Friedrich August von Hayek, “Wittgenstein”

“Wittgenstein” is a published letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, dated February 8, 1974, and republished in the supplied 2022 version with an explanatory editorial note. Hayek intervenes in a dispute between Elizabeth Anscombe and William Warren Bartley III over the circumstances in which he abandoned a biographical sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His claim is narrowly historical: Anscombe, acting for Wittgenstein’s literary executors, had withheld permission to reproduce letters to Bertrand Russell until the executors had published them themselves. Because those letters supported much of his draft, Hayek ceased work on it.

The letter begins by distinguishing what Hayek remembers from what he can now document:

Sir,—As I have not preserved the correspondence which would provide the proof I should not wish to enter into controversy with Professor Anscombe (January 18).

This qualification governs the intervention. Hayek does not present surviving correspondence that would settle the disagreement, and his reluctance to enter a controversy acknowledges that evidentiary limitation. Nevertheless, he considers himself obliged to defend Bartley, whose statement rested on information Hayek had supplied long before. The letter thus moves from caution about proof to responsibility for testimony: Hayek cannot remain silent when another writer is challenged over an account originating with him.

His substantive correction combines present recollection with a note written shortly after the events:

It is indeed not only my distinct recollection at present, but is confirmed by a note I wrote soon after the event, that I abandoned my plan to complete a longish biographical sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein because Professor Anscombe, on behalf of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, refused me permission to reprint, until they themselves had published them, those letters of Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell around which I had written most of the early part of my draft.

The sentence identifies both the restriction and its practical consequence. Hayek describes a temporary priority claimed by the executors, rather than an unconditional prohibition on publication. Yet that delay was sufficient to stop his project because the Russell correspondence was integral to the early part of the manuscript. The important distinction is between permission eventually available and permission available when the biography was being written. His contemporary note strengthens the account beyond unaided retrospective memory, although the letter does not reproduce that note.

The appended editorial annotation supplies the wider controversy without making it part of Hayek’s own argument. Bartley’s 1973 biography had attracted criticism over its portrayal of Wittgenstein’s sexual life. In responding to Anscombe’s questions about his evidence, Bartley also alleged her long-standing opposition to biographical research, citing Hayek’s abandoned project. Anscombe subsequently denied that the executors had refused Hayek permission to publish the letters. Hayek’s response supports the specific account of his own experience; it supplies no evidence for Bartley’s claims about Wittgenstein’s sexuality and does not independently establish a general policy of obstructing biography.

The note also places the unfinished manuscript in a longer history. Hayek, a distant cousin acquainted with Wittgenstein’s background and friends, produced three drafts in 1953. Objections from one of Wittgenstein’s sisters contributed to the executors’ request for postponement. His later reminiscence, published in 1977, drew chiefly on their few meetings, while the third biographical draft eventually appeared in 2019. These details clarify the letter’s relevance as testimony about the interrupted project. Its central move remains modest but consequential: it separates the limits of surviving proof from the grounds for affirming a remembered event, and shows how control over the timing of documentary publication could determine whether a biography was completed.