Essays on Liberalism and the Economy

Across 17 volumes to date, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek has anthologized the diverse and prolific writings of the Austrian economist synonymous with classical liberalism. This penultimate volume in the series, 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 represented the best hope for Western civilization. This volume 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 graduatestudents, 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 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 feel petty or credit-seeking; some are meant as slights to intellectuals" (a pejorative term in Hayek's use of it) like Keynes and Galbraith. All serve to distill important threads of his worldview, as summarized by volume editor Paul Lewis: "[A] belief in the power of ideas to shape public opinion, in particular about the appropriate boundaries of state intervention; and a concern thatthe supporters of liberalism had allowed themselves to be portrayed as advocates of a laissez-faire approach that confined itself to the negative task of criticizing misguided forms of intervention and so left no scope for articulating a positive vision of legitimate collective action. The conclusion Hayek drew was that a revival of liberalism would require it to be rethought, with much more attention to be devoted "to the positive task of delimiting the field of useful State activity." Lewis's critical packaging of the material is deft and elegant, and this combination of unpublished and little-known works will serve to enlighten and enliven debates around the ever-changing face of Western liberalism"--