2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
By the end of the First World War, Hayek recalls, liberalism had all but ceased to be a living tradition for the young, kept alive only in the rhetoric of aging statesmen who no longer stirred the imagination. This short tribute to Ludwig von Mises, given here in the 1967 translation of the 1951 original, traces how economic freedom survived that eclipse through scattered teachers rather than parties: Edwin Cannan and his London pupils, Mises and the Austrian circle, Frank Knight and the Chicago school, and the German neoliberals Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke. Mises holds the centre as the one thinker who rebuilt liberal doctrine most systematically. Liberalism, Hayek concludes, is less a policy preference than an inherited discipline that must be taught, translated and renewed before it can again become a living body of thought.
Gone is the day when the few remaining liberals each went his own way in solitude and derision; gone the day when they found no response among the young.
When the prestige of physics and biology tempts social thinkers to borrow their methods wholesale, the result, Hayek argues, is not science but scientism: a prejudiced approach that decides how to study society before examining it. This volume gathers his studies on that abuse of reason, first defending a subjectivist, compositive method in which institutions such as money, law, and markets exist only as the beliefs and purposes of those who use them, and collective terms like 'society' name patterns of individual conduct rather than agents. It then narrates the counter-revolution historically, from the École Polytechnique and Saint-Simon's engineers through Comtean sociology and its convergence with Hegel, tracing how impatience with evolved orders turned science into a model for social command. The through-line is epistemic: planning fails because dispersed knowledge exceeds any single directing mind.
So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are.
No purely factual history is possible in any politically relevant sense, Hayek maintains, because citizens judge their institutions through inherited stories about what those institutions have done. Introducing a wider inquiry into capitalism and industrialization, he takes aim at one such story: the legend that the Industrial Revolution impoverished and degraded the working classes. Drawing on Clapham and on concessions later made by the Hammonds, he argues that real wages and living standards generally rose, and that capital accumulation let a vastly larger proletarian population survive at all. Visible urban misery, Corn Law-era Tory propaganda against manufacturers, and socialist historicism from Marx to Sombart and the Webbs together fixed the darker picture as common sense. Hardship, he counters, more often flowed from monopoly, state action, and precapitalist restrictions than from the competitive order itself.
Political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected.
A functioning market, this revised Cologne lecture insists, demands not an absent state but a deliberately maintained legal framework — general, predictable rules applied equally to all, sharply distinguished from the discretionary administrative commands that corrode economic coordination. Speaking into the German debate over the soziale Marktwirtschaft and alongside Walter Eucken's ordoliberalism, Hayek presses the case in strict rule-of-law terms and dismantles the textbook ideal of 'perfect competition,' which mistakes an imagined final state for the discovery process by which markets actually work. He defends even the distressed, overinvested industry's right to fail against demands for cartels and protection, holding that competition's painful verdicts perform an accounting no administrative body can replace. The decisive task, he concludes, is educating opinion to accept competition consistently rather than licensing exceptions whenever it turns temporarily harmful.
Was wir wollen, ist nicht universelle Konkurrenz, sondern universelle Möglichkeit der Konkurrenz.
English translation: “What we want is not universal competition, but the universal possibility of competition.”
Where classical physics can specify its variables with precision, the sciences of complex order cannot, and Hayek builds an entire method around that limit. Accepting Popper's view that theories are deductive systems which forbid events and invite falsification, he rejects the further demand that science must always uncover new laws yielding exact predictions. Prediction, on his account, comes in degrees: to exclude a single outcome, narrow a range, or state a disjunction is still to predict. His central instrument is the explanation of the principle, which begins from familiar mechanisms and asks whether their combined operation could generate an observed pattern, evolution by natural selection being the paradigm. For biology, economics, and institutions, the honest goal is orientation and cultivation, not the control the physics template falsely promises.
The practical value of such knowledge consists indeed largely in that it protects us from striving for incompatible aims.
Specialization is indispensable to serious inquiry and, in the study of society, uniquely dangerous, and that is the tension this lecture-essay sets out to hold. A physicist may work fruitfully within a narrow technical field, but the student of society who masters only one discipline may misunderstand the very world he examines, since concrete social problems draw on law, economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, and inherited cultural wisdom at once. Hayek distinguishes systematic specialization in a theoretical field, which trains rigor, from topical specialization around an empirical object, which mature work demands; the danger lies in sequencing, for breadth without discipline becomes amateurism while discipline without breadth becomes blindness. He couples this with his anti-rationalist caution against discarding traditions whose significance we cannot yet articulate, and proposes settings, such as a College of Advanced Human Studies, where disciplines can meet after competence is won.
But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist—and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.
One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.
To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.
Once policy accepts that no major group's money wages can ever fall, inflation stops being an accident and becomes the standing instrument of adjustment. Hayek's target is a practical conviction he attributes to the Keynesian revolution: because economic development constantly alters the wage relations needed among regions, trades, and skills, and because no nominal cut is permitted, every downward relative adjustment must be engineered by raising other wages instead, so the aggregate level climbs faster than real wages, which is inflation. And inflation stimulates only while it surprises; once expected, costs rise in advance, so the dose must accelerate to keep working. His conclusion reverses the accommodationist premise: the stream of money expenditure must be the fixed datum to which wages adapt, not the passive supply that ratifies whatever unions demand.
A society which accepts this is bound for a continuous process of inflation.
Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.
Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.
English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”
When Walter Reuther pressed his 1958 wage demands on behalf of the United Automobile Workers, Hayek seized on them as a test case for a broader warning about legally privileged group power. Modern unions, he argues, owe their strength not to freedom of association but to the tolerated coercion of workers willing to accept other terms, and their wage pressure turns inflationary only once monetary authorities feel bound to supply whatever credit full employment demands at any wage. Distinguishing average output from the marginal productivity of labour, he brands the claim on productivity gains generated by capital an attempted expropriation, and reads Reuther's profit-sharing scheme as a step toward syndicalism—not public ownership, but the seizure of enterprise returns by closed groups of incumbent workers who supply none of the capital.
Inflation-born prosperity has never been and never will be lasting prosperity.
Confine the corporation to a single task, the profitable use of the capital its stockholders entrust to management, and you limit its power to where it does good; license it to pursue 'social responsibility,' and you create centres of uncontrollable authority never intended by those who supplied the funds. That is the thesis Hayek presses in this 1960 essay, testing in turn each rival claimant to corporate purpose: management, labour, stockholders, and the public. A firm run for its existing employees becomes a closed interest against consumers; a management spending on culture or politics becomes an unaccountable ruler. Because limited liability is a privilege granted by law, he argues, democratic society may redesign corporate rules, letting stockholders decide annually whether to reinvest and stripping voting rights from corporate-held shares. He closes with Milton Friedman's warning that managerial social responsibility is fundamentally subversive.
Power, in the objectionable sense of the word, is the capacity to direct the energy and resources of others to the service of values which those others do not share.
Galbraith's Affluent Society argued that many modern wants are not our own but are manufactured by the very production that satisfies them, so private consumption lacks urgency and resources should flow toward government-supplied services. The inference is a plain non sequitur, Hayek replies in this 1961 essay, and with it the book's whole argument collapses. His counter-move separates the origin of a want from its worth: nearly all civilized desire is culturally acquired, and to dismiss learned wants as trivial is to dismiss the whole cultural achievement of man, music, literature, cultivated taste and all. Producers and advertisers may shape the environment in which preferences form, he concedes, but shaping is not determining. Behind Galbraith's sociology he detects an old socialist strategy in new dress: having failed to deliver abundance, it now declares that abundance does not matter.
To say that a desire is not important because it is not innate is to say that the whole cultural achievement of man is not important.