Customer Reviews

The Essence of Hayek

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This collection of essays by Friedrich Hayek provides a great overview of his thought. The essays include early pieces on economic issues, essays on the history of economic thought, psychology, epistemology, political theory, and personal reflections. Hayek is best known for "The Road to Serfdom," a cold war anti-socialist tract which I consider his least interesting work. In this collection one discovers the Hayek who developed the analysis of how the diffuse nature of information in society reveals on the one hand why socialism failed, and on the other why entrepreneurship and creativity are critical to the well-being of society. His essay "Competition as a Discovery Procedure," included in this volume, should be required reading on college campuses across the nation. His essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative" provides a clear distinction between the views of a classical liberal (of which Hayek is perhaps the best 20th century examplar) vs. those of a conservative. Because "liberals" in the U.S. have been hostile to free enterprise and because "conservatives" have been relatively supportive of it in the U.S., the classical liberal position has become an esoteric oddity known only to a few. For those of us who believe that the most powerful basis for a just and flourishing society may be found in classical liberalism, its relative obscurity in popular perception is a serious tragedy in the history of thought. There is no better single author from who one can learn an intelligent statement of contemporary classical liberalism than F.A. Hayek. This volume is a comprehensive, digestible introduction to his thought.

This book is one in a series of compilations of publications by eminent scholars issued by the Hoover Institution (subsequent volumes in the series are of George J. Stigler, Milton Friedman, and Gary S. Becker). With an oeuvre as far-reaching and as extensive as Hayek's, it is inevitable that some works are not included. A notable omission is any excerpts from The Road to Serfdom, but chances are if you are interested in The Essence of Hayek, you may have already read that one. Another nitpick would be that two chapters, "Principles of a Liberal Social Order" (ch. 20) and "Whither Democracy?" (ch. 19), make for a comprehensive summary exposition of the ideas in all three volumes of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (vols. 1-2 and vol. 3, respectively), so Essence could have done without the three chapters from that trilogy, which would have freed up space for quite a few other papers, of which in Hayek's case there is an almost endless number from which to choose.

Having said all that, like the other volumes in the Essence series, this one provides as good a representation of Hayek's corpus as can probably be made in a single volume (it was published before the release date of The Fatal Conceit, but ch. 17 of Essence ["The Origins and Effects of our Morals: A Problem for Science"] is a 1983 lecture that summarizes the ideas in The Fatal Conceit pretty well). If you are new to Hayek and his political writings are your main interest, you may be better off first reading The Constitution of Liberty and/or The Road to Serfdom. But after those, this book makes for terrific sampling of Hayek's other writings.

All selections in Essence are eminently readable; e.g., there are no complex equations in the papers on economics. I am not sufficiently familiar with Hayek's writings to know whether this is characteristic of his works in general, or whether the editors deliberately made their selections this way, but either way the result is most enjoyable.

The only bad thing about this book, is the simple fact that it was shipped by Amazon and when I received it, the slip cover of the book was sliced open. I have ordered the Essence of Friedman elsewhere, and it came in perfect condition...so if you can find it at Hoover Press you might get a book in better shape. I'm picky though...and Amazon's return policy is ridiculous, so I didn't bother to have a new one shipped out.