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Title: Friedrich Hayek: A Biography by Alan O. Ebenstein ISBN: 0-312-23344-2 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: March, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Biography of Great Economist Thoughtful, Thorough
Comment: Excerpted from book review by Bruce Caldwell in The Independent Review (Fall 2001)
Alan Ebenstein's Frederick Hayek: A Biography is the first English-language biography of FA Hayek. The volume clearly represents a massive amount of investigative work. It has much to recommend it, not least that it offers up the facts of Hayek's life in clear prose and with considerable detail.
He has gathered into one place virtually everything that has been written about Hayek's life and personal relationships. The book represents a truly imperssive amount of investigative work. Ebenstein has done a superb job of collecting and putting into usable form what already existed in print about Hayek's life and of filling in most of the remaining holes by his own investigative effort.
Diminishing this considerable accomplishment is Eberstein's insistence on offering at various places throughout the book his own assessments of Hayek's substantive work. Too often summaries compress an entire literature or debate into a few pages.
Those who wish to know about Hayek's life should get this book and study it carefully, for it contains more information than any other source available on that subject. It is also, in my opinion, quite solid on certain aspects of Hayek's political thought. But it is not a particularly good guide to Hayek's intellectual development or to his legacy in other areas. The book would have been far stronger had Ebenstein stuck to reporting and left out his own responses to Hayek.
Rating: 5
Summary: Essential Biography -- balanced, thorough and well written
Comment: Ebenstein has written a fantastic book about the man who may go down as the greatest thinker of the 20th century. While it is obvious the Ebenstein greatly admires Hayek it does not prevent him from giving a very accurate assement of the man and his ideas. In several places in the book he points out mistakes and logically issues with several of Hayek's ideas. It seems to be all to rare these days to get such a fair and accurate view.
The biography sheds light on all the key periods and influence on Hayeks intellectual life. Its greatest service is the ability to explain many of Hayek's most complicated thoughts in terms that are both easy to understand but not over simplistic.
Highly recommended!
Rating: 4
Summary: A middle class economics hero's life.
Comment: This biography has many short chapters, and displays a considerable balance. The structure of the book reflects the nature of Hayek's thoughts. "Hayek put forward the difficult idea of spontaneous order. In a spontaneous order, individuals may exchange and interact with one another as they desire. There is no central management of individual decision making." (p. 3). The fame of Friedrich Hayek is associated mainly with the political views needed to maintain a thriving economy as much as with the idea that no one person knows everything that is going on in an economy which functions as Adam Smith pictured, with each person acting in his own interest in order to produce the mix of goods and services that best provides the needs of all. Adam Smith is listed in the index, but not quite as much as Milton Friedman, who is occasionally mentioned as being more popular than Hayek, as well as more correct in the analysis of monetary policy in the United States at the start of the great depression.
Hayek finished a law degree and a second degree in political science from the University of Vienna before he lived in the United States from March 1923 to May 1924. (p. 31). One of his first economic articles in 1924 was "on American monetary policy suggesting that an expansionist credit policy leads to an overdevelopment of capital goods industries and ultimately to a crisis. . . . So I put in that article a long footnote sketching an outline of what ultimately became my explanation of industrial fluctuations. . . . A rate of interest which is inappropriately low offers to the individual sectors of the economy an advantage which is greater the more remote is their product from the consumption stage." (p. 41). The Federal Reserve Bank had been designed to keep the economy moving by offering great deals to capitalists, but when Hayek noted the tendency to produce instability, he became the head "of the evolution of Austrian business cycle theory." (p. 41). When the depression became the lowest point reached by the American economy in the 20th century, Hayek continued to think that low interest rates in the 1920s had produced the instability which produced it, while Milton Friedman produced a monetary explanation which is more widely accepted.
Public opinion is often a matter of simplifications which avoid the complexity that real problems present. Chapter 8, on Keynes, quotes Keynes attacking Marxism as if Marxism were nothing but a public opinion. "How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" (p. 68). German was a problem for Keynes, who wrote "in German I can only understand what I know already!" (p. 70). Hayek tried to review Keynes' TREATISE ON MONEY for an English journal, "Economica," when he was about to start teaching at the London School of Economics. Keynes seemed to think that his criticism could be characterized as "The wild duck has dived down to the bottom--as deep as she can get--and bitten fast hold of the weed and tangle and all the rubbish that is down there, and it would need an extraordinarily clever dog to dive after and fish her up again." (pp. 357-358). Hayek was allowed to publish a reply in the "Economic Journal" edited by Keynes "to an article by Piero Sraffa attacking him, and concluded his reply, `I venture to believe that Mr. Keynes would fully agree with me in ... that he [Sraffa] has understood Mr. Keynes' theory even less than he has my own.' Keynes then footnoted, `I should like to say that, to the best of my comprehension, Mr. Sraffa has understood my theory accurately.' " (p. 72). The finishing touches on this argument are complex. Keynes wrote that his footnote was appended to Hayek's reply "with Prof. Hayek's permission," (p. 72), a sure sign that Keynes was amused at agreeing far more with Sraffa, however Hayek might feel about it, and that he had done everything he could to force Hayek to see it his way.
Hayek was admired most for his popular book, THE ROAD TO SERFDOM, which considered central planning in control of an economy as a major step on the way to totalitarianism. He expected his book, THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY, to appeal to the same readers, but when it was published on February 9, 1960, people had other concerns. In "The New York Times Book Review," Sydney Hook presented the mainstream economic opposition to Hayek's major concerns. "He is an intellectual tonic. But in our present time of troubles, his economic philosophy points the road to disaster." (p. 203).
Considering disasters in the area of economics, it is difficult to counter the idea that any government program offers the kind of deviation from stability that anyone would expect from a drunken bat. One idea that was almost popular at the end of the 20th century was a lockbox, where workers' money could be kept until it was time for them to retire. Hayek followed John Locke in thinking that civil government can maintain an impartial liberty through "certain basic rules on everybody." (p. 224). LAW, LEGISLATION AND LIBERTY was supposed to provide some guidelines, but there was no lockbox in the title, or in the title of any of Hayek's books. Now tax law has changed, as a basic incentive for a rise in the price of common stock, without safeguards to see that income is taxed even once. Speculation seems to be the common assumption upon which everyone is now to be satisfied. Actually, I suppose the government might never stop flying around like a drunken bat. For all the complexity in this book, it is much less like a drunken bat than the opinions I find in any newspaper.
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Title: Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek by Alan Ebenstein ISBN: 1403960380 Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek ISBN: 0226320618 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 1994 List Price(USD): $9.48 |
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Title: Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek by Bruce J. Caldwell ISBN: 0226091910 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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Title: Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman ISBN: 0226264211 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (Studies in Law and Economics) by Richard A. Epstein ISBN: 0226213048 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.00 |
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