Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek

Bruce Caldwell

Dec 2008 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

Friedrich A. Hayek is regarded as one of the preeminent economic theorists of the twentieth century, as much for his work outside of economics as for his work within it. During a career spanning several decades, he made contributions in fields as diverse as psychology, political philosophy, the history of ideas, and the methodology of the social sciences. Bruce Caldwell—editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek—understands Hayek's thought like few others, and with this book he offers us the first full intellectual biography of this pivotal social theorist.

Caldwell begins by providing the necessary background for understanding Hayek's thought, tracing the emergence, in fin-de-siècle Vienna, of the Austrian school of economics—a distinctive analysis forged in the midst of contending schools of thought. In the second part of the book, Caldwell follows the path by which Hayek, beginning from the standard Austrian assumptions, gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but a broad range of social phenomena. In the third part, Caldwell offers both an assessment of Hayek's arguments and, in an epilogue, an insightful estimation of how Hayek's insights can help us to clarify and reexamine changes in the field of economics during the twentieth century.

As Hayek's ideas matured, he became increasingly critical of developments within mainstream economics: his works grew increasingly contrarian and evolved in striking—and sometimes seemingly contradictory—ways. Caldwell is ideally suited to explain the complex evolution of Hayek's thought, and his analysis here is nothing short of brilliant, impressively situating Hayek in a broader intellectual context, unpacking the often difficult turns in his thinking, and showing how his economic ideas came to inform his ideas on the other social sciences.

Hayek's Challenge will be received as one of the most important works published on this thinker in recent decades.

Ratings and reviews

daviding says: F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Bertalanffy were contemporaries, and exchanged correspondence. Caldwell writes ... "Degrees of Explanation" is also significant because, when Hayek illustrates his claims about sciences that study complex phenomena, he chooses, not economics, but the theory of evolution as his exemplar. In doing so, he links evolutionary theory directly to his earlier ideas about "explanations of the principle": "The most familiar instance in the natural sciences of this sort of mere 'explanation of the principle' is probably provided by the theory of evolution by natural selection of different organisms" (Hayek [1955] 1967a, 11-12). Nearly the exact same sentence appears in the "Within Systems" paper. So, in unpublished pieces in the early 1950s, then in published work a few years later, Hayek was identifying evolutionary theory as yet another example of a scientific theory that attempts to explain complex phenomena. [p. 302] Like Weaver before him, however, Hayek emphasizes that evolutionary theory is only one of many such theories. In the conclusion of his paper, he states that a variety of other fields also employ "explanations of the principle": "As the advance of the sciences penetrates further and further into more complex phenomena, theories which merely provide explanations of the principle, or which merely describe a range of phenomena which certain types of structures are able to produce, may become more the rule than the exception. Certain developments of recent years, such as cybernetics, the theory of automata or machines, general systems theory, and perhaps also communication theory, seem to belong to this kind" ([1955] 1967a, 20). "Theory of automata" refers to von Neumann's work, and "communication theory" probably refers to Hayek's own "Within Systems" paper (note the qualifier: "perhaps also communications theory). "Cybernetics," popularized by Norbert Weiner, was a theory that attempted to analyze the dynamic properties of all manner of systems, both living and nonliving, using such notions as "homeostatis" (an equilibrium arnong the various parts of a system) and "negative feedback" (where adaptations to chanaes in the environment are made). "General systems theory," devcloped in part by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who read The Sensory Order when it was in manuscript form, took these trends to their logical conclusion, seeking (as the term implies) a general theory of systems. By the mid-1950s, Hayek was increasingly citing those who sought new tools for analyzing complex systems. His interest would only deepen with the passage of time. [pp. 302-303]

About the author

Bruce Caldwell is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century. He is past president of the History of Economics Society and the general editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, copublished by the University of Chicago Press.