Friedrich August von Hayek · 1936
Hayek’s review of Henry Higgs’s bibliography prepared for the British Academy balances appreciation of an indispensable scholarly undertaking with criticism of its editorial reliability. Its governing distinction is between comprehensiveness and accuracy: a bibliography may cover its field exceptionally well yet require further checking before historians can trust its individual entries.
About the need for competent bibliographies as the basis of any work on the history of a science there can be no reasonable doubt.
Hayek begins by explaining the bibliography’s exceptional resources: Professor Foxwell’s accumulated library catalogues and records of books not obtained. Higgs and his collaborators have transformed this material into 6,741 entries covering twenty-five years, with extensive English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian coverage. Hayek praises the convenient division of each year’s titles into eleven groups and welcomes the proposed extension backward and forward. These acknowledgments establish the scale and value of the project before he tests its execution.
Yet, without being ungrateful and without underrating the enormous burden which such a work imposes on the editor, some doubts must be expressed whether in the present case too much of the work of checking the individual items has not been left to subordinate assistants.
The review then proceeds through concrete discrepancies. Anonymous authorship is insufficiently investigated, or departures from existing catalogue attributions remain unexplained. Joseph Harris’s Essay upon Money and Coins receives misleading entries that obscure the successive publication of its two parts; Matthew Raper’s work appears twice, once under “Roper.” An erroneous attribution involving Ferguson and Anderson and a puzzling Bentham entry further undermine confidence. Hayek’s examples show why apparently minor bibliographic details matter: names, dates, and titles determine whether an entry identifies a distinct work or duplicates and misrepresents another.
The final case moves from inaccurate entries to inconsistent inclusion criteria. A nineteenth-century publication of archival documents about Prussian silk manufacture appears among works dated 1769. Hayek distinguishes delayed publication of economists’ own writings from modern documentary scholarship about the period. Even the former category, he observes, is represented inconsistently.
But to include modern publications of documents from official archives which illustrate the economic conditions of the period can hardly have been intended and would certainly mean that many more similar items should have been included.
The review’s significance lies in this compact statement of bibliographical standards. Breadth alone cannot secure an authoritative research tool: attribution must be checked, duplicate records reconciled, and chronological boundaries applied consistently. Hayek’s detailed criticism serves his opening conviction that dependable bibliography is foundational to the history of a science.
This work was divided into 1 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 1 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian