Hayek, Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas (original) (raw)

«Introduction–Hayek's grand research programme»

1994), Hayek, Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy …, 1994

Many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind . . . the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend'.

F.A. Hayek: the radical economist

If anything like a change in direction can be distinguished in the development of the work of Friedrich August von Hayek, it does not lie in his supposed abandoning of the idea of equilibrium (which is based on a mistaken interpretation of his work). It is rather the transition of a radically systematic approach to problems and the elaboration of their solution that is characterized by a high level of analytic sophistication to a more associative approach. Examples of the former are Hayek’s theory of mind and his monetary, business cycle and capital theories; his theory of evolution and social and political philosophy are examples of the latter. Hayek’s economics constitutes a research programme. One of the factors that influenced its further development was Sraffa’s criticism of Hayek’s Prices and Production. In reply to this, Hayek developed his highly sophisticated capital theory and his ideas on neutral money and the international monetary order. I intend to show that the development of Hayek’s economic research programme can only be understood if one takes into account his radically systematic and analytical approach. ADDED COMMENT The paper has “radical ECONOMIST” in the title because I wanted to point out to the audience of the Department of Economics of NYU that the almost generally accepted idea that Hayek’s theory of capital is fatally flawed is wrong. It is one of the (alas!) several red herrings that keep freely swimming in the sea of Hayek research. In the early 1930s Piero Sraffa critized Hayek’s Prices and Production. One of his criticisms was that Hayek had not taken account of the fact that every factor of production has its “own rate of interest.” Hayek took this criticism seriously and with the thoroughness that is characteristic of all his work in all of the various disciplines – at least up till the publication of The Sensory Order in 1952 - set out to solve the problem Sraffa had indicated. That led to a series of articles and eventually The Pure Theory of Capital, in which he had meticulously constructed a highly abstract theory takes into account each productive input's own rate of interest. Hayek showed how entrepreneurial decisions on investment process involve all these own rates. The paper shows that this type of radicalism characterizes the rest of Hayek’s work, too. This more than once became a case of the better being the enemy of the good: because Hayek did not succeed in solving the (often very difficult) problems he had put on his agenda at all, or not in time, he either decided not to publish his attempt to solve it (in the case of his reply to Popper’s criticism of The Sensory Order – see my paper on “How artificial is intelligence in AI?”) or it was too late for the scientific community to take notice (the case of Sraffa’s criticism).

The continuing relevance of FA Hayek's political economy

2008

Abstract: This chapter explores the political economy of FA Hayek with emphasis on the continued relevance of his work for contemporary scholars. We focus on the theme of coordination throughout Hayek's research program. This general theme can be traced from Hayek's technical economics up through his later writings in political philosophy. After considering Hayek's major works in political and legal theory, we conclude by discussing the contemporary implications of Hayek's political economy.

HAYEK AND HISTORICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

History of Economic Ideas, 2004

Hayek’s opposition to the historical approach to political economy was unwavering over the course of his career. Drawing on Menger’s Untersuchungen über die Methoden der Sozialwissenschaften, Hayek regarded the Schmollers and Brentanos as foreign to true economics - a dangerous, but transitionary, hiccup in the progression of economic theory. In spite of Hayek’s antagonistic attitude, this article argues that certain elements of his stance after “Economics and Knowledge” (1936) were raised by historical political economists in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The point is not to suggest a direct influence of historical economists on Hayek, but one mediated by the geographical, linguistic, and cultural proximity of Austria and Germany. As documented in section one, plenty of evidence indicates that the Methodenstreit between Menger and Schmoller did not entail a sharp separation between the two camps. The paper focuses on the following facets of Hayek’s thought: his concern with realism; the acknowledgement of complexity; the willingness to address policy issues, drawing on a peculiar history of modern thought; his ambivalence about value judgements; his focus on institutions and social rules; and a view of evolution as regulated by group superiority. It is argued that, in contrast to Hayek who advocated “the primacy of the abstract”, Schmoller can be seen as an upholder of the primacy of the concrete. Looking at Hayek through German lenses has four advantages. First, it widens the historical context of his thought by questioning the supposed gulf between the Austrian and the German schools. Second, it shows that Hayek’s interpretation of the “younger historical school” was severely biased. Third, establishing a link between the historical economists and a now revered author like Hayek may shed a new and favourable light on a group still viewed with disdain. Fourth, there emerges an interpretation of Hayek’s thinking centred on value judgements.

Knowledge and meliorism in the evolutionary theory of FA Hayek

2001

Unlike most economists, the late F. A. Hayek ventured often into domains other than the strictly economic. As a result, his work encompasses a number of social disciplines. Such intellectual trespassing might well have led to a diffuse and disconnected body of work; but this is a danger Hayek understood and largely avoided. The unifying thread in his work is arguably his vision of society as an evolved system of rules, which he often discussed in terms of the concept of "spontaneous order." The negative message of this approach is quite clear: social institutions are not the product of conscious rational design, and attempts consciously to redesign evolved social orders (as envisioned, in principle at least, in most forms of socialism) are likely to yield inferior and even disastrous results. The affirmative implications of Hayek's vision are less clear. What kinds of rules are likely to lead to "good" social orders? K. Dopfer (ed.

A Cognitive Approach to Law and Economics: Hayek's Legacy

Journal of Economic Issues, 2014

Hayek's contribution to the analysis of law has been widely criticized and disputed This paper shares with the opinion that the significance of Hayek's legal writings and their relevance to law and economics can only be completely understood by jointly analyzing his economic theory and his legal theory. Moreover it will be argued that both theories must be reconsidered in light of Hayek's theory of mind. This theory, in fact, represents the key element in understanding Hayek's thought in that it gives insight into the complexity of the cognitive and psychological determinants involved in coordination processes. The latter are the main phenomena that Hayek studied, and they are also essential for understanding the emergence of customs and social institutions as described in his legal theory. From this perspective, Hayek's legal theory is of close relevance to current research in law. His contribution suggests a different methodological approach to developing legal theory in which the analysis of the micro-foundations of human behavior is of central importance. The paper argues that inquiry of this kind can contribute to legal theory by explaining perception in decision-making processes, and it may be the first essential step toward a normative legal theory that reduces errors in legal contexts like the one currently being sought by behavioral law and economics scholars (Cass R. Sunstein, Christine Jolls, Richard Thaler 1998 and.

F. A. 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.

The Political Economy of FA Hayek

Friedrich A. von Hayek was arguably the most important classical liberal political economist of the twentieth century. Although trained as a technical economist, Hayek's body of work extended well beyond the discipline of economics. Indeed, the most productive reading of Hayek's body of work is as an interconnected research program that overlaps the disciplines economics, politics and law (Boettke 1999). Given this overlap across disciplines, a full understanding of Hayek's political economy must start with the main themes found in his ...