This file is a wartime political address by Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered in 1944, on the intellectual reconstruction of Europe after Germany’s defeat. It is not a technical economic argument but a historical-political intervention: Hayek asks how Germany might be restored to the moral traditions of European civilization without turning “re-education” into victorious propaganda. His central claim is that Europe’s future depends on Germany, and Germany’s future depends heavily on historians.
The future of England is tied up with the future of Europe, and, whether we like it or not, the future of Europe will be largely decided by what will happen in Germany.
Hayek rejects both collective condemnation and easy optimism. Defeated Germany will not simply become liberal through Allied instruction, nor will it automatically recover shared political standards once Nazism collapses. The more likely condition is fragmentation: surviving centers of intellectual seriousness will exist, but they will be scattered, isolated, and cut off from common European traditions.
We shall almost certainly find a moral and intellectual desert, but one with many oases, some very fine, but almost completely isolated from each other.
This diagnosis leads Hayek to emphasize private, scholarly, cross-border contact rather than official ideological management. The Allies may help reconnect German scholars to European discussion, but open patronage risks discrediting those it means to assist. He is especially hostile to the idea that victors should write Germany’s future historical consciousness from outside.
The suggestion one can now often hear that the victors should produce the textbooks on which future generations of Germans should be brought up appears to me pitifully silly.
The core of the address is Hayek’s account of historians as political educators. German historians of the nineteenth century, he argues, helped create reverence for the power-state, nationalism, expansionism, and the moral habits that Nazism exploited. Because historical teaching shapes political imagination, postwar German history-writing will either manufacture new myths or begin the harder work of truth. German responsibility, wartime atrocities, and the facts obscured by Nazi propaganda must therefore be examined carefully, not buried in a premature rhetoric of reconciliation.
History must above all cease to be an instrument of national policy.
Hayek’s defense of truthful history is not a plea for moral neutrality. One of the address’s most important moves is its distinction between fidelity to fact and ethical indifference. He criticizes a style of “scientific” historiography that dissolves moral judgment into explanation, treating political evil as merely the product of circumstance. Against this, he defends a morally serious, Actonian ideal: the historian must be independent of party and nation, but not indifferent to the difference between liberty and power, decency and crime.
The constructive proposal of the address is an “Acton Society,” a voluntary association of historians and students of society inspired by Lord Acton, with Burckhardt and Tocqueville as allied figures. Acton matters to Hayek because he symbolizes moral judgment, anti-centralism, suspicion of power, Catholic independence, and a liberalism grounded in the supreme value of individual liberty. Such a society would not impose doctrine. It would restore contacts, publish neglected liberal German writers, encourage responsible public history, and provide a forum for international discussion.
The address ends by widening this institutional suggestion into a philosophy of historical responsibility. Historians should not become party propagandists, but neither can they pretend that their work lacks political consequence. Their vocation is to make better political ideals imaginable before they become practicable.
It is because, whether he wills it or not, the historian shapes the political ideals of the future, that he himself must be guided by the highest ideals and keep free from the political disputes of the day.
Its continuing relevance lies in this tension: Hayek opposes official “re-education,” nationalist myth, and value-free historicism alike. The future of Europe, he argues, depends on historical truth sustained by free international communities of scholars, and on moral judgment strong enough to resist the seductions of power.
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