Across seventeen volumes to date, the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series has anthologized the diverse and prolific writings of the Austrian economist synonymous with classical liberalism. Essays on Liberalism and the Economy traces the author’s long and evolving writings on the cluster of beliefs he championed most: liberalism, its core tenets, and how its tradition represents the best hope for Western civilization.
This deft selection includes some of Hayek’s most important and famous essays as well as unpublished and lesser-known works. It contains material from almost the entire span of Hayek’s career, the earliest from 1931 and the last from 1984. The works were written for a variety of purposes and audiences, and they include—along with conventional academic papers—encyclopedia entries, after-dinner addresses, a lecture for graduate students, a book review, newspaper articles, and letters to the editors of national newspapers. While many are available elsewhere, two have never appeared in print, and two others have not been published in English.
The varied formats collected here are enriched by Hayek’s changing voice at different stages of his life. Some of the pieces resonate as high-minded and noble; others are less formal. Some see Hayek focus on expounding his own views; others are primarily critiques of the ideas of other prominent thinkers like John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. All serve to distill important aspects of Hayek’s worldview.
Editorial Foreword
1. Liberalism
2. The Transmission of the Ideals of Economic Freedom
3. The Prospects of Freedom
4. The Webbs and Their Work
5. Closing Speech to the 1984 Mont Pèlerin Society Meeting
6. ‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order
7. The Economic Conditions of Inter-state Federalism
8. The Meaning of Government Interference
9. The Economics of Development Charges
10. Effects of Rent Control
11. Economics
12. The Uses of ‘Gresham’s Law’ as an Illustration of ‘Historical Theory’
13. The Dilemma of Specialisation
14. Full Employment, Planning and Inflation
15. Inflation Resulting from the Downward Inflexibility of Wages
16. Unions, Inflation, and Profits
17. The Corporation in a Democratic Society: In Whose Interest Ought It to and Will It Be Run?
18. The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect’
19. What Is ‘Social’? What Does It Mean?
20. The Moral Element in Free Enterprise
21. The Principles of a Liberal Social Order
22. The Constitution of a Liberal State
23. The Confusion of Language in Political Thought
24. Economic Freedom and Representative Government
25. The Campaign against Keynesian Inflation
26. The New Confusion about ‘Planning’
27. The Atavism of Social Justice
28. Whither Democracy?
29. Socialism and Science
30. Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation
31. Letters to The Times, 1931–1981
Biography
F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and cowinner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century.
Paul Lewis is professor of political economy at King’s College London and an affiliated fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
