The archive.

The instruments to stop inflation exist; the will does not, and that gap is Hayek's diagnosis in this 1978 lecture. Central banks command the base of the credit pyramid, but democratic commitments to full employment, coupled with unions that push money wages above market-clearing levels, make expansion the path of least resistance. Drawing on Mises, Hume, and Cantillon, he shows that new money enters at particular points and spreads as a price gradient rather than a uniform rise, misleading entrepreneurs and corrupting accounting so that spurious profits are taxed as though real. Because the stimulus works only by surprise, inflation must accelerate to keep its effect, and stop-go policy grows ever more unstable. Durable stability, he concludes, requires restoring flexible wage determination before any international reform can hold.

My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men.

A dispute over how much inflation to tolerate becomes, in Hayek’s hands, a challenge to government’s exclusive right to issue money. In this 1978 letter to the Sunday Times, presented in an annotated 2022 reprint, he disputes the label “deflation” and argues that the pain of stabilisation should be traced to earlier monetary expansion. His distinctive move is to shift attention from policymakers’ choices to their incentives: governments face pressure to manufacture more money, whereas competing private issuers would have to preserve the value users prefer. The letter offers a compact encounter with the reasoning behind his currency proposal, linking the language of a British policy controversy to the practical question of what makes money worth holding.

Markets coordinate activities that no participant—and no economist—can fully comprehend. In this Ludwig von Mises memorial lecture, Hayek makes that tension the basis of both his account of prices and his argument for scientific restraint. Prices allow producers to respond to circumstances they need not know directly; economic theory, he argues, can explain the resulting patterns without predicting particular outcomes. His recollections of Mises sharpen the distinction: intellectual gratitude does not prevent him from questioning his mentor’s rationalism and wholly a priori conception of economics. The lecture offers a compact route into the connection between Hayek’s defence of market coordination and his criticism of aggregate forecasting, showing why the information conveyed by particular prices cannot simply be replaced by a general price index.

Winning an election, Hayek argues, can be worse than losing it if victory brings no authority to change policy. In this 1978 letter to The Times, reproduced with editorial annotation in 2022, he reads Conservative divisions as a clash between candidates seeking seats and Margaret Thatcher seeking the public support needed for difficult decisions. His support is pointed rather than unconditional: he disclaims knowledge of her private intentions and acknowledges the electoral risk. The concrete issue is trade unions’ legal privileges, which he wants revoked through a mandate sought directly from workers rather than negotiations with union leaders. This brief intervention exposes the demanding distinction Hayek draws between securing office and earning permission to govern differently.

Responding to accusations of racialism, Hayek insists in this brief 1978 letter to The Times that hostility toward immigrants concerns acculturation rather than ancestry. His concrete test is Vienna: he contrasts its substantial population of Czech descent with riots over newcomers’ Czech schools, then invokes hostility toward differently dressed Jewish refugees from Galicia. These compressed comparisons expose the central tension in his account: does explaining resentment through cultural separation distinguish it adequately from racial prejudice? This annotated 2022 reprint also preserves an editorial note on Nicholas Kaldor’s competing emphasis on unemployment and deflation. The letter offers a sharply bounded encounter with Hayek’s assimilation-centered reasoning—and with the explanatory burden his historical examples leave unresolved.

Two rival traditions, Hayek argues, have long shared a single name. One is British and evolutionary, defining liberty as protection from arbitrary coercion under known general rules; the other Continental and constructivist, rationalist and democratic, bent on remaking society toward collective purposes. Tracing the first from Greek isonomia through Roman private law, the medieval and common-law struggles against personal rule, and the Scottish moral philosophers, he reconstructs liberalism as a discipline of political humility rooted in human ignorance. Its core is equality before the law, not equality of condition; its safeguards are constitutionalism, separation of powers, and a protected private sphere. From this he refuses to divide political from economic freedom, treats social justice as incompatible with general rules, and confines democracy to a method of changing rulers rather than a source of unlimited power.

High and low alike sought liberty by insisting on enlarging the number of rules under which they lived.

A claim that inflation is increasing more slowly need not mean that inflation is falling. In this brief 1978 letter to The Times, presented in an annotated reprint, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges the wording of Prime Minister James Callaghan’s claim of economic improvement. His numerical counterexample separates the inflation rate from the proportional increase in that rate: a smaller percentage increase can accompany much higher inflation. Hayek does not establish what actually happened to prices; he asks whether the language offered as evidence of success proves anything of the kind. The letter offers a compact lesson in reading political statistics, where the decisive question is precisely what is being measured.

Admiration does not erase disagreement in Hayek’s introduction to Ludwig von Mises’s memoirs, presented here in its 2013 English version. Drawing on their association in Vienna, Hayek asks why a thinker he regarded as an exceptional economist and social philosopher remained outside the academic establishment. His recollections make the tension concrete: a private seminar sustained open disagreement, while Mises’s defense of capitalism and undisguised contempt for prevailing economics deepened his professional isolation. Hayek also marks the limits of his allegiance, questioning Mises’s claims for the a priori character of economic theory. The result is a portrait of intellectual influence exercised beyond university chairs—and an account of how ideological hostility, institutional expectations, and personal impatience could obstruct recognition without exhausting the value of the work.

Can a policy accommodate prejudice without assigning blame to its victims? In this brief 1978 letter to The Times, republished in 2022, Hayek rejects Bernard Levin’s accusation that he had blamed racialism on those subjected to it, while defending restrictions on the rate of immigration as a means of preventing hostility. His reasoning turns on a claim about the receiving population: people, he argues, adjust slowly to an increase in foreign neighbours, even when differences concern only language and manners. A second reply, to Willi Frischauer, places generational memory against historical criticism of his account of Austria. The letter offers a compact opportunity to examine the tension between Hayek’s denial of victim-blaming and a preventive policy directed at newcomers rather than prejudice itself.

Does liberty depend on how a government is chosen, or on how tightly its powers are limited? In this 1978 letter to The Times, presented in an annotated 2022 reprint, Friedrich August von Hayek answers David Steel’s criticism of Margaret Thatcher by making market choice, rather than electoral choice, indispensable to individual freedom. His pointed comparison between a self-limiting dictatorship and an unlimited democracy exposes the stakes of that distinction. He also separates liberty from distributive justice: desirable social outcomes, he argues, need not be constituents of freedom. The editorial notes supply Steel’s counterexamples of political repression in Chile and poverty that renders choice ineffective. This brief exchange brings into focus a precise disagreement over whether protected choice alone is enough to constitute liberty.

Can restricting immigration preserve the movement toward equal treatment, or does it let prejudice set that movement’s limits? In this 1978 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Hayek defends Margaret Thatcher’s warning about immigration by recalling changing attitudes toward Jewish residents and refugees in Vienna. He attributes the spread of antisemitic sentiment partly to sudden arrivals—a causal judgement grounded in personal recollection, not demonstrated by the letter. His distinctive tension is between free movement as an ultimate liberal ideal and his fear that pursuing it immediately would revive nationalism. This brief intervention exposes how Hayek’s commitment to universal rules encounters his belief that people extend equal treatment only slowly beyond those they perceive as similar to themselves.

Why call socialism reactionary rather than progressive? In this lecture essay, republished in 1983, Friedrich August von Hayek locates its appeal in the wish to extend the solidarity of small, familiar groups to an entire society. His counterargument turns on a moral tension: serving people we know feels compelling, yet impersonal exchange can meet needs we never see. Property and contract, he argues, enabled cooperation beyond shared purposes long before anyone understood how they worked. Particularly revealing is his criticism of large businesses as well as government organizations: both can teach habits of directed cooperation that obscure the wider market order. The essay offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s account of how inherited institutions, emotional loyalties, and demands for rational justification can pull social judgment in opposing directions.