Friedrich August von Hayek, “Origins of Racialism”

“Origins of Racialism” is a published letter to the editor of The Times, dated March 1, 1978, and republished in the supplied 2022 version. Hayek responds to two criticisms of an earlier letter: Bernard Levin’s interpretation of his position on immigration and racialism, and Willi Frischauer’s challenge to his account of Austrian history. Its central distinction is between assigning blame to those subjected to racial hostility and recommending restrictions on immigration as a means of preventing that hostility.

Hayek first rejects Levin’s characterization of his argument:

I never suggested that “racialism is really all the fault of the victims, who only have to remain sufficiently few, sufficiently inconspicuous and sufficiently unsuccessful, for it to go away”.

This denial addresses responsibility without abandoning the claim that immigration can provoke hostility among an established population. Hayek presents his position as a regrettable lesson of experience, moving from an assertion about the slow adjustment of ordinary people to a recommendation for statesmanship:

What I argued was that experience has shown, regrettably, that ordinary man only slowly reconciles himself to a large increase of foreigners among his neighbours, even if they differ only in language and manners, and that therefore the wise statesman, to prevent an unpleasant reawakening of primitive instincts, ought to aim at keeping the rate of influx low.

The qualification concerning language and manners extends his proposed explanation beyond racial difference. “Primitive instincts” locates hostility in the receiving population, but his preventive policy acts on the rate of newcomers’ arrival. The letter thus separates culpability from policy while leaving a tension between condemning prejudice and accommodating its anticipated effects.

The second paragraph turns from this policy dispute to historical authority. Against Frischauer’s suggestion that his memory is deceptive or his knowledge inadequate, Hayek appeals to the impressions of the generation that lived through and subsequently discussed the Austrian developments in question. He supplies no detailed historical demonstration here. The letter’s relevance lies in this compact pairing of an immigration-policy defence with an appeal to lived generational memory; the editorial notes identify the interlocutors and related writing without supplying the missing arguments of the earlier exchange.