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Friedrich Hayek: A Biography

2002; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 483 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-0297.t01-23-00083

1742-0350

D. P. O’Brien,

Political Economy and Marxism

Friedrich August von Hayek, 1899–1992, is undoubtedly an extremely important figure in the history of the dominant ideas of the twentieth century. While Keynes has been the subject of a series of biographies, Hayek has remained an enigmatic figure. A man who believed in the importance of moral ideas as evolved by society –he was an agnostic, not a Catholic as claimed in this volume (p. 301) – he acted in a way which, even now, would raise eyebrows and which in 1950 caused scandal, by divorcing his blameless (as he acknowledged) first wife in an Arizona divorce so that he could marry his childhood sweetheart. There is certainly a need for a biography of Hayek. The present volume is divided into 42 chapters – an average of only 8 pages each – together with a postscript and a bibliographical appendix. It actually contains remarkably little biographical material, and relies to a significant extent on secondary sources (which may explain a good deal of repetition) supplemented by reference to interviews, not all of them conducted by Ebenstein. (There is a remarkable divergence between one of Ebenstein's quotations from an interview as transcribed by him and the published version in Hayek on Hayek.) Citations of the Hayek Archive are remarkably infrequent. Some of the secondary sources, notably Hayek on Hayek, are well‐known; others, especially Cockett's fascinating book Thinking the Unthinkable, certainly deserve to be. The lack of primary research is sometimes startling. The account of Hayek's time at the University of Vienna is derived, to a considerable extent, from Hayek's recollections in old age, without any reference to university records; and information on the sale of Hayek's books come from Cockett, and even from a casual aside by the journalist Frank Johnson. The biographical treatment itself is unsatisfactorily handled; there are strange parallels drawn with the life of Marx, on the grounds that he and Hayek both lived in London (given the existence of a large and flourishing German community in London especially before 1914, this is hardly remarkable), and there is often, the flavour of an assembly of ‘talking heads’, with no discernible logical structure even to the sequence of heads. Those quoted are proceded by labels. Thus we have ‘Marxist John Strachey’ (p. 53), ‘LSE political scientist and democratic socialist, Harold Laski’ (p. 55) and even ‘Chicago economist Harry Johnson’ (p. 358) (Oh, that Harry Johnson). The lack of logical sequence is compounded by a literary style which includes such gems as ‘When he came up to Chicago in 1950, Hayek's work program was about as follows’ (p. 194).