Friedrich Hayek

“Marxist theory and over-capitalisation theories overlap. The true heir to this theory is an arch-conservative, von Hayek, who paradoxically and honestly recognised Marx's paternity... The essential point is not to be found in von Hayek's conservative conclusions, but in his analysis of the causes of the boom and depression, which, as he himself admits, strongly resembles the Marxian one.”

“But the Hayek thing is almost entirely about politics rather than economics. Without The Road To Serfdom — and the way that book was used by vested interests to oppose the welfare state — nobody would be talking about his business cycle ideas.”

“It is in good part because of Professor Hayek's work [on the topic of social engineering], and also because of his profound insights — most notably in The Constitution of Liberty — into the connection between a free market, the rule of law, and individual liberty, that you don't hear professors saying today, as they used so glibly to say, that 'we are all socialists now.”

“Hayek has as fine and as powerful a mind as is to be found anywhere, and [his] Constitution of Liberty is one of the most thoughtful works of the last decades.”

“As a result of the efforts of Hayek, Friedman, and the many others who share their general outlook, the idea of a centrally planned and centrally administered economy, so popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, has been discredited.”

“The most intelligent defender of capitalism today … who has as fine and as powerful a mind as is to be found anywhere.”

“I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.”

“Hayek's mature appreciation of a society built on the foundations of individual rights, the rule of law, and limited government can thus be traced directly to his own extension of the subjectivism of the Austrian tradition in economics. It must be emphasized that the economic understanding of markets which emerges from the Austrian tradition differs sharply from the understanding of markets which informs the minimal-statist position of many mainstream economists.”

“The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.”

“If Hayek believes that the spending of newly-printed currency on employment and consumption will worsen our current terrible depression, then Hayek is a nut.”

“I did not begin from Keynes: I began from Pareto, and Hayek (footnote 10: There is evidence for this, in the paper 'Equilibrium and the Cycle')”

“Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.”

“It was from Hayek that I began.”

“At the time of his death, F.A. Hayek (1899–1992) was unquestionably the world’s preeminent spokesman for classical liberalism and its most important thinker. He led an immensely productive life, over the course of which he made significant contributions to a variety of disciplines, among them economics, political and social theory, psychology, and the history of ideas.”

“Hayek watched the interwar collapse with horror, as Keynes did, and shared many of Keynes’s liberal values. What he failed to understand is that these values cannot be renewed by applying any formula or doctrine, or by trying to construct an ideal liberal regime in which freedom is insulated from the contingencies of politics.”

“No-one who knows Hayek's work can doubt that his attempt to restate liberal principles in a form appropriate to the circumstances and temper of the twentieth century has yielded a body of insights wholly comparable in profundity and power with those of his forebears in the classical liberal tradition.”

“Hayek's work composes a system of ideas, fully as ambitious as the systems of Mill and Marx, but far less vulnerable to criticism than theirs because it is grounded on a philosophically defensible view of the scope and limits of human reason.”

“Friedrich A. von Hayek, one of the strongest, and at times one of the few, economic voices advocating the reduction of government's role in the economy, is finally finding himself in the position of a Cassandra who suddenly that discovers people are listening.”

“Hayek's attempt to delegitimize one side of the Western tradition is one of the most significant ideological closures in his work. It prevents him from seeing the close ties which exist between liberalism and socialism.”

“Hayek's greatest failure is his neglect of the problem of private power. All his efforts go into the denunciation of state power, but he has little to say about private coercion.”