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The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Volume 1) (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek) Paperback – August 28, 1991
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"The achievement of The Fatal Conceit is that it freshly shows why socialism must be refuted rather than merely dismissed—then refutes it again."—David R. Henderson, Fortune.
"Fascinating. . . . The energy and precision with which Mr. Hayek sweeps away his opposition is impressive."—Edward H. Crane, Wall Street Journal
F. A. Hayek is considered a pioneer in monetary theory, the preeminent proponent of the libertarian philosophy, and the ideological mentor of the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions."
- Print length194 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
- Publication dateAugust 28, 1991
- Dimensions8.95 x 6.04 x 0.51 inches
- ISBN-100226320669
- ISBN-13978-0226320663
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The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Volume 17) (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek)Paperback
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
About the Author
F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. He taught at the University of Vienna, University of London, University of Chicago, and University of Freiburg.
Product details
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (August 28, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 194 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0226320669
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226320663
- Item Weight : 10 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.95 x 6.04 x 0.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #66,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Income Inequality
- #26 in Radical Political Thought
- #60 in Theory of Economics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Friedrich August Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century. He taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. His influence on the economic policies in capitalist countries has been profound, especially during the Reagan administration in the U.S. and the Thatcher government in the U.K.
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This book is a spirited defense of capitalism as an extended economic order. Hayek is utterly convinced that a close look at history shows that a strong government is more likely to stifle than to promote the efforts of those who could produce productive economic activity by following the rules which economics ought to provide for those with great wealth. The main argument, for me, of THE FATAL CONCEIT is about morality, which is primarily avoided by modern people functioning mainly as spectators concerned with the behavior of human beings who have previously inhabited a world in which people had contact with each other. Attempting to apply the lessons of this book is sure to be ironic in a comic society, in which those who are highest in the public eye merit the lowest form of treatment. For example, the comedy channel on television is ready to ridicule any individual who has no way to escape from whatever comic role our entertainment values have assigned to people in positions of interest, while the audience is supposed to be too complacent to think that they can do anything about what they see. The comedians who ape stupidity are filling in for furiously planning activists of the world, who are blatantly called intellectuals in this book, as in:
"Intellectuals may of course claim to have invented new and better `social' morals that will accomplish just this, but these `new' rules represent a recidivism to the morals of the primitive micro-order, and can hardly maintain the life and health of the billions supported by the macro-order." (p. 75).
Hayek was living in Freiburg im Breisgau in April 1988 when he penned the Preface on page 5, stating "There were to be no footnotes" and he was right until page 24, where the editor furnished information to support the text: "Not only is the idea of evolution older in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics." For Hayek, analogous laws, mechanisms, modalities and "cultural development rests on such inheritance -- characteristics in the form of rules guiding the mutual relations among individuals" (p. 25) that make sense, in the context of group selection compared to biological evolution. "Despite such differences, all evolution, cultural as well as biological, is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseen events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast. This is another reason why evolutionary theory can never put us in the position of rationally predicting and controlling future evolution." (p. 25).
Having established that the small group environments of hundreds of thousands of years ago established instinctual loyalties that are more ontogenetic than phylogenetic in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 starts with a section on "Freedom and the Extended Order" (p. 29) which starts history with "So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognized private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relationships among different communities." (p. 29). Hayek gave us no reason to suppose that he was thinking of drastic climate change when he wrote in Chapter 3, "Indeed, it will perhaps not be long before even Antarctica will enable miners to earn an ample living. To an observer from space, this covering of the earth's surface, with the increasingly changing appearance that it wrought, might seem like an organic growth. But it was no such thing: it was accomplished by individuals following not instinctual demands but traditional customs and rules." (p. 43).
Billions of people imply a lot more survival problems than anyone can think for, as President Woodrow Wilson discovered, or maybe died trying, sometime after the Great War, and Hayek is only going to provide support for anyone who is primarily interested in economic activity. On a philosophical level, the most interesting thing about THE FATAL CONCEIT might be the charge of immorality on a theoretical level concerning Keynes, an intellectual opponent of Hayek, who is identified as "self-proclaimed `immoralists' such as Keynes" (p. 67) due to "his general belief in a management of the market order, on the ground that `in the long run we are all dead' (i.e., it does not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment alone, the short run -- consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery -- which counts)." (p. 57). Television makes a superficial effort to keep people informed of major political issues, but, with even less awareness than economists exhibit of anything beyond the present moment, "is also a characteristic manifestation of an unwillingness to recognize that morals are concerned with effects in the long run -- effects beyond our possible perception -- and of a tendency to spurn the learnt discipline of the long view." (p. 57).
Update for 2013, when I can read my own copy --
Follow the trail of the thug mob (buy the bullet in the first verse).
The reelection in 2012 of the Hey Joe political figure in the White House is the antichrist of all the reasons Jimi Hendrix and 28 Black Panthers were killed in and around 1970. Jimi Hendrix had been shaped by mob control of the music business so hit records could make money for the mob. If Jimi made $50,000 for a concert, $40,000 for his manager came out of Jimi's share. He had signed so many contracts when we wanted to be on his own in the music business that many powerful interest could keep him from getting money like he was a little kid. By 1970 he wanted to be able to play any music he liked and he was wasting so much studio time making tapes nobody was buying that his manager had no further way to profit from a black rock god packaged for white audiences.
It has been over 48 years since the election which was supposed to matter the most for me before I could vote in 1964, when LBJ used the idea of a great society to paper over the kind of numbers racket that scum were reduced to in The Autobiography of Malcolm X because a large segment of society was frozen out by laws and crop eradication of the things Nietzsche and Freud would know about. The kind of economic exchange envisioned by Hayek was subject to government control like Ezra 9:11and12 so only the privileged would have an inheritance to provide their children. Hayek's discussion of The Philosopher's Blindness mentions Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as adopted by the Roman Catholic Church for a condemnation of grab oxen for the benefit of more powerful people sitting on their asses with popular support.
Austrian economics reminds me of Vienna and Berlin in Jane Fonda's movie Julia. The defenestration of socialist thinkers and the most important witness to what happened the night Jimi Hendrix died, like the fatwa death sentences that have been the mark on Salman Rushdie since 1989 (I'm sure some translator of The Satanic Verses was killed) could also spring from Ezra 9:11-12 as described by Hayek:
The anti-commercial attitude of the mediaeval and early modern
church, condemnation of interest as usury,
its teaching of the just price,
and its contemporary treatment of gain
is Aristotelian through and through. (p. 47).
Hayek's discussion of Marginal Utility starting on page 94 establishes that no absolute values exist in a system based on:
Economic value expresses changing degrees
of the capacity of things to satisfy some
of the multiplicity of separate, individual scales of ends. (p. 95).
The idea that government can freeze spending by building a capacity to assert stop*or*I'll*shoot when the original funding scheme gets to a bisexual financial transition stage for money that has already been spent can no longer apply to people who will not be your fool.
Economics might be described as the study of how humans behave when changes happen to things they value and trade: changes in quality, availability, demand, or price. It might more accurately be described as the study of the effects of all the humans behaving, as and after they behave, and the effort to model and predict these effects. Actual human behavior can be inferred but is less important than the aggregate effects. Economics is less concerned with how people react when the price of steel goes up than in what changes in the quantity of steel purchased, the quantity of steel produced and the effects on price and demand for aluminium and other substitutes for steel.
Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit takes a step back farther still, examining aggregate human nature and what happens to those things we value and exchange (buy and sell) when humans have liberty to make their own decisions and security in their persons and their property. The result of this liberty and security is what Hayek calls “the extended order” (or more precisely, the extended order of voluntary human interaction, aka the free market), a self-organizing ecosystem that automatically provides more of something when need or demand goes up and, overall, has advanced our standard of living (wealth) beyond that of the hunter-gatherer societies of the first 90% of our species existence.
No charts, no graphs, no equations, no tables of numbers. Easily read prose that explains Hayek’s conclusions about how human wealth is created and how the extended order operates. In the process Hayek explores our instinctive responses, the communal “micro morality” that enabled small troops of hunter-gatherers to survive, and how these instincts gave way to a “macro morality” based not on instincts but on traditions – the learned results of trial-and-error – as humans began to trade and increase our wealth over the last 10,000 years or so. Though guided by instincts and reason, this macro-morality exists between instinct and reason as the evolving form of what humans have discovered works.
The “Fatal Conceit” is the ancient belief that reason, particularly the reasoning of powerful or educated elites, can manage and operate the human economy (and the creation of wealth and wellbeing) more efficiently and more effectively than the extended order will operate on its own. Much like the discredited idea that modern biological and agricultural expertise can be utilized to manage the Serengeti better than it operates, and has operated for perhaps millions of years, on its own, progressivism and modern socialism update this millennia-old conceit by asserting that modern science and the rationality of the Enlightenment enable humans to intentionally control the details of creation, production, and distribution of human goods and services better than the self-organizing and self-regulating extended order of the free market. In the 1960s, the Ecology Movement explained that natural ecosystems were far too complex for human science and reason to control and that any artificial actions should be undertaken with humility, the expectation of unforeseeable consequences, and the very likely possibilities that those actions would have to be reversed. Hayek asserts that the ecology of human economics, the extended order, is vastly more complex, more dynamic, and more changeable than any natural ecosystem, hence even less amenable to rational control than nature. Limits and boundary conditions, yes, but control no.
Whether you agree or disagree with Hayek’s conclusions, this is an excellent summary of the overall thinking of the leading free-market economists.
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Die Lektüre jedes Kapitels zeigt ein unglaublich tiefes und ein in einem langen Leben erarbeiteten Verständnis. Hayek war nicht nur Ökonom, sondern auch ein Philosoph mit einer tiefen Kenntnis vieler Autoren der klassischen Literatur und Ökonomen, Philosophen, Naturwissenschaftler und vielen weiteren Spezialgebieten. Er pflegte eine innige Freundschaft mit John Maynard Keynes, lehnte jedoch seine Sicht zur Steuerung der Wirtschaft ab. Keynes war sozusagen der große Gegenspieler von Hayek. Hayek kritisierte beispielsweise die zynische Bemerkung Keynes, wonach er meinte „in the long run we are all dead“. Bei einer solchen Sichtweise ist es offensichtlich weniger schlimm, wenn hinter den keyneschen Maßnahmen die Sintflut kommt.
Nach Hayek ist Eigentum die wesentliche Voraussetzung einer entwickelten Wirtschaft. Ohne Eigentum wäre es unmöglich Wohlstand zu schaffen und zu mehren. Vor der neolithischen Revolution war das Schicksal des Menschen zu jagen und zu sammeln. Das Eigentum der Menschen war begrenzt auf ihre Kleider, Werkzeuge, Waffen etc. Im Laufe der neolithischen Revolution, als die Menschen sukzessive sesshaft wurden, entwickelte sich das Eigentum weiter. Auch das Haus, das Vieh, das Land etc. waren nun in der Verantwortung des Individuums und der Familie und löste sich von der Verfügungsgewalt der Gruppe ab. Dieser Prozess war mit großen gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen verbunden. Die Menschen mussten lernen miteinander zu leben und Regeln zu bilden. Dieser evolutionäre Prozess optimierte sozusagen das Zusammenleben, führte zur Arbeitsteilung, zur Spezialisierung und damit zu Wohlstand, zum heutigen Menschen und zur heutigen Gesellschaft. Hayek spricht neben der biologischen Evolution vor allem von der kulturellen Evolution. Man müsse unterscheiden zwischen den Regeln einer kleinen Gruppe und der einer Gesellschaft. Es ist unmöglich, die Regeln einer kleinen Gruppe auf die der Gesellschaft zu übertragen. Dieses Missverständnis ist daher immer wieder Ursache für Meinungsverschiedenheiten von Solidarität, Gleichheit, Gemeinwohl, Eigentum etc.
Nach Hayek erfordert Freiheit nicht zwangsläufig, dass alle Menschen, aber dass viele Menschen Eigentum besitzen. Er würde lieber ohne jegliches Eigentum in einem freien Land leben, in dem alle anderen Menschen Eigentum besitzen als in einem Land, in dem das gesamte Eigentum einer Kollektive gehört. Eigentum ist nach Hayek Grundvoraussetzung für die optimale Allokation von Ressourcen. Ohne Eigentum kann es keine Gerechtigkeit geben. Eigentum bedeutet auch Kapital, und mit Kapital können Ressourcen eingesetzt werden, um Produkte und damit Nutzen zu erzeugen. Der Satz von Karl Marx, wonach der Kapitalismus ein Proletariat geschaffen hat lässt er nicht gelten. Im Gegenteil hat der Kapitalismus erst ermöglicht, dass diese Menschen überhaupt leben konnten, sie wären sonst schlicht verhungert. Hayek zeigt diese Zusammenhänge sehr gut auf und belegt sie mit Daten und Fakten. Vor der industriellen Revolution gab es immer wieder Hungersnöte. Die Menschen lebten in bitterer Armut, meistens auf dem Land. Viele starben durch Seuchen, Hunger und Gewalt. Durch die Entwicklung der Arbeitsteilung, durch Innovation und Spezialisierung wurden Maschinen und Fähigkeiten entwickelt, die in der Lage waren Produkte viel effizienter herzustellen. Die Arbeitskräfte, die massenweise vom Land in die Industriestädte zogen wollten arbeiten. Natürlich waren die Bedingungen zu Beginn der industriellen Revolution katastrophal, und niemand möchte solche Verhältnisse sehen. Aber eines passierte, nämlich dass die Menschen Geld verdienten und somit überlebten. Im Laufe der weiteren Entwicklung der Industrie stieg auch der Wohlstand deutlich an. Kleider, Nahrungsmittel und Wohnungen waren plötzlich auch für einfache Arbeiter leistbar, wenn auch in einem erbärmlichen Zustand. Aber sie überlebten.
Ich fragte mich stets, warum Karl Marx sein Werk „Das Kapital“ nicht vollendete. Auf der Seite 150 fand ich endlich eine Antwort. Marx las die Werke von Jevons und vor allem Carl Menger, einem 22 Jahre jüngeren Zeitgenossen von Marx und Gründer der Österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie. Nachdem Marx das Werk Mengers gelesen hatte, stellte er alle Arbeiten an seinem Werk ein. Die Erkenntnisse Mengers standen diametral zu den Erkenntnissen von Marx. Heute, 150 Jahre später, ist klar, dass die Theorie von Marx sowohl theoretisch als auch praktisch widerlegt und die von Menger bestätigt ist. Vielleicht ist Marx bei der Lektüre ein Licht aufgegangen. Er hätte seinen Irrtum eingestehen sollen. Der Welt wären mehrere Katastrophen erspart geblieben.
It's definitely worth the time it took me to read it!
Hayek literally included Stone Age and medieval social traditions, to help explain modern economics. He feels social customs, laws, morals, and free market economics, have naturally evolved, and therefore produced our modern society. These complex systems can not be fully understood by modern thinkers. They are too vast and complicated, to be managed by central planners. Yet this is where the problems start. Intellectuals decide they are smarter then an entire economic system, and make changes to procedures. The results are very harmful.
This book was absolutely amazing! Enough said.












