,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, [1946] 1948), 92–106.
For Buchanan’s exposition of Smith’s increasing returns to scale argument see James Buchanan, “Let Us Understand Adam Smith,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 30, no. 1 (2008): 21–28.
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Peart, S.J., Levy, D.M. (2013). F. A. Hayek and the “Individualists”. In: Peart, S.J., Levy, D.M. (eds) F. A. Hayek and the Modern Economy. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354365_3
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