Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue.

This book is a supplement to The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. It is not a piece of scholarship. Rather, Hayek on Hayek is a combination of personal, autobiographical notes Hayek had written since 1945, and several interviews (most under the auspices of UCLA's Oral History Program). The book also includes the full transcript of a 1945 NBC Radio broadcast of a roundtable discussion among Hayek and two other University of Chicago professors. The book, divided into four parts, also includes an able introduction by Stephen Kresge.(1)

In Part One Hayek discusses his upbringing and his intellectual development in Vienna. We learn that his early interests in physiological psychology were overtaken by economics after Hayek's service in World War I, where he experienced first hand the nationalist problem and its implications for political organization. Finding, after the War, that the University of Vienna did not offer a formal degree in psychology, and having been thoroughly impressed with Menger's Grundsatze, Hayek eventually decided to study economics. This would later take him to the United States for several months (in the early 1920s) to study at New York University, recalling tales of living at a local YMCA and "gate-crashing" W.C. Mitchell's lectures and J.B. Clark's seminar at Columbia.

Part Two offers Hayek's account of his London years (during the 1930s and 40s), where he became occupied with Austrian business cycle (and capital) theory, and especially the development of his theory that the market is a system that uses knowledge on the basis of abstract signals such as prices and profit-loss accounts. Hayek recalls his close friendships with Lionel Robbins, and especially J. M. Keynes (of whom he "had in many respects the greatest admiration and liking for him as a man" [p. 88]). His words for some of his other colleagues, such as Harold Laski and William Beveridge, on the other hand, are contemptuous, and it is somewhat surprising to see them surface in print.

In Part Three Hayek discusses his most notorious work, The Road to Serfdom. A wildly popular work (and now considered prescient and a classic in contemporary political economy), Hayek nevertheless laments how The Road to Serfdom "went so far as to completely discredit me professionally." Hayek observed that "In the middle of the 1940s - I suppose I sound very conceited - I think I was known as one of the two main disputing economists: there was Keynes and there was I. Now, Keynes died and became a saint; and I discredited myself by publishing The Road to Serfdom, which completely changed the situation" [p. 103]. The 1945 radio broadcast is included in this chapter, and provides testimony to Hayek's situation - it amounts to nothing less than a documented public lambasting of Hayek the classical liberal economist.

Part Four provides glimpses of Hayek's later years at the Universities of Chicago and Freiburg. Here we learn of Hayek's role in the creation of the Mont Pelerin Society, his work on the evolution of social institutions, and his return to his interests in psychology with the publication of The Sensory Order. In Part Four Hayek has the opportunity to announce two of his biggest intellectual regrets: first, never having returned to criticize Keynes's General Theory (which he mentions earlier in Part Two) and, in the same breath, "of not having criticized Milton's [Essays in] Positive Economics, which in a way is quite a dangerous book" [p. 145].

Austrians like to distinguish between end states and processes, If Hayek's published books and articles can be considered "end state" achievements, then, in Austrian fashion, this book offers us the "processes" through which Hayek's achievements were created. Hayek on Hayek provides many fascinating glimpses into Hayek's life and mind that, until now, haven't been available to a general readership. I was surprised to hear Hayek admit, for example, that the single tax proposal of the Bodenreformers "seems to me to the present day the theoretically most defensible of all socialist proposals and impractical only because of the de facto impossibility of distinguishing between the original and permanent powers of the soil and the different kinds of improvements" [p. 63]; or that Hayek, an agnostic, nevertheless came to admire aspects of Buddhism for its "profound respect for the existence of other orderly structures in the world, which they admit they cannot fully understand and interpret" [p. 42].

David L. Prychitko State University of New York at Oswego 

1. Pages 126-27, 130-31, and 134-35 were blank on my review copy. I did manage, however, to acquire page copies from a colleague who owned the book.