F.A. Hayek's Birthday Today

May 8, 2009 7:47 AM by Jeffrey Tucker (Archive)

Today is F.A. Hayek's Birthday (born May 8, 1899). Today, Mises.org features fully 15 books in its catalog, as well as vast writings in Literature.

Mario Rizzo has an excellent tribute here today. In the course of his writing, he mentions that Rothbard was critical of Hayek's impure libertarianism and impure Misesianism - criticisms that Rizzo says that he later came to reject.

But let's think about this in context. Rothbard was critical of Hayek's own criticisms of Mises and defended Mises against them - exactly as one might expect and rightly so. Rothbard also criticized Hayek's periodic embrace of aspects of the social-assistance state, such as we find in The Constitution of Liberty. Rothbard was also a rationalist who didn't have a high opinion of Hayek's theory of knowledge, but even this I suspect was brought to a head by The Fatal Conceit, a book that appeared in 1988 and which only later turns out to be highly suspect at best.

Even so, I was just looking around at Rothbard's citations of Hayek throughout Rothbard's writing. Rothbard's favorite book appears to The Counter-Revolution of Science; he cites it in a dozen or so methodological pieces. But he also cites The Road to Serfdom, Prices and Production, and make frequent reference to Hayek's "brilliant" criticisms of Keynes from the 30s and 40s, many of which are now in Prices and Production and Other Essays.

As late as 1982, Rothbard wrote: "It is, furthermore, too late for gradualism. The only solution was set forth by F.A. Hayek, the dean of the Austrian School, in his critique of the similarly disastrous gradualism of the Thatcher regime in Great Britain."

Yes, Rothbard could be tough on Hayek but it sources were clear, and if you look at the full sweep of writing, especially before 1988 and Conceit, we get a much different picture.