[Liberals in Your Pocket] Friedrich v. Hayek

Hayek (Friedrich v. Hayek, 1899–1992), who emphasized the importance of spontaneous order

- Born in Vienna, Austria

- Doctor of Law in 1921; Doctor of Economics in 1923

- First director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in 1927

- Professor at the London School of Economics from 1931

- Founded the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947

- Professor at the University of Chicago from 1950

- Professor at the University of Freiburg from 1962

- Awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974

- Major works: The Road to Serfdom (1944), The Constitution of Liberty (1971), The Fatal Conceit (1988), among others

“Liberalism... derives from the discovery of spontaneous or voluntary order. Such an order makes effective the knowledge and skills of all members of society over a far wider range than any order created by central command, and as a result it is an order that can make as full a use as possible of the forces capable of forming such a powerful and spontaneous order.”

— From Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics —

Upon hearing news of the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, Hayek said, “See, what did I tell you?” In The Road to Serfdom (1944), he had predicted that socialism, because it pursues oppression and the equality of slavery, was bound to collapse. Hayek found the reason individual freedom is necessary in mankind’s structural ignorance. If human beings were omniscient and omnipotent, freedom would have no meaning. The knowledge possessed by individuals, who do not even know what they do not know, is full of errors. For error-prone human beings, free competition in a market economy becomes critically important as a procedure through which knowledge is discovered, tested, and spread in order to overcome ignorance.

It is absolutely impossible to predict the results of free competition, because those results can only be discovered through the discovery procedure called free competition. Therefore, any attempt to place unlimited trust in reason and to construct the social order according to a blueprint drawn in advance through rational planning by using the power of reason is nothing less than an act of intellectual arrogance.

Hayek saw the competitive system as the only system that, through the dispersion of power, minimizes the power exercised by one person over another. He argued that those who criticize economic power and insist that it should be replaced by political power through intervention by the government and political authorities are, in effect, paving their own road to serfdom.

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Original title: [주머니 속의 자유주의자 ] 하이에크(Friedrich v. Hayek)

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2005-12-20

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=22&idx=10659