Friedrich August von Hayek, Remembering My Cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

Hayek’s autobiographical magazine essay, first published in Encounter in 1977 and reprinted in the supplied 2013 version, presents Wittgenstein through intermittent encounters between distant relatives. Its chronological movement—from a wartime railway journey in 1918 to a final journey identified by the editorial notes as occurring in 1949—frames a portrait of intellectual severity, personal unpredictability, and elusive intimacy. The essay’s central interpretive claim is that Wittgenstein’s extraordinary demand for truthfulness extended beyond philosophical argument into the conduct of life. Hayek places that demand within a particular Viennese intellectual culture while showing how forcefully Wittgenstein turned it against himself. The accompanying editorial notes qualify the memoir’s chronology and preserve disputes about its most dramatic episode.

The opening encounter at Bad Ischl establishes both affinity and distance. Two artillery ensigns recognize a possible family connection and travel overnight to Vienna. Hayek, then nineteen, remembers Wittgenstein’s contempt for their noisy fellow officers and his assumption that a relative would share his standards. Hayek explains his own receptiveness through a disciplined, “puritanical” upbringing, symbolized by his father’s daily cold bath. Yet the ten-year age difference also separates an inexperienced young man from someone already possessed by an exacting ethical ideal.

It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to 'live' truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others.

This is the essay’s strongest conceptual distinction: truthfulness concerns the authenticity of an entire life, not merely the accuracy of statements. Hayek associates it with the generation of Viennese intellectuals immediately preceding his own, particularly a milieu spanning Jewish and Gentile social worlds. Its hostility to convention could produce rudeness and unpleasantness, since accepted forms of behaviour were exposed as fraudulent. Wittgenstein exemplifies that disposition, but his distinguishing feature is its inward application.

Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.

Hayek’s qualification, “I sometimes felt,” matters: this is a remembered impression rather than a confident explanation of Wittgenstein’s psychology. The portrait joins admiration for uncompromising integrity to unease about relentless self-scrutiny. It also locates him within an exceptionally gifted family whose resources allowed its members to pursue what mattered most to them. Recollections of musical soirées, an early motorcar ride, family suicides, and an elderly relative’s prejudiced account of a marriage evoke the social setting without claiming comprehensive knowledge of it. Hayek repeatedly marks the limits of what he witnessed.

Family connections sustained indirect knowledge during the decade after the first encounter. Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine, close to Hayek’s mother, defended her brother against distorted stories about his behaviour. Such circulation of family news contrasts with his brother Paul’s public prominence as a one-armed pianist. It also helped bring Hayek to the Tractatus, whose impact he links to their shared indebtedness to Ernst Mach. Hayek dates his reading to the book’s appearance in 1922; an editorial note corrects the date to 1923. He records an important intellectual impression without reconstructing the book’s argument or claiming sustained philosophical exchange.

The Cambridge episodes sharpen the contrast between private accessibility and public intimidation. In 1928, Dennis Robertson hesitates to approach Wittgenstein, while Hayek’s kinship permits a friendly conversation about family. Friendliness nevertheless gives way to flagging interest. Later, after Hayek’s wartime relocation with the London School of Economics, a Moral Sciences Club meeting produces the memoir’s most theatrical scene: Wittgenstein rises indignantly with a poker and demonstrates the supposed obviousness of matter. Hayek recalls alarm but cannot remember the paper under discussion. The editorial apparatus records a challenge identifying this with the famous 1946 encounter with Karl Popper, alongside Hayek’s insistence that his experience occurred earlier. The episode remains vivid testimony to perceived intensity, but its date and identity are contested.

Subsequent visits offer a quieter counterpoint. Wittgenstein welcomes conversation outside philosophy and politics; Hayek deliberately avoids professional discussion, and both know they disagree politically. These visits are pleasant but, in Hayek’s estimation, uninteresting. The memoir thus resists converting personal acquaintance into an intellectual partnership. Practical correspondence after the war, concerning food parcels and journeys to relatives in Vienna, supplies a different insight:

In this he showed a curious combination of impracticability and meticulous attention to detail which must have made all contacts with the ordinary business of life highly unsettling for him.

The combination echoes the earlier ethical portrait: exacting attention coexists with difficulty navigating ordinary arrangements. Hayek’s practical knowledge briefly makes him useful to a relative whose standards otherwise keep him at a distance.

The final railway encounter momentarily promises deeper engagement. After reading a detective story, Wittgenstein begins an animated conversation about the Russians in Vienna, whose presence Hayek believes had shattered longstanding illusions. Their discussion moves towards moral philosophy, but arrival at the port interrupts it. Wittgenstein proposes continuing aboard ship and then cannot be found.

Whether he regretted having become so deeply engaged, or had discovered that, after all, I was just another philistine, I do not know.

The ending preserves uncertainty rather than resolving Wittgenstein into a coherent psychological explanation. The essay’s value lies in its conjunction of social memory, ethical observation, and acknowledged limits: Hayek records an unusually demanding personality whose moments of warmth and intellectual openness never become secure familiarity.