Friedrich August von Hayek, Bruno Leoni

Hayek’s memorial address, originally published in 1968 as “Bruno Leoni, the Scholar” and reprinted here in 2013, joins personal remembrance to an assessment of Leoni’s unfinished intellectual contribution. Its central claim is that Leoni’s defence of freedom rested on a distinctive understanding of law: legal rules developed through adjudication and juristic reasoning possess characteristics that legislation does not necessarily preserve. Hayek presents this insight as a research programme worth continuing, rather than as a completed doctrine. The address moves from friendship and international association to interdisciplinary scholarship, then concentrates on Freedom and the Law before returning to the loss suffered by Leoni’s family, students, and friends.

Hayek carefully establishes the limits of his testimony. He knew Leoni chiefly through encounters abroad and their shared work in the Mont Pèlerin Society, not through the greater part of Leoni’s life in Italy. His knowledge of the writings is likewise strongest for those published in English and incomplete for the Italian publications. These qualifications give the tribute a defined perspective: Hayek speaks as a friend and intellectual collaborator whose interests had followed parallel courses for roughly a decade. He identifies three connected achievements—bridging law and the theoretical social sciences, grounding individual freedom intellectually, and suggesting answers to unresolved problems of political theory.

The recollections make intellectual energy inseparable from personal vitality. Leoni’s appreciation of music, oriental art and philosophy, and the pleasures of life accompanies an apparently inexhaustible readiness for discussion. The anecdote of his taking flying lessons during a seminar’s afternoon break gives concrete expression to this restlessness. His organisational work was equally consequential. As secretary of the Mont Pèlerin Society during a crisis, he helped prevent its dissolution and brought it into renewed activity; his election as president shortly before his death confirmed his standing among its members. Hayek treats these services as part of Leoni’s practical commitment to the conditions of individual freedom.

The scholarly portrait begins with a capacity to cross disciplinary boundaries without surrendering intellectual competence:

Bruno Leoni was one of those increasingly rare men who had the courage to transcend the limits of a specialism and to try to see the problems of society as a whole.

For Hayek, this breadth matters because law cannot adequately be understood in isolation from social processes. Leoni combined legal practice with philosophy, sociology, and legal history, while also contributing to political science through Il Politico. His engagement with economic theory, including mathematical economics, extended to questions of method and the philosophy of science. Hayek’s account thus presents interdisciplinary inquiry as the basis of Leoni’s originality, not merely as a catalogue of accomplishments.

The survey of publications narrows to Freedom and the Law. Hayek also singles out the unpublished treatment of classical thought in Leoni’s Lezioni di Filosofia del Diritto, particularly the relation between physis and nomos, as deserving further development. Yet the English-language book receives the fullest attention because its unconventional argument and unfinished suggestions might otherwise be dismissed. Hayek distinguishes its thesis from the exaggerated proposition that legislation should simply be abandoned in favour of judges and jurisconsults:

What I believe he was trying to say is the highly important point that the law which emerges from jurisdiction and the work of the jurists of necessity possesses certain properties which the products of legislation may need but not possess, but which are essential if individual freedom is to be preserved.

The conceptual move is to assess law by the properties required for freedom, rather than to identify legal authority automatically with legislative enactment. Roman law and English common law supply examples of development through juristic activity. Their relevance lies not in an unconditional rejection of legislation but in what their mode of formation reveals about the qualities that all law in a free society ought to possess.

Certainty is the first such quality. Hayek credits Leoni with convincing him that codification, intended to make law more certain, at most increases short-run certainty; he then questions whether even that benefit is assured. Habitual legislative alteration, by contrast, undermines long-run certainty. The distinction shifts attention from knowing what a statute currently says to the stability of the legal framework over time. A precisely stated rule is not necessarily a dependable rule if it remains readily subject to replacement.

The second quality is the negative character of rules protecting individual domains. Hayek describes spontaneously developed rules of just conduct as defining what others may not do to a person, thereby securing liberty rather than directing conduct towards prescribed ends:

As to many other profound thinkers the task of the law was to him not so much to create justice as to prevent injustice.

This formulation connects institutional development with a criterion of justice. Leoni’s emphasis on the negative Golden Rule, shared in Hayek’s account by Confucianism and Christianity, suggests a test for rules through consistent restraint against injuring others. Justice becomes something approached progressively by preventing violations, rather than something exhaustively established through a positive legislative design.

Hayek nevertheless preserves the provisional status of these ideas:

Bruno Leoni would have been the last to deny that it merely points a way and that much work still lies ahead before the seeds of new ideas which it so richly contains can blossom forth in all their splendour.

The address’s relevance lies in this invitation to further inquiry. It identifies questions about legal certainty, protected individual spheres, and the relationship between legislation and evolved law without claiming that Leoni resolved them all. The closing return to personal grief reinforces the intellectual tribute: continuing the unfinished work is one way to honour a scholar whose contribution exceeded both his publications and his institutional achievements.