Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

"Everyone admits that this is the best biography of Hayek. There are others, but they are pretty miserable. This one really does present a whole lot of the detailed biographical data that one would want in a comprehensive portrait. It’s well cited, well documented, and so on. The flip side, from my point of view, is that this is old-fashioned history of economics, where what you do is focus above all else on your hero. This is a heroic tale of thought thinking itself more than anything else. And the hero, because you’re focusing so intently on him, is relatively isolated, even in the intellectual portrait that’s being created. He seems to be self-creating his own genius. Personally, I don’t believe that is a good way to write intellectual history, but the hero-biography is a very popular genre. Bruce presents Hayek’s reasoning as almost completely flawless and eminently judicious throughout, which is a little hard to take. Everyone else turns out to be just bit players. Mises gets a look in, but everyone else is just aghast at Hayek’s brilliance. And the surrounding history—and there’s a lot going on in the 20th century—is treated as local colour. The book does stress how epistemology ends up being central to everything Hayek does, and I think that’s a very important insight. There is this question of how we come to know the social world, and what that implies for how we theorize it. That really is central to understanding Hayek, and the book is good on that. He admits that Hayek’s early economic theory is a little bit incoherent, but because Hayek is his hero, he can’t really belittle it too much. The book argues that Hayek’s work on money and on capital theory got him hired at the LSE in the 1930s, which is amazing to me because that’s his most forgettable work. If that’s all he had done, he would have been relegated to the ranks of the undistinguished, and no one would remember him today. The truth is he was promoted because of his politics. Lionel Robbins at the LSE really wanted somebody to oppose Keynes and neutralize the insurgent left. Robbins actually spoke German, and he paid attention to what was going on in the continent. He hoped that Hayek could be a counterweight to Anglo trends in political economy. The book is good on Hayek’s relationship to Keynes, which was reasonably friendly. But Keynes just trounced him in terms of intellectual significance, at least while he was alive. Keynes ran rings around Hayek. Caldwell goes some way to admitting that, which is, of course, somewhat hard for him to do because Hayek is his hero. But the truth is that Hayek didn’t accomplish what Robbins wanted when he brought him to Britain. The book also begins to explain why Hayek was so afraid of scientism—that is, the inappropriate use of science in discussing economic and social questions. The early Hayek believed that natural scientists and engineers were the fifth column when it came to the onward march of socialism. I actually think that conviction is even more important than Caldwell makes it out to be, but Caldwell realizes that this is absolutely key to Hayek’s epistemology. There are plenty of good things in the book, but it is tempered by the fact that Caldwell can’t explain the internal contradiction of his own position, which is that he portrays a Hayek who eventually ended up pronouncing that human reason was weak and unreliable and not the main cause of human flourishing. And yet Hayek, in the book, emerges as this eminently reasonable middle-of-the-road kind of guy who never goes over the edge in his politics and never plays footsie with the Nazis in any respect. He is a political operator who disparages the ambitions of politics. Here’s a guy who denounces the idea that reason is central to human endeavour, and yet Caldwell constantly paints him as the most reasonable, judicious and thoughtful individual. That’s a real tension that runs through the book, and it’s a circle that can’t be squared."