F. A. Hayek, The Campaign against Keynesian Inflation

First published in 1978 and reprinted in the supplied 2022 version, this authored chapter introduction explains Hayek’s return to public debate about inflation and introduces the papers through which he pursued it. Its organizing argument is that the urgency of inflation required renewed intervention after a period of professional disengagement. The passage provides a chronology of that intervention, connecting newspaper articles, lectures, supplementary discussions, and proposals for monetary institutions. It establishes the circumstances and trajectory of Hayek’s campaign without presenting the detailed economic arguments of the writings it introduces.

Hayek begins by recalling his withdrawal from monetary-policy debate. He attributes this withdrawal to a divergence from his professional colleagues: their language and the problems they discussed had ceased to interest him. His return is consequently framed as a response to an increasingly serious public problem, rather than as the continuation of an uninterrupted disciplinary exchange.

By the summer of 1974, however, the problem of inflation had become so alarming that I felt it to be my duty once again to speak out.

The language of duty gives the introduction its central emphasis. Hayek represents public intervention as an obligation imposed by circumstances, despite his distance from prevailing professional discussion. The title places this intervention under the heading of opposition to Keynesian inflation, but the introductory passage itself does not explain the causal connection between Keynesian policy and rising prices. Its immediate purpose is to show why he resumed speaking and how the ensuing contributions belong together.

The account first moves through the newspaper press. Hayek identifies an English article, reproduced as the first item in the group, and notes a preceding, similar article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 19 August 1974. He then turns to his Nobel Memorial Lecture that December, much of which addressed inflation. The lecture’s placement elsewhere in the larger volume reveals an important distinction between the subject prompting an intervention and the intellectual framework governing it.

However, as this lecture is primarily devoted to problems of the philosophy of science, it is reprinted earlier on in this volume as chapter 2.

Inflation thus overlaps with a broader inquiry into scientific knowledge, although this passage does not develop that relationship. Hayek’s explanation of the lecture’s placement also clarifies the collection’s organization: chronology alone does not determine where a contribution belongs. An intervention in the inflation debate can simultaneously have a philosophical center of gravity.

The next stage is a lecture at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, delivered for the centenary of Luigi Einaudi’s birth. Hayek subsequently lectured along similar lines at several locations in the United States during the second quarter of 1975. Additional topics introduced as particular occasions suggested became a supplement to the principal discussion. The resulting sequence therefore combines a recurring argument with extensions arising from different audiences and settings. The editorial notes identify the associated sections as addressing inflation, the misdirection of labour, and unemployment, followed by further considerations; these titles indicate the subjects of the surrounding material, not arguments demonstrated within the introduction.

The final stage is a Geneva conference lecture in September 1975. Here the chronology points beyond renewed criticism of inflation toward proposals concerning monetary institutions.

The suggestion it contains about future monetary institutions has now been expounded at greater length in a paper Denationalisation of Money, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1976, of which a much enlarged edition is due shortly.

This closing reference makes the introduction a bridge between Hayek’s public campaign and his subsequent institutional proposals. The supplied notes connect that development with choice in currency and competing currencies, but the body passage leaves the proposal’s operation and justification to the referenced writings. Its significance is therefore chiefly contextual: it records the movement from professional withdrawal to urgent public engagement, from repeated lectures to supplementary analysis, and finally toward a more extensive treatment of monetary reform. Read at its documented scope, the introduction is a concise guide to the formation and arrangement of Hayek’s campaign, rather than a substitute for its substantive arguments.